Les Demoiselles d'Avignon


In the summer of 1906, during Picasso's stay in Gosol, Spain, his work entered a new phase, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian, and African art. The key work of this early period, is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).


Subject and Meaning:
The painting shows a figurative composition of five nudes grouped around a still life in the foreground. The three on the left are angular distortions of Classical figures, while the violently dislocated features and bodies of the other two have all the barbaric qualities of primitive art. Avignon is a reference not to the French town but to a famous street in the red-light district of Barcelona.
The painting is more a record of work in progress, of an artist in the process of changing his mind, than a resolved composition: the forms are dislocated, inconsistent in style, in fact unfinished. It is still a disturbing picture -- overthrowing perspective, single viewpoint, integral form, local colour, decorative colour.

a) Treatment of space and form
The figures and the background seem to form a relief that for goes all pursuit of spatial depth and retains the close relationship to the pictorial surface. Destroyed were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso restructured into harsh, angular planes. These are not flat, but shaded in a way that gives them a certain three dimensionally. We cannot always be sure whether they are concave or convex; some look like chunks of solidified space, others like fragments of translucent bodies. They constitute a unique kind of matter, which imposes a new kind of integrity and continuity on the entire canvas. Each individual figure is united by a general geometrical principle which superimposes its own laws on to the natural proportions, and they merge almost completely with the background, which is full of similar rugged cleavages. There are no distinctions of light and darkness that might lend shape to the women’s bodies, and together with the combination of several perspectives, this contributes to a general impression of disorientation in space.
Picasso simplified the painting, to reach the internal structures of objects and establish that a picture was not a window on the world, but something which grasps the substance of an object and then restores it.
The definite solid outlining, sometimes with tonal contrast, is both thick and heavy, created the flat space. Only lines suggest forms, not by tonal effect. Picasso is not interested in describing tone, depth, or form.

b) Relationship to Renaissance tradition
The motif of five female nudes grouped around a still life, remains indebted to classical convention.
The intensity of the partially decomposed figures contrasts strangely with a serene little still life in the foreground (a pear, an apple, a slice of melon, a bunch of melon, a bunch of grapes).

c) Influence of Cezanne and Matisse
In structure, it harks back to Cezanne's figurative works (i.e. Bathers), in which nudes are arranged in architecture of bodies, the volumetric treatment of form. The new line of development which had started with Cezanne's rigorous nude compositions, but extends still further back to primitive humanity's earliest most rudimentary experiments with form. Picasso learned from Cezanne that the outlines of landscapes and bodies can be broken up and that the hidden, intuitive facets of perspective objects can be shown.

d) Influence of primitive art (Iberian and African)
The large figures are angular, with the influence of ancient Iberian sculpture evident in the heads of the central figures, whereas the corner figures with their large, firmly contoured planes herald an entirely new approach. The faces themselves possess a compelling force that owes much to African sculpture.
He used Negro sculpture as a clue to part from traditional anatomical human physical structure, and derived a form, which combined elements seen from many different angles. They contained precisely those archaic forms that inspired him to create stylized natural forms, then arrange them in rigorous geometrical patterns and finally radically deform them. The compression of space so characteristic of much post—Impressionist painting is now extreme and the surface alive with a heated exchange of angular lines, curves, and disjointed planes. It shows this vital sense of formal energy that he valued so highly in primitive art.

e) How is colour used?
The strong, harsh colouring of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has given way in early Cubist pictures to soft tans and olive tones, remarkably cool and serene.
Instead of the lovely roses, blues, and greens of Cezanne, the figures are largely buff, their anatomy indicated by jagged white or black contours, but one takes on the cinnamon tone of the background at the left. A harsh blue, as if a sudden glimpse of sky, surrounds the figure at the upper right.
The middle figures' warmly monochrome bodies are reminiscent of Picasso;s Rose Period. Contrasts of colour and texture are reduced to a minimum, so as not to compete with the design.

f) The meaning of the work
This painting represents a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of modern art. Whereas the central figures are still indicative of that stage in which the painting was begun, the nudes that frame the composition already demonstrate the decisive change of direction in Picasso's art that was to be of such seminal importance to Cubism.
Picasso wanted to destroy absolutely everything. His rebellion against the myth of feminine beauty was relatively insignificant compared with his other rebellion: with this picture he wanted to destroy the whole of Western art since the early Renaissance. Not only the proportions, but the organic integrity and continuity of the human body are denied here, so that the canvas “resembles a field of broken glass.* It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of this picture and the profound effect it had on art subsequently.


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