Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
heaven and hell
The most important painting of the twentieth century”: this was said of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon before the century was even half over. It remains one of the most original and disturbing works in the history of art. Unlike Impressionist paintings, initially rejected but eventually warmly embraced by the general public, Les Demoiselles has never been fully assimilated. Most Impressionist paintings were comfortably scaled to middle-class living rooms. But at eight feet high, Le Demoiselles d’Avignon is an overwhelming and intimidating presence. Reproductions in books shrink its power.
The painting was executed over three months in 1907 in Picasso’s jammed, squalid one-room studio apartment in bohemian Montmarte in Paris. Then twenty-five, he was one of many ambitious young artists in the city. As a teenager in Spain, he had won attention for his expertise with realistic drawings and paintings. Even before moving from Barcelona to Paris, the capital of the art world, he was working his way through established styles in search of one of his own. Picasso’s first unique style was his Blue Period (1901-4), consisting of elongated portraits of the ill, aged, and destitute against a melancholy backdrop of blue. He soon moved onto a Rose Period (1904-6) where gentle family groups of circus performers are suffused with pink, violet, and orange.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907.
Oil on canvas. 8 ft. 8 in. x 7 ft 8 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, United States.
The fleshy pinks of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are a survival from Picasso’s Rose Period but with a stunning change of tone. There is no longer any humour or pleasure. On the contrary, we seem to have wandered into a torture den. It’s the reception room of a brothel, where bored women lounge with their hair down as they wait for customers – a scene frequently drawn by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso had painted prostitutes in Paris cafés, where they were dancing or flirting with one another. In Les Demoiselles, however, each of the women seems locked in her own severe, remote consciousness. They are like Fates, frigid masters of man’s destiny.
When the painting finally became known to the world after its acquisition by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939, commentary on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon focused on its formal properties as a prefiguration of Cubism, co-created by Picasso and George Braque before World War I. A 1972 essay by the art historian Leo Steinberg demanded honest recognition of the painting’s illicit sexuality. Because so many of Picasso’s preparatory sketches were preserved, studies of the paintings genesis are extensive, but little to no attention has been paid to a variety of later details. Its demurely ambiguous title, “The Maidens of Avignon,” has proved an irritant; Picasso did not coin it, and he disliked it. He simply called the painting “mon bordel” (my brothel).
Les Demoiselles is staged like a tableau vivant. The woman standing at left lifts a heavy curtain, while her opposite bursts like wind into the tentlike space....The two apparently upright central figures are actually reclining with arms behind their heads, a white sheet draping their legs. Picasso’s startling conflation of two points of view was revolutionary. Ever since the Renaissance, perspective had been based on the spectator’s fixed position, reproducing where the painter had set his easel. Here, however, we stand on the brothel floor and also hover near a ceiling – a duality not seen since Byzantine art.
Multiple perspective, soon to be a hallmark of Cubism, also applies to the spiderlike sitter: we view her legs and bare buttocks from behind, but her torso demonically twists to make her head and arms face forward. She is resting her menacingly boomerang-like chin on her fist. The reclining ladies are also hybrid: their eyes and face are frontal, while their noses are profiled. Picasso’s disjunctive method is partly derived from Cézanne, whose sloping country table tops are imitated here in the giddily angled coffee table.
But Picasso had also studied Egyptian art, with its anatomical contortions. His left-hand lady, hand clenched at her side and one foot forward, is based on pharaoh sculptures and the Greek athlete status (kouroi) that they inspired. Furthermore, as the sole clothed (or semi-clothed) demoiselle, she evokes the Winged Victory of Samothrace, plastered with wet drapery as she lands on a ship’s prow, a monumental ancient sculpture that Picasso saw dominating the magnificent Daru Staircase at the Louvre.
Meanwhile, the reclining demoiselles allude to the Venetian tradition of lazy, opulent nudes, who reappeared as hookah-smoking Turkish or Algerian odalisques in nineteenth0centruy French paintings. Picasso based the two women’s domed heads and large ears on pre-Roman Iberian sculptures recently found near his hometown of Málaga in Andalusia. Their raised elbows come from a homoerotic statue that always fascinated him – Michelangelo’s Neoplatonic Dying Slave, a life-sized plaster copy of which can be seen in photographs of Picasso’s studio after his death.
Michelangelo, Dying Slave. 1513-1516. Marble. The Louvre, Paris, France.
Thus, Demoiselles d’Avignon densely embodies a procession of styles in Western art, read from left to right: antiquity through the Renaissance to modernity, which Picasso shows transformed by the abrupt arrival of non-Western cultures, represented by scarified tribal masks from Africa and Oceana. Picasso had seen and admired many examples of what was then collectively called l’art nègre. The Fauve painters, including Henri Matisse, the artistic leader of Paris, were acquiring tribal objects from 1904 on. Although he later tried to minimize it, Picasso also had an intense spiritual experience at the Trocadéro ethnographic museum just as was formulating Les Demoiselles. Sixteen years earlier, Gauguin had abandoned Paris for Tahiti. Picasso saw Gauguin’s South Seas paintings at two posthumous retrospectives; their influence can be detected in the dusky complexion of the left-hand demoiselles, who resembles Oceanic ancestor spirits like the stone sentinels of Easter Island.
But how tranquil Gauguin’s Tahitian pictures seem compared with Picasso’s visceral adaptation of what was then called “primitivism” ... There are no welcoming smiles in this cabal of urban nymphs. Their snake-like lidless eyes are fixed and blank or at mismatched angles or missing altogether. They are sleepless watchmen of the heaven-hell of sex, where the price of momentary ecstasy may be disease or obliteration of identity. The jewel-like, geometric facets of Cubism are anticipated in Picasso’s transformation of round breasts into aggressive squares ...
Picasso called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon “my first exorcism painting.” It was an experiment in black magic. With its graceful, chalky outlines yet jagged fractures and distortions, it weds beauty to ugliness. Despite many claims that the title refers to a brothel in Barcelona, no archival evidence has been found of a brothel ever existing on respectable Avignon Street. It was in fact on that very street, just around the corner from his parents’ house, that the young Picasso bought art supplies. These statuesque demoiselles, crowding the flat picture plane, are Picasso’s carnal muses...He had to rip through the veils of personality to capture women’s essence, which always eluded him. In this, his greatest painting until his political protest mural, Guernica, thirty years later, he confronts the mothers of his creative vision. Mutating through many faces, they are the models for the restlessly mercurial styles of his long career. He cannot conquer them, but their intense gaze conveys that they are choosing him, and only him.