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It was then that Picasso and Braque were confronted with a unique dilemma: they had to choose between illusion and representation.

If they opted for illusion, it could only be illusion per se -- an illusion of depth, and of relief, so general and abstracted as to exclude the representation of individual objects.

If, on the other hand, they opted for representation, it had to be representation per se -- representation as image pure and simple, without connotations ( at least, without more than schematic ones ) of the three-dimensional space in which the objects represented originally existed.

It was the collage that made the terms of this dilemma clear: the representational could be restored and preserved only on the flat and literal surface now that illusion and representation had become, for the first time, mutually exclusive alternatives.