There is no other painting that is as disturbing as Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” after it was first created in 1907. The scene depicted in the painting was taken from a brothel in Barcelona, where Picasso often visited. Women in the painting look ugly and deformed. And what is noticed and remembered by most of the viewers after viewing this painting, are mainly ugly appearance. In addition, unlike classical oil painting, this painting makes it difficult for viewers to get a simple and clear impression. It is just like a mirror reflecting the fragmented parts of women after it is shattered by the devil. But in this essay, it is argued that “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a significant work that starts the new trend of modern art when Picasso creatively combined African art element, decomposed images of women, and innovated the structural relationship of them, showing a sort of spiritual liberation pursued by Picasso.
For Picasso, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is at first a serious and in-depth interaction between modern art and the traditionally African art forms. Women have always been an important and indispensable factor for Picasso whether in daily life or artistic creation. Although the girls in the painting visually have no young and plump bodies, Picasso focused on lines and colors, which are indispensable elements in the painting. Based on Patricia Leighten, there is a connection between “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”and African themes, explained by a post-colonial theory (Harris 2008) . During this period, Picasso was constantly thinking about how to combine the original elements of African art with the language of oil painting.
He kept collecting African artworks including woodcarving, carving, and bronze statues. From the perspective of the picture as a whole, it draws on the modeling and body structural elements in the formal language of African woodcarving. The lines of the picture mostly use diagonal lines and curves. Although they are complicated, they are not messy. The direction of the lines are matched very harmoniously, and the lines interspersed in the whole picture reflect a sense of rhythm and dynamism. Variations and interspersed lines create a geometric forms of triangles, which takes account of the majority of the paintings.
The combination of geometrical forms adds a wonderful effect to the picture, which makes the picture look more formal. Those triangles make the painting not feminine, but rather full of tension, showing a sense of power. Various triangles with different styles of stability, imbalance, thickness or sharpness are fully reflected in this painting. So the whole picture has been marked with both change and unity. In addition to lines from African art, colors of the two women on the right side of the picture are in sharp contrast with the other three women. This is reflecting the roughness of African artistic colors. And the middle woman is softer and flattened. The female on the far left is relatively in the middle degree in terms of color contrast, making the atmosphere of the whole picture more harmonious.
So for the first time, the form of African primitive art has been successfully introduced into his own work. The light orange body and contour lines in this work, are clearly displayed in the viewers’ eyes, which was creatively under the influence of African primitive arts. The reason why Picasso did this is probably because he was attracted by the rugged and instinctive power of primitive art, and such temperament could not be more appropriate for expressive themes. This also adds to the charm of the painting. In addition to his accumulation of knowledge and experience of African arts, Picasso was also self-critical, leading to a process of continuous innovation.
All figures and backgrounds are creatively segmented, interleaved, and reunified in the painting, which conveys the idea of free organization of painting materials in the modern art. Although learning from others’ techniques, he was pursuing a continuous progress and cannot allow himself to be limited to only a painting technique. Unlike realism and naturalism which only pursue the realistic representation in the picture, the five girls in the picture are marked with a rough depiction. Without drawing beautiful faces in line with traditional aesthetic, Picasso boldly omitted the depiction of the details of these images, using almost conceptual overall brushstrokes to express the body and facial features, and outline the main shapes with concise lines to make the figures more powerful.
More importantly, Picasso freely broke down the different organs of women into simple geometric shapes by flexible and layered color blocks, so that the heads, noses or eyes of the girls were moved and disconnected. Then he rearranged the different parts on the canvas to form the human body, space, and background according to some interesting and wonderful ideas. Some parts that were originally on the side or front were thus arranged to be displayed on the same plane. Even the facial features on a face are all in the wrong position, showing an extended state. People can see different sides of the characters in this painting space at the same time. At the same time, in a limited painting space, squeezing the five sense organs originally located on different sides into the same plane has inevitably caused the women in the painting to be distorted and deformed with the shift of their positions. Although women are ugly and distorted, the aggressive gaze and provocative posture of these women are powerfully reflected.
