![]() If the women peer at us, like in Manet’s Olympia of 1863, we, as viewers, have become the customers. The women now peer outward, beyond the confines of the picture plane that ordinarily protect the viewer’s anonymity. By removing these men, the image is no longer self-contained. ![]() If men are present, the prostitutes attend to them. Why? Well, to begin, we might imagine where the women focused their attention in the original composition. What is important is that Picasso decides to remove the men. Could it be that Picasso was expressing the ways that he saw these women? As objects of desire, yes, but also, with a knowledge of anatomy probably superior to many doctors. He understands how their bodies are constructed, etc. While the sailor represents pure lust, the student sees the women from a more analytic perspective. He is not there to look after the women’s health but he does see them with different eyes. The fictive sailor has been at sea for months, he is an obvious reference to pure sexual desire. Or, more exactly, how Picasso viewed these women. The (male) artist’s gazeĮach of these male figures was meant to symbolize an aspect of Picasso. He wore a brown suit and carried a textbook, he was meant to be a medical student. ![]() Another man originally entered from the left. He sits in uniform in the center of the composition before a small table laden with fruit, a traditional symbol of sexuality. In some there are two men in addition to the women. These studies depict different configurations. It was preceded by nearly one hundred sketches. (18.5 x 20.3 cm) (irregular) (Museum of Modern Art, New York)īecause the canvas is roughly handled, it is often thought to be a spontaneous creation, conceived directly. Pablo Picasso, Study for Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 7.5 x 8 in. Years later Picasso would anonymously return them. By the way, Picasso purchased, from Apollinaire’s secretary, two archaic Iberian heads that she had stolen from the Louvre! Some have suggested that they were taken at Picasso’s request. Instead of going back to the sensual myths of ancient Greece, Picasso is drawing on the real thing and doing so directly. In fact, Picasso has recently seen an exhibition of archaic (an ancient pre-classical style) Iberian (from Iberia–the land mass that makes up Spain and Portugal) sculpture at the Louvre. Her head is shown in perfect profile with large almond shaped eyes and a flat abstracted face. Her right arm juts down while her left arm seems dislocated (this arm is actually a vestige of a male figure that Picasso eventually removed). One of several historical sources that Picasso pillaged is archaic art, demonstrated very clearly by the left-most figure of the painting, who stands stiffly on legs that look awkwardly locked at the knee. While that analogy might be a little coarse, it is fair to say that he had an enormous creative appetite. Indeed, Picasso has been likened to a “creative vacuum cleaner,” sucking up every new idea that he came across. In fact, a number of artists stopped inviting him to their studio because he would so freely and successfully incorporate their ideas into his own work, often more successfully than the original artist. Picasso draws on many other sources to construct Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Compare the woman standing in the center of Picasso’s composition to the woman who stands with elbows raised at the extreme left of Matisse’s canvas: like a scholar citing a borrowed quotation, Picasso footnotes. But while Picasso clearly aims to “out do” Matisse, to take over as the most radical artist in Paris, he also acknowledges his debts. Matisse’s pleasure becomes Picasso’s apprehension. The bodies of Picasso’s women look dangerous as if they were formed of shards of broken glass. Picasso has replaced the graceful curves of Bonheur de Vivre with sharp, jagged, almost shattered forms. ![]() Gone too, is the sensuality that Matisse created. Instead, the artist chooses deeper tones befitting urban interior light. Picasso has also dispensed with Matisse’s clear, bright pigments. Here are five prostitutes from an actual brothel, located on a street named Avignon in the red-light district in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia in northern Spain-a street, by the way, which Picasso had frequented. No longer set in a classical past, Picasso’s image is clearly of our time. Like Matisse’s later Blue Nude (itself a response to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), the women fill the entire space and seem trapped within it. (Note, for example, the squatting figure at the lower right.) His space is interior, closed, and almost claustrophobic. In very sharp contrast, Picasso, intent of making a name for himself (rather like the young Manet and David), has radically compressed the space of his canvas and replaced sensual eroticism with a kind of aggressively crude pornography. ![]()
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