The Modernist Iconography of Sleep. Leo Steinberg, Picasso and The Representation of States of Consciousness
The Modernist Iconography of Sleep. Leo Steinberg, Picasso and The Representation of States of Consciousness

Summary/Abstract: In the present study, I will consider Leo Steinberg’s interpretation of Picasso’s work in its theoretical framework, and I will focus on a particular topic: Steinberg’s account of “Picasso’s Sleepwatchers.” I will suggest that the Steinbergian argument on Picasso’s depictorial modalities of sleep and the state of being awake advances the hypothesis of a new way of representing affectivity in images, by subsuming emotions into a “peinture conceptuelle.” This operation corresponds to a shift from modernism to further characterizing the postmodernist image as a “flatbed picture plane.” For such a passage, I will also provide an overall view of Cubism’s main phenomenological lectures.

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