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| Picasso and his sister. Personality! |
In 1907, a brash, young Spanish painter living in Paris began assembling a large canvas, stretching fabric across a frame measuring almost 8' X 8'. It was unwieldy, big, and, by the time he got it gessoed, a lot of blank whiteness. The height of the picture plane dwarfed the painter as he began outlining his ideas in charcoal, but he confidently pressed on, referring back to the many studies he had already made for the painting. What he had in mind for the picture was unlike anything he had done before; although, at the age of only 26, he had already painted in what would come to be defined as just three of his earliest distinct styles of work.
This new picture would be miles removed from the boring, old fashioned yawn of precise drawing and glazed oils he had mastered (to please his artist father) by the age of 16. It would take almost nothing from the representational, yet depressively evocative azure work he had shed like tears after the public suicide of his best friend. It would have little in common with the next group of commercially successful, rosy paintings of harlequins and misfits that had helped him to finally begin to heal.
No, this would be an entirely new kind of painting. This was a painting about whores. Not courtesans or companions; not mistresses and certainly not Madonnas. This would be five naked prostitutes, lined up for inspection by their customers, each on full display, and each simultaneously wanting and dreading selection.
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| Les Demoiselles |
Pablo Picasso had already studied and made plenty of paintings about women before, so a composition featuring females was nothing new. At the La Llotja Academy, and, under his father's tutelage, he had been taught all about the proper way to paint the fairer sex. Smoothly, slowly, and with near photographic realism, women in all of western art were to be depicted as either Madonnas or Queens (if they were "good"), or Nymphs, Ciphers, Mistresses or Courtesans (if they were "bad"). But nobody was ever really bad. They were just kind of sexy bad.
In the Rococo, Francois Boucher gave us a Reclining Girl (1752), glorying in her pinchable, pattable, disrobed derriere, but she was not a whore, just the coy mistress of the King. Jean-Honore Fragonard answered back with The Swing (1767), allowing us to draw our own conclusions about the lingerie wearing habits of French women and the visual delight of the gentlemen who liked to sit at their feet. Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres continued the tradition with La Grande Odalisque (1814), a neoclassical fantasy of an exotic foreign dish that was very hot and only partially covered. Realist painter Edouard Manet shocked the Paris Salon by turning his Olympia (1863) to face us, and even though she progressively met our gaze, her pampered surroundings and porcelain skin let us know that even if she were a call girl (she was), she was the highest class of call girl you could get. In other words, if you had to ask the price, you couldn't afford her.
We all knew who these women were, and exactly what it was that they did, to keep a roof over their heads and fine china silks on their back. But all of those women were veiled in a common gossamer cloak of beauty and winking naughtiness, of "companionship" rewarded by a discrete deposit, or the accidental leaving behind of a pawnable jewel. What never happened in these artistic and utterly masculine fantasies was the reality of payment being pressed into a dirty, rough nailed hand, to be immediately skimmed by a pimp, madame, or husband. We heard the women sigh, but never heard the exhausted, worn out sigh of a working girl.
Until Pablo faced that big, rectangular canvas, and began to stab at it with an angry brush of truth.
Picasso came of age just as the still, and then the motion picture camera began widely capturing the world he lived in. The painters of this era that we don't remember stubbornly stuck to the idea of painted canvas as only an historic document, but the ones who broke through realized that the cameras didn't ruin paintings, they liberated them.
First, photojournalists masterfully took over the function of art to document a political cause, or disseminate a particular view of history. Portrait photographers brought personal images to the masses, who in turn, began to understand the difference between a good composition and a poor one. And with "movies" (like the ones by the Lumiere brothers [first shown in 1895]) at the Grand Cafe in Paris, the world Picasso lived in suddenly became one that moved. Of course it had always moved, but now it could be moved and captured simultaneously, then viewed together in a shared cultural experience. No painter had ever dreamed a dream this big, and no painter seemed to understand that this was a seismic cultural shift. And although he did not see it yet, Picasso's eyes, in the quiet of a darkened room illuminated by flickering images, were beginning to open.
Picasso's talent had been recognized by a prescient and very important Parisian art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. With a taste that could almost foretell the future, Vollard began to promote the young, unknown Spaniard, along with the other unappreciated artists he represented, including Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne.
Picasso had been fascinated by Cezanne's work, particularly the multi-angled paintings the Frenchman had done of Mount Sainte-Victoire. He had also met and begun what would become an intense rivalry with Henri Matisse, (Les bonheur de vivre [1905-06]), whose own use of color, flattening of forms, and abstraction of reality must have spurred him on, as well.
From these masters, Picasso had begun thinking about an even greater loosening of his style. He had already been elongating the figures of his blue and rose periods, stretching and distorting the subjects of his paintings, and infusing an ever increasing emotionality in his work.
Pablo had also joined the social circle of Gertrude and Leo Stein, American Expats who, for their famous and lively salons, had plucked and savored the Avant-Garde of Paris like hors d'oeuvores at a cocktail party. Picasso had offered to paint a portrait of Gertrude, knowing that her money and influence would help his career, but he struggled with the picture.
After many bad starts, Picasso broke through when he thought about her image in conjunction with archaic Iberian sculptures, which he had begun "collecting" (with the help of a light fingered secretary who took advantage of the opportunity presented by a sleeping security guard at the Louvre). The statues, with their flattened, simple, almond shaped eyes, allowed Picasso to capture Stein's essence, if not her exact image. The process of making that painting also got him thinking about just how valuable simplified and "primitive" techniques could be in serving a new, modern art for a new, modern age.
During the same period, with the opening of an Ethnography museum in Paris, Picasso had begun looking at and collecting African art, particularly tribal masks. Pablo admired the unconstricted freedom of all of these "primitives," and, with the completion of the Stein painting, he was ready for everything he had been thinking about to coalesce.
