Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Picasso: The Painting That Broke Cubism Open (1907)
Five naked women face you across a tight, shallow space, framed by curtains that look as hard as broken glass. Two of them stare out with faces like carved masks; another crouches with her back to us and her face somehow turned towards us at the same time. At their feet, a little still life of fruit sits on the edge of a table. Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted in Paris in 1907 and now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is the picture with which modern art broke with five centuries of perspective. Even today it is not a comfortable painting to stand in front of.
Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
Date: begun winter 1906–07, finished June–July 1907, Paris
Medium: Oil on canvas, 243.9 × 233.7 cm
Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (333.1939), Gallery 502
First shown in public: Paris, 1916
A painting made from hundreds of studies
Picasso began the canvas in the winter of 1906–07 in his cramped studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, the ramshackle building in Montmartre where many artists lived. He was twenty-five, a young Spaniard trying to make his name in Paris, and he was competing with Henri Matisse for the title of leader of the avant-garde. According to the Museum of Modern Art, the picture changed dramatically over several months as he made hundreds of preparatory sketches and studies in graphite, pen, ink and paint. Early versions included two men, a sailor and a medical student, who disappeared from the final composition, leaving the women alone with the viewer.
What does the painting show?
The scene is a brothel. The title, which was given to the painting around 1916, refers to the sex workers of the carrer d’Avinyó, Avignon Street, in Barcelona, the city where Picasso grew up. But nothing about it is seductive. The five women are built from angular lines and flat, splintered planes, and each seems to belong to a different world. As MoMA explains, the striding figure on the far left, with her clenched fist, echoes ancient Egyptian and South Asian sculpture; the two central women, with their raised elbows, have been traced to Roman copies of ancient Greek statues; and the stylised faces of the two figures on the right evoke African and Oceanic masks that had entered French collections through colonial channels.
The space is as fractured as the bodies. There is no single viewpoint: noses are seen in profile on faces seen from the front, and the crouching figure at the lower right is shown from behind and from the front at once. The curtains and the background are broken into sharp facets, so that figures and setting seem cut from the same material. The small still life of grapes, a pear, an apple and a slice of melon at the bottom, tilted towards us, is almost the only reminder of the old genres of painting.
Why it broke the rules
For centuries, European painting had treated the canvas as a window onto a coherent space, and the nude as an ideal of beauty, usually disguised as a goddess or a nymph. Compare Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, or Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, the triumph of the Paris Salon some forty years earlier. Picasso rejected both conventions at once. His women confront the viewer instead of offering themselves to be looked at, and his space is assembled from separate views rather than seen through a single eye.
MoMA notes that the figures also share something with the multi-figure paintings of El Greco, Paul Cézanne and Matisse. Cézanne’s late paintings of bathers, with their simplified bodies and compressed space, were especially important. Picasso pushed those lessons much further, and in the following years, with Georges Braque, he developed the new language that critics would call Cubism.
Shock, silence and fame
When friends saw the enormous canvas in the summer of 1907, many were shocked. Even fellow painters found it baffling, and Picasso kept it in his studio for years. It was not shown in public until 1916, at an exhibition in Paris, and some viewers then recognised it as a turning point. In 1924 the couturier and collector Jacques Doucet bought it, and in 1939 the Museum of Modern Art acquired it, through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, the same fund that later brought Van Gogh’s The Starry Night into the collection.
Since then, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon has become one of the founding images of modern art, and also one of the most debated: for its treatment of women, and for the way it used African and Oceanic objects removed from their own cultures and meanings. MoMA’s own text raises these questions openly, and they are part of what keeps the painting alive.
Where can you see it?
The painting hangs on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, in Gallery 502 of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries, a few steps from The Starry Night in Gallery 501. To compare it with a very different American icon of the same century, read our essay on Grant Wood’s American Gothic in Chicago, or browse more paintings by museum and period in Explore Art. Looking for something to hang at home? See the twelve best-selling art prints chosen by our readers.
Watch the video essay (in Spanish) on @SapiensVerbum on YouTube.
Sources
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, collection record and museum essay, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (333.1939); Wikipedia, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”.
Comments
Post a Comment