| Artist: | Picasso, Pablo |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Les Demoiselles d'Avignon | |
| Date of Work: | 1907 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Proto-Cubism (1906-1907) | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: 5 prostitutes in a brothel fix their gaze outward, directly at us in this confrontational painting, which arguably is the key turning point of the first half of 20th c. art. Instead of vision turned inward, we see everything coming forward to the surface with a new boldness. The picture started out as a traditional allegory on the vices and virtues, but it does not end there; Picasso deconstructs allegory by leaving out the traditional storyline and symbols. In allegory, one is supposed to read through the picture to the underlying moral, but there is no way to read through the Demoiselles; there is no way to get past that surface! These figures are not nudes in the traditional sense; they are naked, implying a raw sexuality that cannot be sugarcoated. The turn of the century depiction of the femme fatale climaxes here in these women who have been called a "species of bitch goddess." They parody some of the traditional poses of the Academy, but the figure seated on the right also seems to be "mooning" that academic tradition. It is almost as if Picasso had committed pictorial rape, assaulting the conventional concepts of Western Art: Beauty, Grace, Harmony, and Unity. To take on the Western tradition, Picasso has turned to counter-cultural traditions: to Iberian sculpture (the "primitive" sculture of the ancient Spanish penninsula) in the almond-shaped eyes and scroll-like ears of the figures on the left; and to African sculpture and masks for the figures on the right (he would have seen such art in the Trocadero Museum, a collection of ethnographic arts still considered to be "curiosities" at the time). So-called "primitive" art supplied him with a counter-cultural aesthetic to hold up against the Western emphasis on Mimesis. African art does not try to mirror nature; instead, it diagrams or maps nature onto a different, more schematic, abstract plane. He takes on Western one-point illusionistic persective, as well, shattering it into multiple perspectives. In many ways, this painting is the birth of Cubism (though the lessons of Cezanne still have to be added to the mix). Style: fragmentation of the body, of space, and of any unity of style. Picasso does not model any figure in the round; the women's bodies are broken into faceted planes in space. They are all elbows and sharp angles; these women "prick" you if you get too close! The body is dismantled or deconstructed into bits and pieces. Space is both exploded and imploded as Picasso shatters one-point perspective and its mimetic illusions. There is no way to separate figure from ground, as Picasso denies plasticity in the end to affirm the flat picture plane. Stylistic unity is also shattered into multiple perspectives: from the Iberian influences on the left to the African influences on the right and the subtext of classical poses that reference Western art and the Academy. Picasso never finished the painting; he leaves all its internal tensions unresolved and exposed. Cubism, a radical redefining of how to represent space, mass, and form on a flat canvas surface, will grown out of all those tensions that keep the Demoiselles so dangerous. Context: the Demoiselles represents a major turning point away from Mimesis and towards abstraction. When Picasso breaks the neck of the seated figure on the right, he is breaking the tradition of Mimesis that had governed art since the Renaissance; we see her head-on and from the rear simultaneously! And when he paints her face with the schemaztized, highly abstracted and flattened features of an African mask, he is subverting the very foundation of the Western aesthetic. In terms of its almost expressionistic intensity and aggressive confrontation, the Demoiselles does not exhibit the disciplined study of space and form that characterizes the Cubist project that will follow, but in terms of its play of multiple perspectives, affirmation of the flat picture plane, and anti-mimetic attitude, it builds the foundation out of which Cubism will develop. Most subsequent modern "isms"--from German Expressionism to Italian Futurism--will be movements that splinter off from Cubism and, thus, are traceable back to this seminal painting. Coming to terms with early Modernism means quite simply confronting the Demoiselles. | ||
