'The Man with the Blue Guitar' and the problem of representation in the work of Picasso, Stevens, and Hockney (Pablo Picasso, France, Wallace Stevens, David Hockney)

The problem of representation is that paradoxical state arising from one thing trying to be another. Though the representative object, the art object, fails to be what it can only represent, it succeeds in bringing itself into existence. This creates an eternal knot with a paradox at its core: the twin nature of a selfhood that is both dependent on and independent of the thing it tries to represent. It is the artistic paradox, the problem of representation that will not allow an art to rest in complete identification with its referent, or exclusively, with its own formal properties.; This problem is central to the work of Pablo Picasso, Wallace Stevens, and David Hockney. The common challenge of representation allows their works to correspond across the bounds of media. Stevens's poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar" is, in fact, a nexus for the work of the two painters. Picasso's paintings inspire Stevens. Both Picasso and Stevens inspire Hockney. He interprets the poem visually in a series of prints and paintings that approach the problem of representation yet again, with a fresh look toward the works of Picasso and Stevens.; This dissertation traces the intricate knot woven by these three artists around the central problem of representation in painting and poetry. (It is a knot that draws music and theater into itself as well.) Picasso moves from re-presentation of tradition to direct representation of the object in radical ways. Stevens's poem is an inquisition of the act of seeing itself, a fictional guitarist's musings on how the subject and object become fused in the act of representation. Hockney ties together the depiction of time as space for a fuller lifelikeness in art. This dissertation finds the work of all three artists bound together around the problem of representation. It is a problem that, rather than stifling artists with its difficulties, may inspire their creativity as Alexander's was inspired by the knot of Gordius.