In Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, Mailer attempts to make sense of the life of a painter he deemed one of his greatest influences. In Advertisements for Myself, he included a short piece called “An Eye on Picasso,” and had also planned to pen a biography of Picasso as early as 1962. Moreover, Mailer himself also dabbled in the visual arts, producing a number of sketches that invoke a Modernist aesthetic in their relative abstraction. This chapter traces these connections, and illuminates the role that Cubism played in determining the shape and dimension of Mailer’s literary canon during the second half of the twentieth century.

Part III deploys the theories and approaches presented in Parts I and II, along with art historical texts, to develop a new interpretational framework for artworks that make rhythm and matter explicit.

David J. Code explores the reception of Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Apres-midi d’un faune, a 1912 choreographic reworking of Claude Debussy’s orchestral Prélude (1894). He peels off layers of historical reference, looking backwards to Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé from Faune’s 1912 Nijinskian embodiment. In the process, he questions the ballet’s accepted relationship to cubism in favour of a Matisse-inspired framework for understanding the underlying modernity of the Faun. With attention to scene and character types, structure and style, diegesis, eroticism and Freudian psychological interiority, Code highlights ways in which music and dance might both embody and subvert typically modernist modes of dramatic expression.

Often conceived as the abstract counterpoint to the supposedly absent representational image, geometry suffuses visual cultures of the Islamic world. Chapter 9 examines its theorization in relation to legacies of Sufi cosmology and music. While often contrasted with European representational traditions, the geometry of Islamic pattern is, like perspective, an optical device structuring surface treatment. Without offering a hermeneutic of geometry, Islamic discourses suggest an implicit understanding of geometry as an agent of meaning without a semiotic structure of signifier and signified. Geometry does not re-present; it presents. As such, its religious significance has everything to do with perception and little to do with intention. Putting forth its own quiddity, geometry induces subjects to infinitely reaffirm their own transience. It prepares them for enhanced religious insight and theological theorization. The infinitely shifting subjectivity it induces both enacts and contrasts the doctrinal absoluteness of God. This chapter examines the meanings accorded to geometry both in Islamic and Western discourses. The first section suggests origins for the common art-historical premise that geometry functions decoratively rather than mimetically. The subsequent section uses Islamic discourses about geometry to reveal its meanings not only as a cultural sign but as a mimetic practice.