Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Encyclopedia
He followed his success by developing into his Rose period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work. The Rose period depictions of acrobats, circus performers and theatrical characters are rendered in warmer, brighter colors and are far more hopeful and joyful in their depictions of the bohemian life in the Parisian avant-garde
and its environs. The Rose period produced two important large masterpieces: Family of Saltimbanques (1905), which recalls the work of Gustave Courbet
(1819–1877) and Édouard Manet
(1832–1883); and Boy Leading a Horse (1906), which recalls Cezanne's
Bather (1885–1887) and El Greco
's Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597–1599). While he already had a considerable following by the middle of 1906, Picasso enjoyed further success with his paintings of massive over-sized nude women, monumental sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin
and showed his interest in primitive (African, Micronesian
, Native American
) art. He began exhibiting his work in the galleries of Berthe Weill (1865–1951) and Ambroise Vollard
(1866–1939), quickly gaining a growing reputation and a following amongst the artistic community of Montparnasse
.
Picasso became a favorite of the American art collectors Leo Stein
and his sister Gertrude
around 1905. The Steins' older brother Michael and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein
.
Gertrude Stein began acquiring Picasso's drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris. At one of her gatherings in 1905 he met Henri Matisse
(1869–1954), who was to become in those days his chief rival, although in later years a close friend. The Steins introduced Picasso to Claribel Cone
(1864–1929), and her sister Etta Cone (1870–1949), also American art collectors, who began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy, and Michael and Sarah Stein became important patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.
of 1905 brought notoriety and attention to the works of Henri Matisse and the Les Fauves
group. The latter gained their name after critic Louis Vauxcelles
described their work with the phrase "Donatello
au milieu des fauves!" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance
-type sculpture that shared the room with them. Henri Rousseau
(1844–1910), an artist that Picasso knew and admired and who was not a Fauve, had his large jungle
scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope
also hanging near the works by Matisse and which may have had an influence on the particular sarcastic
term used in the press. Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaper Gil Blas
, and passed into popular usage.
Although the pictures were widely derided—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", declared the critic Camille Mauclair
(1872–1945)—they also attracted some favorable attention. The painting that was singled out for the most attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat
; the purchase of this work by Gertrude
and Leo Stein
had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.
Matisse's notoriety and preeminence as the leader of the new movement in modern painting continued to build throughout 1906 and 1907, and Matisse attracted a following of artists including Georges Braque
(1880–1963), André Derain
(1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck
(1876–1958). Picasso's work had passed through his Blue period and his Rose period and while he had a considerable following his reputation was tame in comparison to his rival Matisse. To make matters worse Matisse shocked the French public again at the 1907 Société des Artistes Indépendants
when he exhibited his painting Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)
, completed in early 1907. The Blue Nude was one of the paintings that would later create an international sensation at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City.
By the spring of 1907 when he began to paint Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, until its completion later in the year, Picasso was vying with Matisse for the preeminent position of being the perceived new leader of Modern painting. Upon its completion the shock and the impact of the painting propelled Picasso into the center of controversy and all but knocked Matisse and Fauvism off the map, virtually ending the movement by the following year. In 1907 Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). Kahnweiler was a German art historian, art collector who became one of the premier French art dealer
s of the 20th century. He became prominent in Paris beginning in 1907 for being among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, and especially his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized as one of the important leaders of Modern art alongside Henri Matisse who had been the undisputed leader of Fauvism
and who was more than ten years older than he was and his contemporaries the Fauvist André Derain
and the former Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque
.
In his 1992 essay Reflections on Matisse, the art critic Hilton Kramer
wrote,
Kramer goes on to say,
(1541–1614). At the time El Greco was largely obscure and under-appreciated. Picasso's friend Ignacio Zuloaga
(1870–1945) acquired El Greco's masterpiece, the Opening of the Fifth Seal
, in 1897 for 1000 pesetas. While Picasso was working on , he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga
in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal. The relation between and the Opening of the Fifth Seal was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities
and the relationship between the motifs
and visually identifying qualities of both works were analysed.
El Greco's Apocalyptic Vision of Saint John which Picasso studied over and over in Zuloaga's house inspired not only the size, format, and composition of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon but it inspired its apocalyptic power. Later, speaking of the work to Dor de la Souchère in Antibes, Picasso said: "In any case, only the execution counts. From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Spanish origin and that I invented Cubism. We must look for the Spanish influence in Cézanne. Things themselves necessitate it, the influence of El Greco, a Venetian painter, on him. But his structure is Cubist."
The relationship of the painting to other group portraits in the Western tradition, such as Diana and Callisto
by Titian
(1488–1576), and the same subject by Rubens
(1577–1640), in the Prado, has also been discussed.
(1848–1903) and Paul Cézanne
(1839–1906) were accorded major posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne
in Paris in 1903, 1906 and 1907 respectively, and both were important influences on Picasso and instrumental to his creation of Les Demoiselles. According to the English art historian, collector and author of The Cubist Epoch, Douglas Cooper
, both of those artists were particularly influential to the formation of Cubism
and especially important to the paintings of Picasso during 1906 and 1907. Cooper goes on to say however Les Demoiselles is often erroneously referred to as the first cubist painting. He explains,
Although not well known to the general public prior to 1906, Cézanne's reputation was highly regarded in avant-garde
circles, as evidenced by Ambroise Vollard
's interest in showing and collecting his work, and by Leo Stein
's interest. Picasso was familiar with much of Cézanne's work that he saw at Vollard's gallery and at the Stein's. After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne
greatly impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism
. The 1907 Cézanne exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cézanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris.
Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism in Paul Cézanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso
, Braque
, Gris
and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.
Picasso drew each of the figures in Les Demoiselles differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right is rendered with heavy paint. Composed of sharp geometric shapes, her head is the most strictly cubist of all five. The heads of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian
figure to its current state.
Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, the style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.
and Native American
art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin
, Henri Matisse
and Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those cultures. Around 1906, Picasso, Matisse, Derain
and other artists in Paris had acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture
, African art
and tribal masks
, in part because of the compelling works of Paul Gauguin
that had suddenly achieved center stage in the avant-garde circles of Paris. Gauguin's powerful posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne
in Paris in 1903 and an even larger one in 1906 had a stunning and powerful influence on Picasso's paintings.
In the autumn of 1906, Picasso followed his previous successes with paintings of oversized nude women, and monumental sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive art. Pablo Picasso's paintings of massive figures from 1906 were directly influenced by Gauguin's sculpture, painting and his writing as well. The savage power evoked by Gauguin's work lead directly to Les Demoiselles in 1907.
According to Gauguin biographer David Sweetman, Pablo Picasso as early as 1902 became an aficionado of Gauguin's work when he met and befriended the expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio (1875–1940), in Paris. Durrio had several of Gauguin's works on hand because he was a friend of Gauguin's and an unpaid agent of his work. Durrio tried to help his poverty-stricken friend in Tahiti by promoting his ouevre in Paris. After they met Durrio introduced Picasso to Gauguin's stoneware, helped Picasso make some ceramic pieces and gave Picasso a first La Plume edition of Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin.
Concerning Gauguin's impact on Picasso, art historian John Richardson
wrote,
Both David Sweetman and John Richardson point to the Gauguin's Oviri
(literally meaning 'savage'), a gruesome phallic representation of the Tahitian goddess of life and death intended for Gauguin's grave. First exhibited in the 1906 retrospective, it was likely a direct influence on Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes, "Gauguin's statue Oviri, which was prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso's interest in both sculpture and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in print-making, though it was the element of the primitive in all of them which most conditioned the direction that Picasso's art would take. This interest would culminate in the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."
According to Richardson,
, its impact was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. At first, only Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work. While many were shocked and some outraged, influential people such as Georges Braque
and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were supportive. Soon after the late summer of 1907, Picasso and his long-time lover Fernande Olivier (1881–1966) had a parting of the ways. The re-painting of the two heads on the far right of Les Demoiselles fueled speculation that it was an indication of the split between Picasso and Olivier. Although they later reunited for a period, the relationship ended in 1912.
Les Demoiselles would not be exhibited until 1916, and not widely recognized as a revolutionary achievement until the early 1920s, when André Breton
(1896–1966) published the work. Richardson goes on to say that Henri Matisse
was fighting mad upon seeing the Demoiselles at Picasso's studio. He let it be known that he regarded the painting as an attempt to ridicule the modern movement; he was outraged to find his sensational Blue Nude
, not to speak of Bonheur de vivre
, overtaken by Picasso's "hideous" whores. He vowed to get even and make Picasso beg for mercy. Just as the Bonheur de vivre had fueled Picasso's competitiveness, Les Demoiselles now fueled Matisse's.
Among Picasso's closed circle of friends and colleagues there was a mixture of opinions about Les Demoiselles. Georges Braque
and André Derain
were both initially troubled by it although they were supportive of Picasso. According to William Rubin, two of Picasso's friends, the art critic André Salmon
and the painter Ardengo Soffici
(1879–1964), were enthusiastic about it while Guillaume Apollinaire
(1880–1918) wasn't. Both the art dealer-collector Wilhelm Uhde
(1874–1947), and art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were more enthusiastic about the painting however. In July 1916, Les Demoiselles was exhibited to the public for the first time when it was included in the Salon d'Antin an exhibition organized by André Salmon. Picasso referred to the painting as his Brothel painting calling it Le Bordel d'Avignon but André Salmon retitled it Les Demoiselles d'Avignon so as to lessen its scandalous impact on the public. Picasso never liked the title, however, preferring "las chicas de Avignon," but Salmon's title stuck.
(1897–1982), he sold it to designer Jacques Doucet
(1853–1929), for 25,000 francs. John Richardson quotes Breton in a letter to Doucet about Les Demoiselles writing:
in his will. However after Doucet died in 1929 he did not leave the painting to the Louvre in his will, and it was sold like most of Doucet's collection through private dealers. In November 1937 the Jacques Seligman & Co.
art gallery in New York City held an exhibition titled "20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903–1923" that included Les Demoiselles. The Museum of Modern Art
acquired the painting for $24,000. The museum raised $18,000 toward the purchase price by selling a Degas
painting and the rest came from donations from the co-owners of the gallery Germain Seligman
and Cesar de Hauke.
The Museum of Modern Art
in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition on November 15, 1939 that remained on view until January 7, 1940. The exhibition entitled: Picasso:40 Years of His Art, was organized by Alfred H. Barr (1902–1981), in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago
. The exhibition contained 344 works, including the major and then newly painted Guernica
and its studies, as well as Les Demoiselles.
figure to its current state. She also seems to have been drawn from two different perspectives at once, creating a confusing, twisted figure. The woman above her is rather manly, with a dark face and square chest. The whole picture is in a two-dimensional style, with an abandoned perspective.
Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account
for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, the style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.
Art critic John Berger
, in his controversial 1965 biography The Success and Failure of Picasso interprets Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the provocation that led to Cubism:
In 1972, art critic Leo Steinberg
in his essay The Philosophical Brothel posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches—which had been ignored by most critics—he argued that far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer. He notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare.
The earliest sketches feature two men inside the brothel; a sailor and a medical student (who was often depicted holding either a book or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a memento mori
, a reminder of death). A trace of their presence at a table in the center remains: the jutting edge of a table near the bottom of the canvas. The viewer, Steinberg argues, has come to replace the sitting men, forced to confront the gaze of prostitutes head on, invoking readings far more complex than a simple allegory or the autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso's own history with women. A world of meanings then becomes possible, suggesting the work as a meditation on the danger of sex, the "trauma of the gaze" (to use a phrase of Rosalind Krauss's invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large.
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According to Steinberg, the reversed gaze, that is, the fact that the figures look directly at the viewer, as well as the idea of the self-possessed woman, no longer there solely for the pleasure of the male gaze, may be traced back to Manet
's "Olympia
" of 1863. William Rubin (1927–2006), the former Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA
wrote that "Steinberg was the first writer to come to grips with the sexual subject of the Demoiselles."
