Semiotics of Space: What Picasso’s Collages Teach Us About Layout Architecture

Rosalind Krauss. Photo: Widewalls.

In her 1981 essay In the Name of Picasso, art historian Rosalind Krauss focuses on the contemporary scholarly reception of the famous painter Pablo Picasso and its focus on biography. For numerous scholars writing at the time, Picasso’s personal life was distinctly reflected in his art by references to his two wives and several lovers as well as by his surrounding objects and studio. Krauss elaborates her argument by analyzing the artist’s collages, specifically how their compositions acquire meaning by playing with the ambivalence of signs. Through a detailed reading of these analytical collages, which fully reject illusionism, she insists that the formal organization of these works trumps a mode of meaning which can be simply deciphered like vocabulary being translated from one language to another. By asserting on this linguistic aspect of collage construction, Krauss denies the idea that the most vital way to uncover a work’s context is a mirror logic – one which purely duplicates the artist’s life just like a mirror reproduces one’s reflected appearance. To me this is an effective argument particularly because of the two following claims.

For a designer, this rejection of "mirror logic" is foundational. It suggests that a visual layout, whether pasted on a canvas or rendered on a digital screen, derives its power not from superficial decoration or literal representation, but from its underlying structural architecture.

Picasso’s The Violin (Violin and Fruit) 1913

The first claim is that Picasso’s collages intuitively rely on the division of the sign into signifier and signified to construct meaning. The signifier stands for the actual material element of the sign: the sonority of the word, the painted image on a canvas, or the pasted elements of a collage. The signified deals with the meaning of a sign: the definition of a specific word one would find in the dictionary, or when it comes to a work of art, its interpretation by a viewer. Picasso’s The Violin (Violin and Fruit) made in 1913 is a collage that incorporates “one plane [that is] set down on another, that is the centre of collage as a signifying system” (Krauss 218). The signifiers in this work are the glued planes themselves, whilst the signified is achieved through the construction of these elements and the way they relate to each other. In this case, there is no clear image of the instrument, yet as viewers we can identify the suggested form and comprehend that the faint outline of the violin’s body is represented whole by the supplemental pasted planes that complement it.

This ability to play with objects to create something that is implied captures the eye and mind of the viewer, complicating apparent visuality with reading. In other words, this piece is organized according to positions, just like a sentence would be. The meaning of lines, planes, or color: as outlines, as foreground, as background, as objects, is structured in relation to other and their placement within the support. Analyzing this work solely based on references would undermine the richness of its construction. This exact spatial reliance on position mirrors how we approach modern digital grids; the semantic weight of an interface element is defined entirely by its relational hierarchy and structural placement within the layout support.

The Expanded Field, diagram by Rosalind Krauss. Reprinted from Krauss, R. (1979). Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October, 8, p. 37 

This structural mapping of relational positions is a signature of Krauss’s analytical approach. Just as she later mapped the complete transformation of physical spaces into an expanded structural field, Picasso’s early cubist canvas functions as a finite grid where elements only gain meaning through relative distance, boundaries, and systemic positions.

Krauss’ analysis of Picasso’s 1912 Violin discloses additional stylistic methods the artist employed to elevate his work’s message. A significant stylistic approach Picasso incorporates into his work of art is the “appearance of the two f-shaped violin sound holes” (Krauss 215). The composition displays the letter twice, mirrored, giving rise to some technical functions that complexify the structure of this art piece. The f’s function goes beyond its basic role as an identifier, adding versatility to the work through the foreshortening that is achieved by the thickness and the sizes. In the article, Krauss elaborates that “life and art allegorize each other, both caught up equally in the problem of representation” (Krauss 213).

Aesthetical decisions like the f’s are part of the visual representation that tend to be overlooked in a host of analyses, since they get buried under the artist’s eventful biography. Even though a person’s narrative can be critical for shaping a more thorough context of an artwork, a work’s substance is built by elements, like line, and their arrangement forms the greater meaning. Being more attentive towards how artwork is structurally built through stylistic methods and elements aids in a simplified deciphering of the context. Today, this methodology is precisely what allows us to translate complex ideas into approachable, highly intuitive imagery, ensuring that design details always serve a functional, systemic purpose.

In her 1981 essay, Rosalind Krauss explicitly articulates her refutation of a work’s subject matter being predominantly identified through a mirror logic. Studying the signs and the stylistic methods of an artwork are two approaches to dissecting a work’s essence. The arrangement of those elements, whether it be on a basis of positions or not, creates a more straightforward comprehension of the work of art that interestingly relates to how languages are structurally arranged. Even though In the Name of Picasso is authored for a niche, knowledgeable audience that is invested in topics like these, anyone interpreting this text will acquire a more profound way of reading an artwork, and ultimately, a more rigorous framework for organizing visual communication.

Bibliography

Krauss, Rosalind. “In the Name of Picasso.” 1981. Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, edited by Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, Phaidon Press Limited, 1992, pp. 210-221.