Ron Reichman

Advisor: Richard Meyer (Art & Art History) 

Abstract: This study offers a queer reappraisal of Pablo Picasso’s work between 1906 and 1914—a critical juncture in the history of avant-garde art, when Cubism emerged as a transformative idiom reshaping the terms of modernist representation. An exemplary case study, Picasso came to define one of the central paradigms of twentieth-century art, shaped by enduring myths of artistic greatness and virility. Foregrounding the unstable and contradictory logics structuring his representations of the body, gender, and desire, this dissertation pressures the category of heterosexual masculinity—not as a default identity, but as a historically situated idealization. It examines Picasso’s investment in metamorphosis as a pictorial code, an iconographic leitmotif, and a way of seeing, as expressed across a range of mediums—painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, paper constructions, and photography. Read alongside the social codes and psychic economies of male homosociality and gender multiplicity, these works help dislodge heterosexuality from its privileged role in conventional interpretations of his art and legacy. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Picasso’s pre-Cubist and Cubist work, often framed in terms of phallic domination and erotic conquest, reveals something more subtle yet profound about identity—namely, its instability—registered in the malleability and inherent ambivalence of artistic form, as well as in often-overlooked cultural scripts of male intimacy and homosocial desire. 

Ron is currently serving as a teaching fellow in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University and will be applying for postdoctoral positions in the upcoming application cycle. He plans to develop his Picasso dissertation into a book, and as a second project, intends to pursue a monographic study of the Jewish art historian Leo Steinberg, focusing on his radical approach to the erotics of vision and spectatorship.