A few years after writing The Philosophical Brothel, Steinberg wrote further about the revolutionary nature of Les Demoiselles:
At the end of the first volume of his (so far) three volume Picasso biography: A Life Of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881-1906, John Richardson
comments on Les Demoiselles. Richardson says:
, and that the painting was created following a series of brothel visits by Picasso, who was then temporarily separated from his mistress Fernande Olivier. Rubin interprets the painting as expressing the artist's atheism
, his willingness to risk anarchy for freedom, his fear of disease and illness, and, most forcefully, 'his deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body, which existed side by side with his craving for and ecstatic idealization of it.'
The stylistic sources for the heads of the women have been much discussed, in particular the influence of African tribal masks
, art of Oceania
, and pre-Roman Iberian sculptures. The rounded contours of the features of the three women to the left can be related to Iberian sculpture
, but not obviously the fragmented planes of the two on the right, which indeed seem influenced by African masks. Picasso emphatically denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art? Never heard of it!" (L'art nègre? Connais pas!), asserting instead that the primitivism in his work during, before and after the painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, from spring 1906 through the spring of 1907 was primarily influenced by Iberian sculpture. Some Iberian relief
s from Osuna
, then only recently excavated, were on display in the Louvre from 1904. Archaic Greek sculpture has also been claimed as an influence.
The influence of Iberian sculpture became an issue in 1939, when Alfred Barr
claimed that the primitivism of the Demoiselles derived from the art of the Ivory Coast and the French Congo. Picasso insisted that the editor of his "catalogue raissonne", Christian Zervos
, publish a disclaimer: the 'Demoiselles,' he said, owed nothing to African art
, everything to the reliefs from Osuna that he had seen in the Louvre a year or so before. Nonetheless, he is known to have seen African tribal masks while working on the painting, during a visit to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero
with Andre Malraux
in June 1907, about which he later said "When I went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed, I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren't like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things." Maurice de Vlaminck
is often credited with introducing Picasso to African sculpture of Fang
extraction in 1904.
Picasso biographer John Richardson recounts in A Life Of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907-1916, art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's recollection of his first visit to Picasso's studio in July 1907. Kahnweiler remembers seeing dusty stacks of canvases in Picasso's studio and African sculptures of majestic severity. Richardson comments: so much for Picasso's story that he was not yet aware of Tribal art
. A photograph of Picasso in his studio surrounded by African sculptures
c.1908, is found on page 27 of that same volume.
published a two-page article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing it as the "most influential work of art of the last 100 years".
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
and its environs. The Rose period produced two important large masterpieces: Family of Saltimbanques (1905), which recalls the work of Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...
(1819–1877) and Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
(1832–1883); and Boy Leading a Horse (1906), which recalls Cezanne's
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
Bather (1885–1887) and El Greco
El Greco
El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...
's Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597–1599). While he already had a considerable following by the middle of 1906, Picasso enjoyed further success with his paintings of massive over-sized nude women, monumental sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
and showed his interest in primitive (African, Micronesian
Micronesian
Micronesian may refer to:* Something of, from, or related to Micronesia, a subregion of Oceania composed of hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean...
, Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
) art. He began exhibiting his work in the galleries of Berthe Weill (1865–1951) and Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard is regarded as one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century...
(1866–1939), quickly gaining a growing reputation and a following amongst the artistic community of Montparnasse
Montparnasse
Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail...
.
Picasso became a favorite of the American art collectors Leo Stein
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
and his sister Gertrude
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
around 1905. The Steins' older brother Michael and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein
Allan Stein
Allan Stein is a 1999 novel by Matthew Stadler. Its epigraph is a quotation from writer Gertrude Stein: "What is the use of being a boy if you grow up to become a man, what is the use?"...
.
Gertrude Stein began acquiring Picasso's drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris. At one of her gatherings in 1905 he met Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
(1869–1954), who was to become in those days his chief rival, although in later years a close friend. The Steins introduced Picasso to Claribel Cone
Claribel Cone
The Cone sisters were Claribel Cone and Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland. Together they gathered one of the finest collections of modern French art in the United States. They were wealthy socialites during the Gilded Age.-Early life:Their parents were Herman Cone and Helen Cone, who were...
(1864–1929), and her sister Etta Cone (1870–1949), also American art collectors, who began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy, and Michael and Sarah Stein became important patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.
Rivalry with Matisse
The Salon d'AutomneSalon d'Automne
In 1903, the first Salon d'Automne was organized by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Angele Delasalle and Albert Marquet as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon...
of 1905 brought notoriety and attention to the works of Henri Matisse and the Les Fauves
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
group. The latter gained their name after critic Louis Vauxcelles
Louis Vauxcelles
Louis Vauxcelles was an influential French art critic. He is credited with coining the terms Fauvism , and Cubism ....
described their work with the phrase "Donatello
Donatello
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi , also known as Donatello, was an early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence...
au milieu des fauves!" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"), contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
-type sculpture that shared the room with them. Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector...
(1844–1910), an artist that Picasso knew and admired and who was not a Fauve, had his large jungle
Jungle
A Jungle is an area of land in the tropics overgrown with dense vegetation.The word jungle originates from the Sanskrit word jangala which referred to uncultivated land. Although the Sanskrit word refers to "dry land", it has been suggested that an Anglo-Indian interpretation led to its...
scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope is a large oil-on-canvas painting created by Henri Rousseau in 1905...
also hanging near the works by Matisse and which may have had an influence on the particular sarcastic
Sarcasm
Sarcasm is “a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter jibe or taunt.” Though irony and understatement is usually the immediate context, most authorities distinguish sarcasm from irony; however, others argue that sarcasm may or often does involve irony or employs...
term used in the press. Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaper Gil Blas
Gil Blas (periodical)
Gil Blas was a Parisian literary periodical founded by Augustin-Alexandre Dumont in November 1879. It was in publication until 1914...
, and passed into popular usage.
