Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

  Per i miei alunni del corso di storia dell'arte in inglese

 The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is one of the most important works in the genesis of modern art. The painting depicts five naked prostitutes in a brothel; two of them push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses—but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided or staring or asymmetrical, and the two women at the right have threatening masks for heads. The space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass. In the still life at the bottom, a piece of melon slices the air like a scythe.

 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)

Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas (243.9 x 233.7 cm).

The faces of the figures at the right are influenced by African masks, which Picasso assumed had functioned as magical protectors against dangerous spirits: this work, he said later, was his "first exorcism painting." A specific danger he had in mind was life-threatening sexual disease, a source of considerable anxiety in Paris at the time; earlier sketches for the painting more clearly link sexual pleasure to mortality. In its brutal treatment of the body and its clashes of color and style (other sources for this work include ancient Iberian statuary and the work of Paul Cézanne), Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective.

http://www.moma.org/audio_file/audio_file/36/502._Les_Demoiselles_d_Avignon._1907.mp3

This painting is titled, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, "The women of Avignon," and it's Avignon Street in the city of Barcelona where Picasso was a young artist. The Demoiselles d'Avignon are actually five prostitutes, and these are five women—obviously naked—and they're looking at us as much as we're looking at them.

The very early studies show a sailor walking into this curtained room where the ladies stand and the woman on the far left now has the traces of having been that man entering the room, and you even feel a certain masculinity in the sort of sculptural carving of her body and the way that very large foot is stepping toward the others. It almost seems like its a build-up of geometric forms, and if you look at the chest of the woman at the very top right, you can see one of these cubes making up the space underneath her chin, thus the name Cubism.

One striking aspect of this painting is the way this stage on which these women are painted is almost looming out at the viewer. Rather than feeling like these women are nice and safely set back in some kind of room that you are peering into, I, at least, feel like the women are almost piled atop of each other and piled in such a way onto the canvas that they almost could step out of it at the viewer. It's part of the desire of the painting to confront you physically, psychologically, as well as intellectually, with everything that's going on in it. 

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso188.html

http://www.moma.org/