The book meticulously analyses the history of critical reception avantguard art through interpretations received by one its greatest emblems, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso, 1907. Since has been considered over this century true paradigm Modern Art, is, fundamentally, a sort synthesis discourses about Modernism from formalism, iconology, Leo Steinberg's 'Other Criteria’, sociological, biogra...

Post-modernism, now fading partly into orthodoxy, partly into irrelevance, brought two new academic metaphors into common usage, especially in the fields of cultural studies and anthropology. The first is the metaphor of writing, given to us especially by Derrida. In this style, we talk of discourses, textualities, inscriptions, readings, and decipherments. All experience and explanation is mod...

In the fi rst great period of bourgeois hegemony, the reinvention of romance fi nds its strategies in the substitution of new positivities (theology, psychology, the dramatic metaphor) for the older magical content. When at the end of the nineteenth century the search for secular equivalents seems exhausted, the characteristic indirection of a nascent modernism, from Kafka to Cortazar, circumsc...