Camille Mauclair
Séverin Faust , better known by his pseudonym Camille Mauclair, was a French poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, and art critic....
(1872–1945)—they also attracted some favorable attention. The painting that was singled out for the most attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat
Woman with a Hat
Woman with a Hat is a painting by Henri Matisse from 1905.It is believed that the woman in the painting was Matisse's wife, Amelie....
; the purchase of this work by Gertrude
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
and Leo Stein
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
(1880–1963), André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
(1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.-Life:Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris to a family...
(1876–1958). Picasso's work had passed through his Blue period and his Rose period and while he had a considerable following his reputation was tame in comparison to his rival Matisse. To make matters worse Matisse shocked the French public again at the 1907 Société des Artistes Indépendants
Société des Artistes Indépendants
—The Société des Artistes Indépendants formed in Paris in summer 1884 choosing the device "No jury nor awards" . Albert Dubois-Pillet, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac were among its founders...
when he exhibited his painting Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)
Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)
Blue Nude is an early 1907 oil painting by Henri Matisse. It is located at the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the Cone Collection....
, completed in early 1907. The Blue Nude was one of the paintings that would later create an international sensation at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City.
By the spring of 1907 when he began to paint Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, until its completion later in the year, Picasso was vying with Matisse for the preeminent position of being the perceived new leader of Modern painting. Upon its completion the shock and the impact of the painting propelled Picasso into the center of controversy and all but knocked Matisse and Fauvism off the map, virtually ending the movement by the following year. In 1907 Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). Kahnweiler was a German art historian, art collector who became one of the premier French art dealer
Art dealer
An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art. Art dealers' professional associations serve to set high standards for accreditation or membership and to support art exhibitions and shows.-Role:...
s of the 20th century. He became prominent in Paris beginning in 1907 for being among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, and especially his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized as one of the important leaders of Modern art alongside Henri Matisse who had been the undisputed leader of Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...
and who was more than ten years older than he was and his contemporaries the Fauvist André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
and the former Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
.
In his 1992 essay Reflections on Matisse, the art critic Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
wrote,
- After the impact of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, however, Matisse was never again mistaken for an avant-garde incendiary. With the bizarre painting that appalled and electrified the cognoscenti, which understood the Les Demoiselles was at once a response to Matisse's Le bonheur de vivreLe bonheur de vivreLe bonheur de vivre , is a painting by Henri Matisse. In the central background of the piece is a group of figures that is similar to the group depicted in his painting The Dance ....
(1905-1906) and an assault upon the tradition from which it derived, Picasso effectively appropriated the role of avant-garde wild beast—a role that, as far as public opinion was concerned, he was never to relinquish.
Kramer goes on to say,
- Whereas Matisse had drawn upon a long tradition of European painting—from GiorgioneGiorgioneGiorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...
, PoussinPoussinPoussin refers to:*Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin Belgian mathematician*Charles-Louis-Joseph-Xavier de la Vallée-Poussin Belgian geologist and mineralogist, father of Charles Jean*Nicolas Poussin , French painter...
, and Watteau to IngresIngresIngres Database is a commercially supported, open-source SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications...
, Cézanne, and Gauguin—to create a modern version of a pastoral paradise in Le bonheur de vivreLe bonheur de vivreLe bonheur de vivre , is a painting by Henri Matisse. In the central background of the piece is a group of figures that is similar to the group depicted in his painting The Dance ....
, Picasso had turned to an alien tradition of primitive art to create in Les Demoiselles a netherworld of strange gods and violent emotions. As between the mythological nymphs of Le bonheur de vivre and the grotesque effigies of Les Demoiselles, there was no question as to which was the more shocking or more intended to be shocking. Picasso had unleashed a vein of feeling that was to have immense consequences for the art and culture of the modern era while Matisse's ambition came to seem, as he said in his Notes of a Painter, more limited—limited that is, to the realm of aesthetic pleasure. There was thus opened up, in the very first decade of the century and in the work of its two greatest artists, the chasm that has continued to divide the art of the modern era down to our own time."
Influence of El Greco
In 1907, when Picasso began to work on Les Demoiselles, one of the old master painters he greatly admired was El GrecoEl Greco
El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...
(1541–1614). At the time El Greco was largely obscure and under-appreciated. Picasso's friend Ignacio Zuloaga
Ignacio Zuloaga
Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta was a Basque Spanish painter, born in Eibar, near the monastery of Loyola. He was the son of metalworker and damascener Plácido Zuloaga and grandson of the organizer and director of the royal armoury in Madrid.-Biography:In his youth, he drew and worked in his father's...
(1870–1945) acquired El Greco's masterpiece, the Opening of the Fifth Seal
Opening of the Fifth Seal
The Opening of the Fifth Seal was painted in the last years of El Greco's life for a side-altar of the church of Saint John the Baptist outside the walls of Toledo. Before 1908 El Greco's painting was referred to as Profane Love...
, in 1897 for 1000 pesetas. While Picasso was working on , he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga
Ignacio Zuloaga
Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta was a Basque Spanish painter, born in Eibar, near the monastery of Loyola. He was the son of metalworker and damascener Plácido Zuloaga and grandson of the organizer and director of the royal armoury in Madrid.-Biography:In his youth, he drew and worked in his father's...
in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal. The relation between and the Opening of the Fifth Seal was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities
Painting style
In the visual arts, style is a "...distinctive manner which permits the grouping of works into related categories." or "...any distinctive, and therefore recognizable, way in which an act is performed or an artifact made or ought to be performed and made." It refers to the visual appearance of a...
and the relationship between the motifs
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
and visually identifying qualities of both works were analysed.
El Greco's Apocalyptic Vision of Saint John which Picasso studied over and over in Zuloaga's house inspired not only the size, format, and composition of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon but it inspired its apocalyptic power. Later, speaking of the work to Dor de la Souchère in Antibes, Picasso said: "In any case, only the execution counts. From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Spanish origin and that I invented Cubism. We must look for the Spanish influence in Cézanne. Things themselves necessitate it, the influence of El Greco, a Venetian painter, on him. But his structure is Cubist."
