Since its’ birth, Picasso’s cubism has been discussed by a number of art historians using various approaches. At the beginning, the formal analysis, rooted in 19th century aesthetics with its belief in the evolutionary development of abstraction, firmly established cubism as an avant-garde example of visual autonomy in early twentieth century art. Similarly collage, as an art medium, has been mostly studied from semantic reading-Rosenblum, Leighten, and Nochlin-and formal analysis. Clement Greenberg, a leading proponent of the modernism, insists that Cubist collage is a dialectical synthesis of sculpture-three dimension-and painting-illusional space-that saved art work from trompe-l’ oeil, According to him, Picasso resolved the dilemma of representation of three dimensional thing on the flat surface and overcame this by creating virtual object in cubist style. However, Greenberg’s idea and analysis of visual materials did not coherently clarify the real status of collage, swinging between the three and two dimension. Yve-alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss both strongly criticize Greenberg and other historians who underscored Picasso’s personal and social environment as well formal reading of the pieces and claimed these as the very crucial constituents of the artist’s proper name. These October editors, armed with both semiotics and structuralism, attempt to explore Picasso’s collage and to reverse the traditional perspective. Bois develops his semiology based upon Charles Peirce’s theoretic diagram of semiotics, which is founded upon Saussure’s study on arbitrary nature of sign, and material quality of signifier and signified. And Bois concludes that Picasso’s collage utilized the sign system that provides meaning beyond representation and figurative marks on art works. Instead, signifier is decoded by its function and the context with other elements. This commences toward a new direction of making images without the help from visible closeness. Bois argues what Picasso really understood from African Grebo mask is the arbitrary nature of the sign. Now collage does not belong to the iconic sign, which has clear visual connection, but to the symbolic, and it is independent from its references and the visual representation. Rosalind Krauss applied the semiotic structure to Picasso’s collage by reading their formal elements. For instance, in Violin(1912) empty space becomes a silhouette of the violin and the very ‘vacancy,’ and ‘absence’ work as the critical point of the meaning. From that, she proposes the way of collage explains depth, which is not depending upon the perspective devices, but on the sign like a letter. In the same painting, two ‘f’ holes in different sizes exist in a symmetrical relationship to each other, representing a depth in space like writing on a plane. Krauss and Bois clearly examine the possibility of different sign systems enriching the meaning of cubism and collage. However, their suggestions leads us to further questions on marks and images. Viewed differently, ‘f’ could mean female, forte, f major, and just a letter of alphabet. The whole point of semiology is to examine images as an expanded system of signs. Picasso disproved the conventional way of making and circulating images. He suggested an open system where signifier can be decoded in various ways, thus to dismiss a particular reading.