Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: A Revolutionary Masterpiece by Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
1907. Picasso.
Born in Malaga in 1881 and died in France in 1973, Pablo Picasso is the most influential pictorial genius of the twentieth century. With a very early vocation and extraordinary technical ability, Picasso, having spent his childhood and youth first in Malaga and then in La Coruña, decided to become a painter. For this, he went to Barcelona and then to Paris, where he would establish contact with Post-Impressionist trends. At the beginning of the century, influenced by a certain symbolism and expressionism, he painted humble characters with a sentimental and melancholic interpretation during the so-called Blue Period (named for the dominant tone of his paintings). Somewhat later, he introduced circus characters, puppeteers, and strolling players in the so-called Rose Period.
But Picasso’s great contribution would occur when, after intense preparations, he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, the true founding document of Cubism. The picture, despite being initially exhibited only in his studio, marked a before and after in the history of art.
Between 1909 and 1911, Picasso would jointly develop Analytical Cubism with Georges Braque. In this style, the canvas would feature numerous intersecting lines, as well as many small, flat tones of ochre, gray, and brown that make the resulting image an image of the infinite physical and intellectual perceptions one can take from an object.
By 1911, the call is initiated in Synthetic Cubism, in which Picasso and Braque begin to incorporate parts of texts and musical scores into their paintings. For Picasso, the words “Journal” (newspaper) or “Ma Jolie” (my pretty), by which he meant to refer to his lover, were other ways of referring to the represented. At this time, he introduced textures such as wallpaper, the grid of wicker chairs, or the wood of a guitar, sometimes with “frottage” (laying down the canvas and painting by rubbing on a textured surface to make its mark) or “collage” (adhering actual fragments of these elements to the surface of the canvas). The picture thus becomes a kind of compendium of perceptions in which matter, through painterly texture and attached elements, claims more presence, but in which both the process and the perception of the artistic image become an intellectual act.
Towards the end of the First World War, Picasso began a new phase called Classicism, in which he would regain perspective and the representation of volumes through traditional chiaroscuro, with rotund body shapes that allude to the classical tradition (from Greece to Poussin, through Masaccio), although these achievements alternate with pictures enrolled in Synthetic Cubism.
Around 1925, Picasso came into contact with the Surrealist group led by the poet André Breton. Picasso would move closer to the precepts of this movement, but without giving up anything of his distinctive personality.
The start of the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of Guernica would result not only in the realization of that masterpiece that is Guernica, but also in the growth of his political commitment, which led him to accept the post of honorary director of the Prado Museum during the Second Republic and to join the Communist Party in 1945.
Many critics have underestimated Picasso’s work after Guernica, which demonstrates considerable narrowness. Thus, in the 1950s, we still find Massacre in Korea, in which the reference to Goya’s The Third of May 1808 is obvious. Picasso also created a series in which he plays with Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers, Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and Velázquez’s Las Meninas (of which he would make 58 versions), as well as works that approach more contemporary trends in fashion (such as abstract expressionism), always maintaining his strong personality and demonstrating his incredible talent and capacity for continuous development.
In his later years, Picasso also devoted himself to ceramics and recorded and delivered highly experiential images that allude to his own physical and sexual decadence.
Throughout his career, Picasso also made some very remarkable sculptures, which, like his paintings, served as a starting point for much of the development of twentieth-century sculpture, from his first applications of Cubism to the sculptural form in the 1910s, such as his welded iron pieces that opened up new avenues in the relationship between form and space (Head of a Woman), or by reinterpreting the Dada Readymade (Bull’s Head).
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a painting on a large canvas painted by Picasso in 1907. In it, Picasso dumps all his knowledge of painting, with areas where the brushstrokes come together to provide masses of color, while we can also appreciate the journey of dense and loaded brushstrokes and lighter ones diluted by the painting’s surface.
The color range is quite limited and is dominated by the flesh tones of the figures, being brown, white, blue, and gray.
The image processing is absolutely groundbreaking, breaking the existing rules of representation since the Renaissance. Clearly, the mode of representing space according to the traditional frontal conical perspective is totally subverted by Picasso, as is the naturalistic representation of figures.
Picasso was aware that, contrary to what happens in perspective, our vision is not fixed but fluctuating, and thus, the image appears broken up into multiple geometric planes, which are merely the result of observations made from different viewpoints and at different times. Thus, the table is the pictorial embodiment of a process of intellectual reconstruction of the observed image. The result is a new mode of representation, a new image, a new truth (Picasso said that “art is a lie that makes us realize truth”). Although the illusion of depth disappears, volume appears emphatically, highlighted by these broken levels of the image.
The image shows some of the influences that shaped this giant step forward in painting: the art of African masks, with their formal simplifications and roundness ratio (which is evident in the faces of the two figures on the right); pre-classical art forms and Egyptian painting (the eye seen from the front in the shape of the left profile); and the attempt to represent volume by renouncing the chiaroscuro initiated by Cézanne.
The founding act of Cubism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the result of laborious work by Picasso, who made hundreds of sketches to fit all the concerns about the plastic that he was meditating on into this picture. If the topic seems classic—a group of female nudes that may refer to Rubens and Poussin—a certain deviation is present here because these are not nymphs or goddesses, but the prostitutes of a brothel on Avignon Street in Barcelona (they are what give the table its name), which can be more strongly linked with Manet (Olympia), Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec (Au Salon de la rue des Moulins). As mentioned, Picasso made numerous sketches to prepare what he knew would be a programmatic painting, questioning the inclusion of more characters in the image and its handling.
As already mentioned, this painting would mark a before and after in the history of art. It ushered in classic Cubism, and countless artists would be seduced by this new visual language. The avenues opened up by it would be explored and taken into account as a new benchmark in the evolution of artistic avant-garde movements and their successors.