The relationship of the painting to other group portraits in the Western tradition, such as Diana and Callisto
Diana and Callisto
Diana and Callisto is a painting of 1556–59 by the Venetian artist Titian. It is currently part of the Bridgewater or Sutherland Loan, on display at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, with a later version by Titian and his workshop in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna...
by Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
(1488–1576), and the same subject by Rubens
Rubens
Rubens is often used to refer to Peter Paul Rubens , the Flemish artist.Rubens may also refer to:- People :Family name* Paul Rubens Rubens is often used to refer to Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the Flemish artist.Rubens may also refer to:- People :Family name* Paul Rubens (composer) Rubens is...
(1577–1640), in the Prado, has also been discussed.
Cézanne and Cubism
Both Paul GauguinPaul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
(1848–1903) and Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
(1839–1906) were accorded major posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne
Salon d'Automne
In 1903, the first Salon d'Automne was organized by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Angele Delasalle and Albert Marquet as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon...
in Paris in 1903, 1906 and 1907 respectively, and both were important influences on Picasso and instrumental to his creation of Les Demoiselles. According to the English art historian, collector and author of The Cubist Epoch, Douglas Cooper
Douglas Cooper (art historian)
Douglas Cooper, who also published as Douglas Lord was a British art historian, art critic and art collector. He mainly collected Cubist works.- Family background :...
, both of those artists were particularly influential to the formation of Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
and especially important to the paintings of Picasso during 1906 and 1907. Cooper goes on to say however Les Demoiselles is often erroneously referred to as the first cubist painting. He explains,
- The Demoiselles is generally referred to as the first Cubist picture. This is an exaggeration, for although it was a major first step towards Cubism it is not yet Cubist. The disruptive, expressionist element in it is even contrary to the spirit of Cubism, which looked at the world in a detached, realistic spirit. Nevertheless, the Demoiselles is the logical picture to take as the starting point for Cubism, because it marks the birth of a new pictorial idiom, because in it Picasso violently overturned established conventions and because all that followed grew out of it.
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
circles, as evidenced by Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard
Ambroise Vollard is regarded as one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art at the beginning of the twentieth century...
's interest in showing and collecting his work, and by Leo Stein
Leo Stein
Leo Stein was an American art collector and critic. He was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the older brother of Gertrude Stein. He became an influential promoter of 20th-century paintings. Beginning in 1892, he studied at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two years. The...
's interest. Picasso was familiar with much of Cézanne's work that he saw at Vollard's gallery and at the Stein's. After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne
Salon d'Automne
In 1903, the first Salon d'Automne was organized by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Angele Delasalle and Albert Marquet as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon...
greatly impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
. The 1907 Cézanne exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cézanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris.
Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism in Paul Cézanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
, Gris
Juan Gris
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...
and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.
Picasso drew each of the figures in Les Demoiselles differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right is rendered with heavy paint. Composed of sharp geometric shapes, her head is the most strictly cubist of all five. The heads of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian
Iberians
The Iberians were a set of peoples that Greek and Roman sources identified with that name in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian peninsula at least from the 6th century BC...
figure to its current state.
Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, the style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.
Gauguin and Primitivism
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, MicronesianMicronesian
Micronesian may refer to:* Something of, from, or related to Micronesia, a subregion of Oceania composed of hundreds of small islands in the Pacific Ocean...
and Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
, Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
and Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those cultures. Around 1906, Picasso, Matisse, Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
and other artists in Paris had acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture
Iberian sculpture
Iberian sculpture, a subset of Iberian art, describes the various sculptural styles developed by the Iberians from the Bronze age up to the Roman conquest...
, African art
African art
African art constitutes one of the most diverse legacies on earth. Though many casual observers tend to generalize "traditional" African art, the continent is full of people, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual special culture. The definition also includes the art of the African...
and tribal masks
African tribal masks
Ritual and ceremonial masks are an essential feature of the traditional culture and art of the peoples of Subsaharan and West Africa. While the specific implications associated to ritual masks widely vary in different cultures, some traits are common to most African cultures: for example, masks...
, in part because of the compelling works of Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
that had suddenly achieved center stage in the avant-garde circles of Paris. Gauguin's powerful posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne
Salon d'Automne
In 1903, the first Salon d'Automne was organized by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Angele Delasalle and Albert Marquet as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon...
in Paris in 1903 and an even larger one in 1906 had a stunning and powerful influence on Picasso's paintings.
According to Gauguin biographer David Sweetman, Pablo Picasso as early as 1902 became an aficionado of Gauguin's work when he met and befriended the expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio (1875–1940), in Paris. Durrio had several of Gauguin's works on hand because he was a friend of Gauguin's and an unpaid agent of his work. Durrio tried to help his poverty-stricken friend in Tahiti by promoting his ouevre in Paris. After they met Durrio introduced Picasso to Gauguin's stoneware, helped Picasso make some ceramic pieces and gave Picasso a first La Plume edition of Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin.
Concerning Gauguin's impact on Picasso, art historian John Richardson
John Richardson (art historian)
John Richardson is a British art historian and Picasso biographer.-Life and work:John Patrick Richardson was born as the elder son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, D.S.O., K.C.B., Quarter-Master General in the Boer War, and founder of London and the British Empire's Army & Navy Stores...
wrote,
- "The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin's work left Picasso more than ever in this artist's thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the most disparate types of art—not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths, and much else besides—could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark gods (not necessarily Tahitian ones) and tapping a new source of divine energy. If in later years Picasso played down his debt to Gauguin, there is no doubt that between 1905 and 1907 he felt a very close kinship with this other Paul, who prided himself on Spanish genes inherited from his Peruvian grandmother. Had not Picasso signed himself 'Paul' in Gauguin's honor."
Oviri (Gauguin)
Oviri is a stoneware ceramic sculpture created from partially glazed stoneware by the French artist Paul Gauguin in the winter of 1894/95. The work depicts the Goddess Oviri, a Tahitian deity of death and mourning, whose name translates as "savage" or "wild"...
