Kristeva has successfully established psychoanalysis as an effective tool for analyzing not only individual artists` psyche but cultural practices of diverse kinds including literary texts and paintings. This paper examines how her crucial psychoanalytic concepts, those of the semiotic and the symbolic, are applied to the works of the avant-garde artists, mainly focusing on her analysis of Giotto`s Padua frescoes in her "Giotto`s Joy." The avant-garde literature, maintains Kristeva, creates `productive violence.` By destroying the fixed, homogeneous discourse, it practises a heterogeneous activity of expressing the instinctual, repressed drives into the symbolic code of signification. And this very heterogeneous process is, according to Kristeva, exactly what is happening in Giotto`s paintings when he uses color to erupt the semiotic. Kristeva`s primary concern in Giotto`s paintings is, however, not the narrative signified of the frescoes which delivers the orthodox Christian message but the space filled with color. According to Kristeva, Giotto uses color, particularly that of blue, as an ultimate strategy of transgressing the given norms and customs of his time including Christianity and the contemporary narrative and pictorical traditions. Giotto`s freedom in his pictorial practice also reveals the paradoxical process of liberation many artists go through; they seek freedom by traversing boundaries of the semiotic and the symbolic, but that freedom cannot be said a complete one but a relative escape from the symbolic order to the semiotic, the escape which can occur only within the realm of the symbolic. Due to her heavy reliance on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, many critics are quite unsparing in their critiques of Kristeva`s rather conservative attitude toward it This paper then examines to what extent Kristeva`s theory of the semiotic stays within the existing psychoanalytic framework by concentrating on her analysis of Giotto`s jouissance through color.