Icon, Index, Symbol: Picasso’s Cubism and Modern Expansion of Pictorial Signs

Picasso’s Cubism occupies an exceptionally important position in the development of modern painting. Since Romanticism, modern painting in the 19th century has steadily moved away from the representation of the world by rejecting the aesthetics of classicism in various ways, but has not completely broken away from this traditional mission of painting that has lasted for over 30,000 years. The confrontation between classicism and modern painting ended only in the 20th century, and the protagonist of the final battle is Picasso’s Cubism. Picasso’s work, seeking a break with classicism, consists of three stages in Cubism through systematic interrogation and exploration of painting as signs. The early Cubism, which refuted the traditional belief in the transparency of iconic signs by using heterogeneous styles and ambiguous shapes that broke the visual unity and fixed signification, the Analytical Cubism, which introduced indexical signs as the leading elements of pictorial composition and reversed the traditional structure of representation that had hidden the surface with the picture plane, and the Synthetic Cubism (papiers-collés) that pioneered the possibility that painting could finally transcend representation by developing symbolic signs that had meaning according to the components and relationships within the painting rather than relying on formal similarity with the external world. Among these, papiers-collés was evaluated as an extraordinary aesthetic achievement that converted pictorial signs from icons to symbols by the semiotic interpreters including Rosalind Krauss. This evaluation is justified in that the symbols introduced by Picasso became the foundation that made possible the advent of abstract painting, a painting that was completely liberated from the representation of the world. However, Picasso’s papiers-collés does not only contain symbols, but also two other signs that had appeared before Synthetic Cubism, namely icons and indices. What we actually have in papiers-collés is not the autonomous signification of the symbol alone, but a rich semiotic feast of these three signs together. Therefore, the scope of semiotic interpretation that focuses exclusively on papiers-collés should be expanded, and the exaggeration of semiotic interpretation that presents papiers- collés as a conversion from icons to symbols should be limited. This paper defines Picasso’s Cubism from start to finish as ‘semiotic adventures’ and presents their aesthetic achievement as expansion of pictorial signs for modern painting.