(literally meaning 'savage'), a gruesome phallic representation of the Tahitian goddess of life and death intended for Gauguin's grave. First exhibited in the 1906 retrospective, it was likely a direct influence on Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes, "Gauguin's statue Oviri, which was prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso's interest in both sculpture and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in print-making, though it was the element of the primitive in all of them which most conditioned the direction that Picasso's art would take. This interest would culminate in the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."
According to Richardson,
- "Picasso's interest in stonewareStonewareStoneware is a vitreous or semi-vitreous ceramic ware with a fine texture. Stoneware is made from clay that is then fired in a kiln, whether by an artisan to make homeware, or in an industrial kiln for mass-produced or specialty products...
was further stimulated by the examples he saw at the 1906 Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d'AutomneSalon d'AutomneIn 1903, the first Salon d'Automne was organized by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Angele Delasalle and Albert Marquet as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon...
. The most disturbing of those ceramics (one that Picasso might have already seen at Vollard's) was the gruesome Oviri. Until 1987, when the Musée d'OrsayMusée d'OrsayThe Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...
acquired this little-known work (exhibited only once since 1906) it had never been recognized as the masterpiece it is, let alone recognized for its relevance to the works leading up to the Demoiselles. Although just under 30 inches high , Oviri has an awesome presence, as befits a monument intended for Gauguin's grave. Picasso was very struck by Oviri. 50 years later he was delighted when [Douglas] Cooper and I told him that we had come upon this sculpture in a collection that also included the original plaster of his cubist head. Has it been a revelation, like Iberian sculptureIberiansThe Iberians were a set of peoples that Greek and Roman sources identified with that name in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian peninsula at least from the 6th century BC...
? Picasso's shrug was grudgingly affirmative. He was always loath to admit Gauguin's role in setting him on the road to primitivism."
Impact
Although Les Demoiselles had an enormous and profound influence on Modern artModern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
, its impact was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. At first, only Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work. While many were shocked and some outraged, influential people such as Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were supportive. Soon after the late summer of 1907, Picasso and his long-time lover Fernande Olivier (1881–1966) had a parting of the ways. The re-painting of the two heads on the far right of Les Demoiselles fueled speculation that it was an indication of the split between Picasso and Olivier. Although they later reunited for a period, the relationship ended in 1912.
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
(1896–1966) published the work. Richardson goes on to say that Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
was fighting mad upon seeing the Demoiselles at Picasso's studio. He let it be known that he regarded the painting as an attempt to ridicule the modern movement; he was outraged to find his sensational Blue Nude
Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)
Blue Nude is an early 1907 oil painting by Henri Matisse. It is located at the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the Cone Collection....
, not to speak of Bonheur de vivre
Le bonheur de vivre
Le bonheur de vivre , is a painting by Henri Matisse. In the central background of the piece is a group of figures that is similar to the group depicted in his painting The Dance ....
, overtaken by Picasso's "hideous" whores. He vowed to get even and make Picasso beg for mercy. Just as the Bonheur de vivre had fueled Picasso's competitiveness, Les Demoiselles now fueled Matisse's.
Among Picasso's closed circle of friends and colleagues there was a mixture of opinions about Les Demoiselles. Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
and André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
were both initially troubled by it although they were supportive of Picasso. According to William Rubin, two of Picasso's friends, the art critic André Salmon
André Salmon
André Salmon was a French poet, art critic and writer. He was one of the defenders of cubism, with Guillaume Apollinaire and Maurice Raynal.-Biography:Andre Salmon was born in Paris...
and the painter Ardengo Soffici
Ardengo Soffici
Ardengo Soffici , was an Italian writer, painter and Fascist intellectual.-Life:Soffici was born in Rignano sull'Arno, near Florence...
(1879–1964), were enthusiastic about it while Guillaume Apollinaire
Guillaume Apollinaire
Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
(1880–1918) wasn't. Both the art dealer-collector Wilhelm Uhde
Wilhelm Uhde
Wilhelm Uhde was a German art collector, dealer, author and critic, an early collector of modernist painting, and a significant figure in the career of Henri Rousseau.-Biography:...
(1874–1947), and art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were more enthusiastic about the painting however. In July 1916, Les Demoiselles was exhibited to the public for the first time when it was included in the Salon d'Antin an exhibition organized by André Salmon. Picasso referred to the painting as his Brothel painting calling it Le Bordel d'Avignon but André Salmon retitled it Les Demoiselles d'Avignon so as to lessen its scandalous impact on the public. Picasso never liked the title, however, preferring "las chicas de Avignon," but Salmon's title stuck.
Public view
Afterwards, the painting was rolled up and remained with Picasso until 1924 when, with urging and help from Breton and Louis AragonLouis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
(1897–1982), he sold it to designer Jacques Doucet
Jacques Doucet (fashion designer)
Jacques Doucet was a French fashion designer, known for his elegant dresses, made with flimsy translucent materials in superimposing pastel colors....
(1853–1929), for 25,000 francs. John Richardson quotes Breton in a letter to Doucet about Les Demoiselles writing:
through it one penetrates right into the core of Picasso's laboratory and because it is the crux of the drama, the center of all the conflicts that Picasso has given rise to and that will last forever....It is a work which to my mind transcends painting; it is the theater of everything that has happened in the last 50 years.A few months after the purchase Doucet had the painting appraised at between 250,000 and 300,000 francs. Richardson speculates that Picasso, who by 1924 was on the top of the art world and didn't need to sell the painting to Doucet, did so and at that low price because Doucet promised Les Demoiselles would go to the Louvre
Louvre
The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
in his will. However after Doucet died in 1929 he did not leave the painting to the Louvre in his will, and it was sold like most of Doucet's collection through private dealers. In November 1937 the Jacques Seligman & Co.