Another innovation of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a new three-dimensional spatial structure and new observation method in this painting. Under normal circumstances, in order to make the picture closer to the painted objects seen by the naked eye, classical oil paintings tend to use squares when expressing the relationship of people. All images or backgrounds in the painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” are divided into sharp geometric blocks. But after summarizing the human body into squares, the artist needs to use shadows and border lines to break these squares to form the light-dark transition observed by the human eye. In other words, the shadows used in traditional oil painting techniques are depicted following the objects seen by human eyes. Picasso painted many shadows on the junctions of these blocks, making it difficult to judge whether these spaces face in or out.
Therefore, the picture forms one space after another, which sharpens each other. This is breaking the human body into a battlefield of space friction and collision. So this way of dealing with shadows comes from traditional oil painting techniques, but it does not totally follow the traditional way. In addition, in Picasso’s case, the processing of shadows was completely ignoring the human eye’s visual habits. It is a result of the painter’s observations from different angles. For example, the young girl in the lower right corner presents the audience with a back view, but the front and side of the face can be viewed as well. The painter’s multi-angle observation and the free change of viewpoint are the result of observation in the state of motion. When the front and profile images of the girl appear on the same plane at the same time, there is a free connection and three-dimensional display of those women.
+It is precisely by using this composition technique that Picasso shapes three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. But the painting is different from the traditional stereotype of three-dimensional space created by perspective. It goes deeper into the spatial attributes of the world and outlines the front and side of the face at the same time. These are allowing Picasso to distinguish himself from the traditional painter. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” was a turning point for Picasso and, Andre Breton calls it to be “the core of Picasso’s laboratory” (Duffy 2014). His painting technique is later called cubism. In other words, Picasso’s painting is not irrational, but is challenging people’s visual habits with precise spatial analysis, expressing the beauty of overlapping and interlacing bodies. This kind of challenge and beauty is pursued by Picasso with the innovated techniques.
This uniqueness shown by “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is rooted in Picasso’s experience, and desire of spiritual liberation. There is a historical background why Picasso created such an unpleasant work. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” went through a complex process before it came into being (Dasgupta 2019). In 1806, the painter Cézanne died, and Paris organized a large-scale retrospective exhibition for him. Picasso, a young man at the time, created this work the second year after seeing the exhibition. The primary goal of creation for Picasso as a modernist is above all personal. So, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is a response to the motif of the bathing women created by Cézanne. In those works on bathing girls, Cézanne made plump, beautiful, and elegant women in traditional paintings disappear. Instead, he depicted them as a tree, a cloud, or a piece of land, despite the legends or the mystery related to them.
As for what the women in his works look like and what they are doing are nothing more than a medium for the expression of him. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” continued such a method of creation. It is consistent with the painter Cézanne using the theme of prostitutes to challenge the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. It depicts a brothel that Picasso visited. It shows the Spanish prostitutes in the painter’s memory, but their images are vilified to a certain extent. At that time, many people died of venereal diseases. In the sketch, it can still find a man in the painting, holding a skeleton in his hand, standing behind these women.
There is an interaction of individual and collective (or social or cultural) memories in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (Brockmeier 2017). The work was a metaphor for venereal diseases. The artist intended to use this painting to link sexual indulgence with death to warn people of the danger of venereal diseases and to warn those who indulged in sexual desire. Women with a bleak destiny received painful diseases after engaging in such occupations. To stress this reality, women’s bodies are depicted in a fragmented manner like glass, and their faces are like demons or monsters. Also, their bodies are obviously entangled by the disease, with black shadow on one’s face being exactly the shadow of the disease, and the face of one woman being simply portrayed as a virus. Therefore, these ugly, morbid, and deformed images of women really give people a terrifying and deep impression.
All kinds of strong personal touches and expressions converge together, and it leads to the cultural trend of modernism shown in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” . “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is regarded as the foremost icon of modernist art history (Chave 1994). And those means of expression unintentionally started a revolution in art and daily life. This also inspires a spiritual liberation in the history of modern art, which cannot be derived from any previous forms of art creation. By this way, modern art can be closer to the emotional feelings of people. So, people can see easily the humanistic care from Picasso in the painting.
It is not an exaggeration to call “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” as an epoch-making work, which is a summary of the past art and also opened the trend of new art development. Different from the artistic works of the previous era, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is of important significance for the development of modern art by completely breaking through the traditional spatial concept of painting. It has broke through the static observation from a fixed angle and the one-sided reproduction of painted objects. As a result, painting has become a kind of free dealing of images, by transforming and recreating a structure with visual imagination.
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