[Modernism]

… Modernism is definable in terms of a single, fundamental axiom: that it is necessary to begin from a radical act of definition or redefinition of the domain of the elements and the operations of the art or of art itself.  […] A specifically restricted from of the axiom is the fundamental proposition of early 20th-century Modernism: that it is necessary for art or an art to define its medium, its elements and operations in terms of what is distinctively peculiar to it as determined from a fundamental reading of its history.   (31)

[Cubism & Representation]

… the main issue of 'modernism' between 1908 and 1914 was the struggle over issues of representation, and […] the art that was the most 'advanced' in this struggle was not music but painting. (11)  [Painters like Picasso and Braque] made a four-year career out of dramatic, comic, lyric and even expressive explorations of the syntactical and semantic constraints limiting pictorial recognizability.  Sometimes only the attachment of a title was sufficient to allow a viewer to recognize the elliptical representations of parts of well known objects like guitars and people, which would otherwise have gone undetected, yet which, once recognized, seemed somehow adequate representations of some experience, like the simultaneous apperception of a man in a room and the city outside the window, several objects in the room, a piece of moulding over the door and a part of an obtruding chair.  But the point of attack was upon the elements and arrangements that go to make up an image, not upon the arrangement of already constructed images [which is usually called collage]. 

[Collage]

"For better or worse 'modern' poetry in English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset."  I suppose the term is better understood in the 'visual arts,' because it derives from the practice of pasting pieces of paper or other extraneous material into a painting in the manner of Picasso and Braque at about 1912.  The early practice usually consisted of the introduction of a piece of wallpaper or some such thing in substitution for a painted depiction of it, but once the process of introducing these foreign, fragmentary, readymade materials got underway, the whole ideas was quickly generalized […] to a principle of construction based on the juxtaposition of objects, object fragments and materials drawn from the most disparate contexts.  The result was a work that no longer yielded an iconic representation [i.e. pictorially presented a seen scene], even of a fractured sort, though bristling with significations.

            This work tended to occupy a rather odd semiological space. It was clearly remote from the conventional notions of representation, yet it was so filled with reference that it couldn't be classed with the abstract[….] What I mean is that the work operated in a middle space between the two possibilities of representational reference and compositional game, depending depending upon whether you stressed the nature of the materials and the contexts from which they were drawn, or the arrangement of the elements. (19)

[Stein]

Of all the writers in English only Gertrude Stein seems to have had a thorough understanding of how profoundly Cubism opened up the possibilities  of representation with this analysis. But then she was the writer in English with the deepest interest in language, the only one with an interest in language as language. (12-13) [….] Stein of all of them had a philosophical commitment to the problematic double system of language—the self-ordering system and the pointing system—and from the beginning of her serious work she had encountered the peculiar conflict between the two, even in her early stories.  She also had a thorough awareness—shared by Joyce more than any other of her English language contemporaries—of another fundamental structural ambiguity of language: that utterance is play before it is address or discourse or representation.  And sometimes this mad jingling can throw light on something in the world ("Sometimes Melanctha was so blue that she didn't know what she was going to do")—and sometimes swamp it in a grammatical or phonological ocean. (13-14)