Jacques Seligmann & Company
Jacques Seligmann & Co. was a French and American art dealer and gallery specializing in decorative art and antiques. It is considered one of the foremost dealers and galleries in fostering appreciation for the collecting of contemporary European art. Many pieces purchased through Jacques Seligmann...
art gallery in New York City held an exhibition titled "20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903–1923" that included Les Demoiselles. The Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
acquired the painting for $24,000. The museum raised $18,000 toward the purchase price by selling a Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
painting and the rest came from donations from the co-owners of the gallery Germain Seligman
Germain Seligman
Germain Seligman was a successful art dealer, collector, and art historian. From 1924, Seligman headed the Paris and New York offices of Jacques Seligmann & Cie., a prominent art dealership...
and Cesar de Hauke.
The Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition on November 15, 1939 that remained on view until January 7, 1940. The exhibition entitled: Picasso:40 Years of His Art, was organized by Alfred H. Barr (1902–1981), in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
. The exhibition contained 344 works, including the major and then newly painted Guernica
Guernica (painting)
Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso. It was created in response to the bombing of Guernica, Basque Country, by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces, on 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War...
and its studies, as well as Les Demoiselles.
Interpretation
Picasso drew each figure differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right has heavy paint application throughout. Her head is the most cubist of all five, featuring sharp geometric shapes. The curtain seems to blend partially into her body. The cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an IberianIberians
The Iberians were a set of peoples that Greek and Roman sources identified with that name in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian peninsula at least from the 6th century BC...
figure to its current state. She also seems to have been drawn from two different perspectives at once, creating a confusing, twisted figure. The woman above her is rather manly, with a dark face and square chest. The whole picture is in a two-dimensional style, with an abandoned perspective.
Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account
for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, the style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.
Art critic John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
, in his controversial 1965 biography The Success and Failure of Picasso interprets Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the provocation that led to Cubism:
- Blunted by the insolence of so much recent art, we probably tend to underestimate the brutality of the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. All his friends who saw it in his studio were at first shocked by it. And it was meant to shock…
- A brothel may not in itself be shocking. But women painted without charm or sadness, without irony or social comment, women painted like the palings of a stockade through eyes that look out as it at death – that is shocking. And equally the method of painting. Picasso himself has said that he was influenced at the time by archaic Spanish (Iberian) sculpture. He was also influenced – particularly in the two heads at the right – by African masks…here it seems that Picasso’s quotations are simple, direct, and emotional. He is not in the least concerned with formal problems. The dislocations in this picture are the result of aggression, not aesthetics; it is the near you can get in a painting to an outrage…
- I emphasize the violent and iconoclastic aspect of this painting because it is usually enshrined as the great formal exercise which was the starting point of Cubism. It was the starting point of Cubism, in so far as it prompted Braque to begin painting at the end of the year his own far more formal answer to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon…yet if he had been left to himself, this picture would never have led Picasso to Cubism or to any way of painting remotely resembling it…It has nothing to with that twentieth-century vision of the future which was the essence of Cubism.
- Yet it did provoke the beginning of the great period of exception in Picasso’s life. Nobody can know exactly how the change began inside Picasso. We can only note the results. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, unlike any previous painting by Picasso, offers no evidence of skill. On the contrary, it is clumsy, overworked, unfinished. It is as though his fury in painting it was so great that is destroyed his gifts…
- By painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso provoked Cubism. It was the spontaneous and, as always, primitive insurrection out of which, for good historical reasons, the revolution of Cubism developed.
In 1972, art critic Leo Steinberg
Leo Steinberg
Leo Steinberg was an American art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S.-Life:Steinberg was born in Moscow, Russia and grew up in Berlin, Germany. He was the son of Isaac Nachman Steinberg. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art...
in his essay The Philosophical Brothel posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches—which had been ignored by most critics—he argued that far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer. He notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare.
The earliest sketches feature two men inside the brothel; a sailor and a medical student (who was often depicted holding either a book or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a memento mori
Memento mori
Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die". It names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality...
, a reminder of death). A trace of their presence at a table in the center remains: the jutting edge of a table near the bottom of the canvas. The viewer, Steinberg argues, has come to replace the sitting men, forced to confront the gaze of prostitutes head on, invoking readings far more complex than a simple allegory or the autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso's own history with women. A world of meanings then becomes possible, suggesting the work as a meditation on the danger of sex, the "trauma of the gaze" (to use a phrase of Rosalind Krauss's invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large.
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
's "Olympia
Olympia (painting)
Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet. Painted in 1863, it measures 130.5 by 190 centimetres . The nation of France acquired the painting in 1890 with a public subscription organized by Claude Monet...
" of 1863. William Rubin (1927–2006), the former Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA
Moma
Moma may refer to:* Moma , an owlet moth genus* Moma Airport, a Russian public airport* Moma District, Nampula, Mozambique* Moma River, a right tributary of the Indigirka River* Google Moma, the Google corporate intranet...
wrote that "Steinberg was the first writer to come to grips with the sexual subject of the Demoiselles."
A few years after writing The Philosophical Brothel, Steinberg wrote further about the revolutionary nature of Les Demoiselles:
- Picasso was resolved to undo the continuities of form and field which Western art had so long taken for granted. The famous stylistic rupture at right turned out to be merely a consummation. Overnight, the contrived coherences of representational art - the feigned unities of time and place, the stylistic consistencies - all were declared to be fictional. The Demoiselles confessed itself a picture conceived in duration and delivered in spasms. In this one work Picasso discovered that the demands of discontinuity could be met on multiple levels: by cleaving depicted flesh; by elision of limbs and abbreviation; by slashing the web of connecting space; by abrupt changes of vantage; and by a sudden stylistic shift at the climax. Finally, the insistent staccato of the presentation was found to intensify the picture's address and symbolic charge: the beholder, instead of observing a roomfuI of lazing whores, is targeted from all sides. So far from suppressing the subject, the mode of organization heightens its flagrant eroticism.