The gifted young Spaniard began turning in his mind a world where still pictures moved, perspectives in paintings shifted, and simplified primitivism was starting to look very, very modern. Pablo Picasso was getting ready to reinvent art.
As Picasso began to lay down the contour lines of the painting he thought of as Mon Bordel (My Brothel), he was probably also thinking about the work of earlier artists, including Post Impressionist Paul Gauguin's small statue, Oviri (1894), Mannerist El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal (1608-14), and particularly, Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses (first, 1874 - 75). But he was not interested in making a reproduction of even a reinterpretation of another painting or sculpture. Picasso was interested in working out an itch, an annoyance; he had a problem that was clearly vexing him. Pablo was a guy who was just trying to get a little relief.
As a young man, Picasso had often indulged in the pleasures of the bordello, sneaking away from his Mother's Catholic embrace to the arms of his favorite whore. And, like those nighttime visits to learn a new way of loving and being loved, Pablo began to secretly, furtively paint each night. Under the sneaky cover of darkness, Pablo found that relief that he needed.
With his canvas in a portrait position, Pablo, working purely from imagination and his studies, lined up three of the girls from the far left to the center of the canvas. He painted them in flat, meaty tones, with angular features that cut the plane of the picture like so many shards of glass. Two are vaguely draped (covering little), and the third, at the far left, is shown with her body like the others, but her head, which is seen in profile, is rendered in dark, woody shades. Her two companions look directly, accusingly, at us, with large misshapen eyes, noses drawn with a profile contour, and wordless slits for mouths. All three are depicted with breasts flung forward, though this belies the flatness of the picture plane. Next to the woman in the center is a frosty blue drape, which is held back, along with a second panel of fabric, by a woman either wearing, or having, in the place of her head, an African mask. Her eyes are blinded, and it is the blind (the drape) that she holds back. Her body is almost flat, and is painted with a harlequin like pattern of tones representing the planes of her form. Within the almost flat picture, she seems to stand behind the others. Her body is obscured by the only completely seated figure, a woman with legs spread wide and her back to our point of view. Her right elbow is cocked toward the right side of the canvas edge, as her left rests casually on a gynecologically opportune leg, which is next to a broken basket of fruit. Her face is the most disturbing of all: an angry red and blue mask peers out at us from the back of her head. She is both completely hidden and uncomfortably naked. None of the women are unconsciously nude; each seems acutely aware of the power of their naked forms. At the far left, there may be another reddish drape, which is held by by the woman with the wooden face. There are just a few shadows and highlights suggesting depth.
Well that was, and is, quite the picture. In it, you will find no modeling, no fixed perspective, no horizon line or focal point. There is no fixed source of light and there are absolutely no other hints of traditional painting to be found within this arresting and completely bizarre image.
But what is there, besides five incredibly ugly women in an unspeakably ugly situation?
There are five figures that appear to completely still, as frozen as greek statues, but they somehow look like they are breathing. There is a picture plane that is utterly flattened, yet is still completely readable as having depth. There is an aspect of selection, as if Picasso is asking in which direction should art go? There are faces abstracted as if by a shaman in the caves at Lascaux, and there is ugliness which melts, like a twisted funhouse mirror, into a reflection of women who are both objectified and finally real. In Les Demoiselles, the art is the fantasy; the women are real.
Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (completed 1907) was a big, gigantic, fully rendered oil study, which I would argue that Picasso produced to tell himself where he needed to go. He never really intended to show the painting, and was probably not surprised by the initial reaction when it finally was shown it to other artists (fellow inventor of cubism Georges Braque was heard to mutter "it's like…drinking… paraffin…").
Of the painting, Picasso said, "I detest people who talk about 'beauty.' What is beautiful? In painting you have to talk about problems! Paintings are nothing but exploration and experiment. I never paint a picture as a work of art. They are all exploration. I am always exploring, and all this searching and searching follows a logical development."
Just as when Picasso visited the prostitutes to teach him how to make love, this visit with these prostitutes taught him how to make art modern. He never intended for it to be a public record; we are so lucky that he saved it.
Les Demoiselles was the way that Picasso found the road to cubism. He painted it because his itchy brain told him that he had to; it nagged at him like a physical urge, until, through the process of fusing girls, masks, movement, and a wholly new kind of perspective, he had painted for himself something that would take him another step toward where he wanted to go. Because he painted the five whores of Avignon, Picasso could shatter the next woman he painted into shards, which he hung in the atmosphere of his picture, like a spray of cubed droplets of perfume.
The five prostitutes are not beloved because they were famous, or because their images are beautiful, or because Picasso particularly wanted to capture even the shadow of any real woman that he knew. These ladies, the beautifully ugly las chicas of the bordello of Picasso's youth are his bridge to modernism, and that is why they will live forever.
The revolutionary act of Pablo Picasso making this painting is what kept two dimensional art as relevant any photograph, digital image or motion picture. Les Demoiselles D'Avignon was the day when, championed by a brilliant Spaniard, painting fought back.
Sources:
Picasso, Master of the New Idea - by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Paule du Bouchet, Discoveries, Abrams, New York
Pablo Picasso - by Hajo Duchting, Prestel, living_art books
Picasso - by Carsten-Peter Warncke, Taschen Books
Picasso, Challenging the Past - at the National Gallery, London: 25 February to 7 June, 2009, Curated by Christopher Riopelle and Anne Robbins, The National Gallery
ART, Everything you need to know about the greatest artists and their works, by Susie Hodge, Quercus books
Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 14th Edition, by Fred S. Kleiner, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Demoiselles_d'Avignon
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