History of the Painting
Significance
Studies and Influences
A New Tradition
Studies and Revisions

“In mystical terms, with this painting we bid farewell to all the paintings of the past.” Andre Breton

"My first exorcism-painting." Pablo Picasso

"In the pagan shrine of a brothel, five statuesque nude goddesses or priestesses, wearing tribal masks and staring blankly with cold, entranced eyes, welcome supplicant man into a fractured paradise garden of crystal shards and ashy fruit." Camille Paglia

"It looks out at us, and challenges the masculine appropriate erotic assumptions behind the mythological genre of 'beauty on parade'.” Christopher Butler.

" a sexual battleground in which Eros and Thanatos contend for Picasso’s psyche." William Rubin

" five nudes force their eroticized flesh upon us with a primal attack." 
Robert Rosenblum

" a tidal wave of female aggression." Leo Steinberg

A HISTORY OF THE PAINTING

According to William Rubin, after he painted Les Demoiselles, “Picasso himself didn't quite know what to make of it.” He kept the painting face to the wall or rolled up on the floor. Andre Breton and Gertrude Stein found the painting marvelous, although many of Picasso's other friends were dismayed. The painting was exhibited at the Salon d’Antin in 1916 to an indifferent public. Sometime between 1921 and 1924, through the intervention of Andre Breton, the painting was sold to Jacques Doucet, a private collector; however, Doucet's wife was so embarrassed by Les Demoiselles that it was hung in an unobtrusive spot in their home. Later, it had its first public viewing when it was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1938, where it now hangs.

SIGNIFICANCE

The significance of this particular painting, writes Christopher Butler in Early Modernism, "has come to lie as much in the way in which it has been incorporated into the writing of art history, as in its historical relationships with the work surrounding it." Art critics assert that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has fostered more studies, paintings, and drawings than any other single work (although the Mona Lisa is probably the most widely recognized painting in the world). For example, the painting is known to have influence on American painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, such as de Kooning's Excavation (1950), below. The painting is said to have influenced the representation of women in painting, the reduction of women into caricatures.

STUDIES AND INFLUENCES

Critics and historians have asserted that Picasso responded to Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907) in his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Cezanne's Bathers:

The impact on the artworld by the Manet's Olympia, a classical pose reinterpreted as the frank sexuality of a contemporary prostitute, was continued in Les Demoiselles:

Early sketches reveal that Picasso originally intended the scene of five women to be interspersed by two men. One, a sailor, sat amidst the women in the brothel. A second man entered the room from the left, parting the curtain and carrying with him a skull or a book. The skull was the classical emblem of death, the end of vanity, a memento mori, while the book could range from illustrating learning or the moral significance of the Bible.

A NEW TRADITION

Although the ugliness of the women in Les Demoiselles breaks with the tradition of Matisse and the Fauves, Picasso was crossing traditional styles with new inventions deriving from primitive works and his Spanish, classical training.

Contrasting classicism with modernity results in what Robert Hughes calls "shock"! Picasso juxtaposes Iberian (Spanish) sculpture, Egyptian art, El Greco, Ingres, Gaugin, Cezanne , and old master paintings. "It seems to agonize at the loss of the very tradition of erotic painting from Rubens to Toulouse-Lautrec, which it helps to destroy" concludes Butler.

The form of Les Demoiselles, for example, is found in Matisse's two paintings Luxe, Calme et Volupte (1904) and Joie de Vivre (1905):

In fact, Picasso preceded and followed the painting with a number of very traditional sketches and paintings of nudes; those below date from 1906 and 1923.

Robert Hughes believes that Les Demoiselles is disturbing because of its play with styles: “no painting ever looked more convulsive, yet it was anchored in tradition.” It distorted and modernized the classical nude. Josephy Canady writes that it is formal in its use of the Three Graces motif and its recollections of "archaic green sculpture," but by the time the right side of the picture is reached by the eye, the formality has become "jagged, swinging," and "crashing."

Picasso also rejected conventional "one-point," linear perspective, as his surfaces "slide into one another," as Butler puts it: "Indeed a sense of the arbitrary and surprising is part of what Picasso taught those who followed him."

