Stop and Look: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso
This work of art is often cited as the seminal painting of Modernism, an immediate precursor of Cubism and all else besides.
A vast literature has grown up round this famous painting. It is indeed enigmatic, not to say incomprehensible, and was much more so when it was painted at the very start of the twentieth century. From our standpoint a hundred or more years later, we can perhaps assess it more coolly.
Its first title was “A Brothel in Avignon” and, unbelievably, it has been seen as an erotic work. If these figures have any reality at all, none can surely be described as possessing an alluring gaze, fixed on the viewer either accusingly or seductively. The faces are lifeless, blank and dead or, in the figures at far right, superimposed illogically in a clashing idiom (Picasso himself said that they were derived from African masks). Reading a learned commentary on the picture we find that these latter are not “demoiselles” but sailors visiting the brothel. They too appear to be naked, but their bodies are not significantly differentiated from those of the tarts, whose faces on the other hand, we gather, derive from Iberian sculpture.
Likewise, the bodies of these figures hardly relate to our experience of the human form: they are perfunctorily drawn with limbs that follow no anatomical rules, gestures that express nothing meaningful, and fail to relate to one another, even in formal terms, let alone as part of a coherent narrative. Though, again, we are told that the girls “disport themselves” against “folds of drapery”. Is that a fair description of them and their setting? Although the picture is full of figures, it tells us nothing about those figures, who they are, what they are like physically or what they might be doing. Nor does it use them to create handsome, or even interesting, shapes in its three square metres of space.
All these points have been made repeatedly. So what, we are entitled to ask, makes this a significant work of art? And, I remind you, it is often cited as the seminal painting of Modernism, an immediate precursor of Cubism and all else besides.
That last observation gives us the answer. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon occupies an important place in the history of twentieth-century art. Evaluations of Modernism are concerned less with the intrinsic merit of the work in question, more with what can be said about its art-historical status.
That Picasso effected some extraordinary innovations and created some powerful and even, occasionally, beautiful images can’t be contested. But a great proportion of his huge output consists of rapid improvisations so random that it’s difficult to take them seriously. I don’t think Picasso took the Demoiselles d’Avignon seriously, despite the large scale on which he executed the picture (though he never finished it). But we can be satisfied that it was inspired by Cezanne’s series of monumental groups of Bathers, and led to Cubism.
In addition, we can say that the work is innovative, and even “revolutionary”. It is therefore historically important. So that’s all right, then.
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