At the end of the first volume of his (so far) three volume Picasso biography: A Life Of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881-1906, John Richardson
John Richardson
- Politics :*John Richardson , Deputy Governor of Anguilla* John G. Richardson , former Speaker of the Maine House and current candidate for Governor.* John S...
comments on Les Demoiselles. Richardson says:
- It is at this point, the beginning of 1907, that I propose to bring this first volume to an end. The 25 year-old Picasso is about to conjure up a quintet of DionysiacDionysusDionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
Demoiselles on his huge new canvas. The execution of this painting would make a dramatic climax to these pages. However, it would imply that Picasso's great revolutionary work constitutes a conclusion to all that has gone before. It does not. For all that the Demoiselles is rooted in Picasso's past, not to speak of such precursors as the Iron AgeIron AgeThe Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...
IberiansIberian sculptureIberian sculpture, a subset of Iberian art, describes the various sculptural styles developed by the Iberians from the Bronze age up to the Roman conquest...
, El GrecoEl GrecoEl Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...
, Gauguin and Cézanne, it is essentially a beginning: the most innovative painting since Giotto. As we will see in the next volume, it established a new pictorial syntax; it enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds, new awareness. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the first unequivocally 20th century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of 20th century art20th century art20th-century art and what it became known as — modern art — really began with modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post Impressionism and Art Nouveau led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke in Germany. Fauvism in Paris...
. For Picasso it would also be a rite of passage: what he called an exorcism.' It cleared the way for cubismCubismCubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
. It likewise banished the artist's demons. Later, these demons would return and require further exorcism. For the next decade, however, Picasso would feel as free and creative and 'as overworked' as God.
Rubin, Seckel, Cousins
The 1994 book Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by William Rubin, Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins represents an in-depth analysis of the work and its genesis. Rubin suggests that some of the figure's faces symbolize the disfigurements of syphilisSyphilis
Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The primary route of transmission is through sexual contact; however, it may also be transmitted from mother to fetus during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis...
, and that the painting was created following a series of brothel visits by Picasso, who was then temporarily separated from his mistress Fernande Olivier. Rubin interprets the painting as expressing the artist's atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
, his willingness to risk anarchy for freedom, his fear of disease and illness, and, most forcefully, 'his deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body, which existed side by side with his craving for and ecstatic idealization of it.'
Ethnographical and Iberian influences
African tribal masks
Ritual and ceremonial masks are an essential feature of the traditional culture and art of the peoples of Subsaharan and West Africa. While the specific implications associated to ritual masks widely vary in different cultures, some traits are common to most African cultures: for example, masks...
, art of Oceania
Art of Oceania
Oceanic art refers to the creative works made by the native peoples of the Pacific Islands and Australia, including areas as far apart as Hawaii and Easter Island. Specifically it refers to the works of the two groups of people that settled the area, though during two different periods. They...
, and pre-Roman Iberian sculptures. The rounded contours of the features of the three women to the left can be related to Iberian sculpture
Iberian sculpture
Iberian sculpture, a subset of Iberian art, describes the various sculptural styles developed by the Iberians from the Bronze age up to the Roman conquest...
, but not obviously the fragmented planes of the two on the right, which indeed seem influenced by African masks. Picasso emphatically denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art? Never heard of it!" (L'art nègre? Connais pas!), asserting instead that the primitivism in his work during, before and after the painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, from spring 1906 through the spring of 1907 was primarily influenced by Iberian sculpture. Some Iberian relief
Relief
Relief is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is thus to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane...
s from Osuna
Osuna
Osuna is a town and municipality in the province of Seville, southern Spain, in the autonomous community of Andalusia. , it has a population of c...
, then only recently excavated, were on display in the Louvre from 1904. Archaic Greek sculpture has also been claimed as an influence.
The influence of Iberian sculpture became an issue in 1939, when Alfred Barr
Alfred Barr
Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. , known as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City...
claimed that the primitivism of the Demoiselles derived from the art of the Ivory Coast and the French Congo. Picasso insisted that the editor of his "catalogue raissonne", Christian Zervos
Christian Zervos
Christian Zervos . French art collector, writer and publisher.Better known as a publisher of books than as an art critic in his own right, Zervos founded the magazine Cahiers d'art in Paris, and ran an art gallery.He was a connoisseur of modern painting in his time, and of Greek art and...
, publish a disclaimer: the 'Demoiselles,' he said, owed nothing to African art
African art
African art constitutes one of the most diverse legacies on earth. Though many casual observers tend to generalize "traditional" African art, the continent is full of people, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual special culture. The definition also includes the art of the African...
, everything to the reliefs from Osuna that he had seen in the Louvre a year or so before. Nonetheless, he is known to have seen African tribal masks while working on the painting, during a visit to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero
Musée de l'Homme
The Musée de l'Homme was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878...
with Andre Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
in June 1907, about which he later said "When I went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed, I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren't like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things." Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck
Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.-Life:Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris to a family...
is often credited with introducing Picasso to African sculpture of Fang
Beti-Pahuin
The Beti-Pahuin are a group of related peoples who inhabit the rain forest regions of Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Though they separate themselves into several individual ethnic groups, they all share a common history and culture. They were...
extraction in 1904.
Picasso biographer John Richardson recounts in A Life Of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907-1916, art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's recollection of his first visit to Picasso's studio in July 1907. Kahnweiler remembers seeing dusty stacks of canvases in Picasso's studio and African sculptures of majestic severity. Richardson comments: so much for Picasso's story that he was not yet aware of Tribal art
African tribal masks
Ritual and ceremonial masks are an essential feature of the traditional culture and art of the peoples of Subsaharan and West Africa. While the specific implications associated to ritual masks widely vary in different cultures, some traits are common to most African cultures: for example, masks...
. A photograph of Picasso in his studio surrounded by African sculptures
African art
African art constitutes one of the most diverse legacies on earth. Though many casual observers tend to generalize "traditional" African art, the continent is full of people, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual special culture. The definition also includes the art of the African...
c.1908, is found on page 27 of that same volume.
Legacy
In July 2007, NewsweekNewsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
published a two-page article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing it as the "most influential work of art of the last 100 years".
External links
- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Conserving A Modern Masterpiece
- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the MoMA Online Collection
- Julia Frey, Anatomy of a Masterpiece, NY Times Review of LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON By William Rubin, Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins.
- Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves, 1910