Toward the 'Total Image': The Thematic Origins of Cubism

Cubist collage, montage, constructive sculpture, and all manifestations of Cubist painting--from Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon on down--depend upon breaking apparent wholes into different parts and conversely, putting different, even diametrically opposed elements, properties, materials together into new hybrid syntheses. This thesis attempts to trace the emergence of such tendencies which constitute, in effect, a unifying principle of Cubism. In tracing these tendencies, certain key conepts go back to the roots of the classical literary tradition, others hark back to Renaissance theory and later variations, and others appear to emerge prominently in the late 1700's. But they come together in certain strains of Romanticism, and it is there that this study begins. Romantic ideas and the characteristic ways they are structured continue to inform nineteenth-century thought to a remarkable degree, but they are transformed, and ultimately become something radically new. The transformation of Romantic ideas into Symbolism, (which essentially, though not exclusively, involves a process of intensification,) and the subsequent metamorphosis of Symbolist ideas into the profoundly related--yet strikingly different--Cubist aesthetic is the subject of this thesis.