In his well-known work on modern art The Shock of the New, author Robert Hughes contends that Cubism "was the first radically new proposition about the way we see in almost five hundred years." Since the Renaissance, almost all painting had obeyed a convention, that of one-point perspective. In a nutshell, one-point perspective means that objects appear to diminish in size as they move away from us. Using the horizon line as a point of reference, artists constructed a single point, a "vanishing point" on the horizon toward which all objects extended. If you think of train tracks running into the distance, you have the conception of one-point perspective. The painting below, Avenue at Middelharnis (1689 Meyndert Hobbema) is an excellent example of the use of the vanishing point:

A geometrical system for arranging reality, one-point perspective offers a way of seeing things that does not always represent the way we actually see, although it has controlled the way we see since the Renaissance. For example, if you look at any object in the room around you, you will notice that your eye is never still: you blink, your head moves slightly, the wind blows a piece of paper on the table. With each of these movements, the object changes its position.

In developing Cubism, Pablo Picasso and his friend, the sculptor Georges Braque, wanted to represent how people actually see and know the world around them. Our knowledge of objects comes from being able to see all possible angles of that object: top, sides, front, back. As Hughes says, "any sight is a sum of different glimpses." Cubism collapses these angles of vision into one simultaneous view. Picasso and Braque argues that their view was reality.

STUDIES AND REVISIONS

The Demoiselles is the site of many visions and revisions--and far from being a completed work. There is a stylistic barrier within it, which is almost a species barrier, and its consequent divisions of purpose make it essentially unfinished and abandoned. For the primitive masking and hatching features got into the Demoiselles in the autumn of 1907, after a summer break, in which Picasso underwent the “shock” and “revelation” of the primitive art in the Trocadero museum. He overpainted the two figures on the right, which X-rays show to have been originally in the same style as the rest of the picture. (Christopher Butler, Early Modernism)

The two images below are of Les Demoiselles as Picasso completed it (one the left) and a supposition of what it may have looked like before he added the mask-like features to the figures on the right.

The interest in African art, which several contemporary scholars have labeled "colonial," yield some rich interpretations of Les Demoiselles. For example, Anna Chave, writing in The Art Bulletin in 1994, links the African features of the two women on the right of the painting to masks and mimicry of Africans. Chave comments that women commonly masquerade, dressing themselves up to please men and in the process giving up their own identity. Thus, Les Demoiselles comments on the inevitable process of women losing their identity to men's desires. The wooden faces of all five of the models represent their alienation, making Picasso a sympathetic commentator on the plight of the prostitute -- and of women in general.

The fact that the painting was set in a brothel might indicate that the prostitute was merely a commodity, a symptom of modern society and all its alienation (a favorite motif of the era). In urban, commercial centers, humanity could be reduced to an impersonal status. Social relations grew cold, love was lost.

The use of the African masks is seen also as disruptive by both Chave and Butler. Drawing on the writings of the critic Homi Bhabha, Chave argues that "mimicry is an act of appropriation," suggesting an insensitive take-over of something important and indigenous. Furthermore, mimicry suggests that there might not be humanity behind the mask.

The primitive features of Les Demoiselles interested Gelett Burgess in 1910, when he wrote a series of articles on the “Wild Men of Paris”:

I had mused over the art of the Niger and of Dahomey, I had gazed at Hindu monstrosities, Asian mysteries and many other primitive grotesques; and it had come over me that there was a rationale of ugliness as there was a rationale of beauty; that, perhaps, one was but the negative of the other, an image reversed, which might have its own value and esoteric meaning. man had painted and carved grim and obscene things when the world was young. Was this revival a sign of some second childhood of the race, or a true rebirth of art? (Quoted in Butler, Early Modernism)

Butler asserts that Les Demoiselles "is not so much a homage to primitive art and its functions, as the theft of some of its stylistic conventions." Anthropologist Clifford Geertz discusses the Yoruba convention of slashing the face of masks, a practice which Picasso adopts in this and other paintings. However, for the Yoruba, the slashes are symbolic as well as aesthetic:

Line of varying depth, direction, and length, sliced into their cheeks and left to scar over, serves as a means of lineage identification, personal allure, and status expression; and the terminology of the sculptor and of the cicatrix specialist--”cuts” distinguished form “slashes” and “digs” or “claws” from “splittings open”--parallel one another in exact precision.

In a stunning blow to Picasso's work Butler writes, "Any such significance is of course wholly absent from Picasso’s “African” art, which appropriates but does not translate."