Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso, 1907

Oil on canvas

243.9 × 233.7 cm, 96 × 92 in

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon in English) is a celebrated painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel. Picasso painted it in France, and completed it in the summer of 1907. The eye-catching painting is one of Picasso's most famous. It now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which acquired it in 1939.^[1] Pablo Picasso. ... Picasso redirects here. ... Year 1907 (MCMVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Monday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Mona Lisa, Oil on wood panel painting by Leonardo da Vinci. ... This article is about the museum in New York City. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... For other uses , see Painting (disambiguation). ... Picasso redirects here. ... Prostitution is the sale of sexual services (typically manual stimulation, oral sex, sexual intercourse, or anal sex) for cash or other kind of return, generally indiscriminately with many persons. ... A brothel, also known as a bordello or whorehouse, is an establishment specifically dedicated to prostitution, providing the prostitutes a place to meet and to have sex with the clients. ... Year 1907 (MCMVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Monday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... This article is about the museum in New York City. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ...

Picasso created over one hundred sketches and studies in preparation for this work, one of the most important in the early development of Cubism. Within the narrative of early modern art, it is widely held as a seminal work.^[1] It has been argued that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.^[2] Its resemblance to Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal was much discussed by later commentators. Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910 Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso, 1912, oil on canvas Georges BraqueWoman with a guitar, 1913 Juan Gris, Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin, 1919, oil on canvas Cubist villa in Prague, Czech Republic Cubist House of the Black Madonna, Prague, Czech Republic, 1912 Cubism... Henri Matisse (December 31, 1869 – November 3, 1954) was a French artist, noted for his use of color and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. ... Le bonheur de vivre is a painting by Henri Matisse from 1906. ... The blue nude Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) is a 1907 oil painting by Henri Matisse. ... Categories: 1839 births | 1906 deaths | French painters | Post-impressionism | Artist stubs ... For the Vangelis album, see El Greco (album). ... The Opening of the Fifth Seal (or The Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse or The Vision of Saint John) was painted in the last years of El Grecos life for a side-altar of the church of Saint John the Baptist outside the walls of Toledo. ...

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. André Salmon gave it its current name; Picasso had always called it Le Bordel.^[3] André Salmon (October 4, 1881, Paris - March 12, 1969, Sanary-sur-Mer in Provence), French poet, art critic and writer. ...

Interpretations

Picasso drew each of the figures 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 cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. The masks seem to be derived from African tribal masks. Maurice Vlaminck is often credited with having introduced Picasso to African sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.^[4] In geometry, two sets of points are of the same shape precisely if one can be transformed to another by dilating (i. ... Iberia can mean: The Iberian peninsula of southwest Europe; That part of it inhabited by the Iberians, speaking the Iberian language. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Mask. ... Maurice de Vlaminck French artist, (1876–1958) Categories: Stub | 1876 births | 1958 deaths | French painters | Modern artists ... Fang children from Equatorial Guinea 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. ...

This 19th century Fang sculpture is similar in style to what Picasso encountered in Paris just prior to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

A possible inspiration: Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1906, by Paul Cezanne.

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, this style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.^[1] Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1500x2900, 2189 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Mask Beti-Pahuin African tribal masks Metadata This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (1500x2900, 2189 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Mask Beti-Pahuin African tribal masks Metadata This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (3176x2687, 828 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Paul Cézanne Les Demoiselles dAvignon ... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (3176x2687, 828 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Paul Cézanne Les Demoiselles dAvignon ... Categories: 1839 births | 1906 deaths | French painters | Post-impressionism | Artist stubs ... Alfred H. Barr, Jr. ...

In 1974, however, critic Leo Steinberg in his landmark essay "The Philosophical Brothel" posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches, which were completely ignored by most critics, he argues 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.^[1] Year 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the 1974 Gregorian calendar. ... Leo Steinberg (born 1920) is an American art historian. ...

The earliest sketches of the work actually feature two men inside the brothel, one a sailor and the other a medical student (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.^[1] For other uses, see Memento mori (disambiguation). ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... An intimate relationship is a interpersonal relationship where there is a great deal of physical or emotional intimacy. ...

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.^[1] “Manet” redirects here. ... Olympia is an oil on canvas painting by Edouard Manet. ...

The 1994 book Les Demoiselles D'Avignon by William Rubin, Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins is an in-depth analysis of the work and its genesis. Rubin suggests that some of the figure's faces symbolize the disfigurements of 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, 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.'^[5] Syphilis is a curable sexually transmitted disease caused by the Treponema pallidum spirochete. ...

In 2004 an episode of the BBC series The Private Life of a Masterpiece featured Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. It reported that Picasso denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art, never heard of it." 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, 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."^[3][6] The Musée de lHomme (French for Museum of Man) was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet, for the event of the Worlds Fair. ...

Reputation and influence

In July 2007, Newsweek published a two-page, four-column article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing it as the "most influential work of art of the last 100 years".^[7]

Luis Gispert's Señoritas Suicidio (2005) is a modern reinterpretation of Picasso's work, a photograph showing five suicide girls in poses very similar to those of Picasso's models, photographed as they emerge from a swimming pool.^[8] Luis Gispert (born Jersey City, New Jersey USA, 1972) is an American sculptor and photographer, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. ... The SuicideGirls logo, used on the website and associated merchandise. ...

References

Hilton Kramer (1928-) is an U.S conservative cultural critic and commentator. ... The New Criterion is a New York-based magazine, a journal of art and cultural criticism. ...

External links

• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon on the MoMa website
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the MoMA Online Collection
• An Eye on Art: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
• Art: Picasso's 'Demoiselles'//New York Times
• "A revolution in paint: 100 years of Picasso’s Demoiselles" John Molyneux, International Socialism 115 (summer 2007)

v • d • e Pablo Picasso
Periods	Blue (1901–1904)  • Rose (1904–1906)  • African (1907–1909)  • Cubism (1909–1919)
Lists of works	1889-1900  • 1901-1910  • 1911-1920  • 1921-1930  • 1931-1940  • 1941-1950  • 1951-1960  • 1961-1970  • 1971-1973
Artworks	Chicago Picasso  • Dora Maar au Chat  • Femme aux Bras Croisés  • Garçon à la pipe  • Guernica (painting)  • Jacqueline (painting)  • Le Rêve (painting)  • Les Demoiselles d'Avignon  • Les Noces de Pierrette  • Maya with Doll  • Nude on a black armchair  • The Old Guitarist  • Reading the Letter (Picasso)  • Seated circus performer and boy  • Sylvette  • The Three Dancers  • Three Musicians  • The Weeping Woman  • Woman in Hat and Fur Collar  • Portrait of Suzanne Bloch
Partners	Françoise Gilot  • Olga Khokhlova  • Geneviève Laporte  • Dora Maar  • Fernande Olivier  • Marie-Thérèse Walter  • Jacqueline Roque
Family	Paloma Picasso  • José Ruiz y Blasco
Colleagues	George Braques  • Max Jacob
Museums	Picasso museums  • Château Grimaldi (Antibes)  • Museu Picasso  • Musée Picasso
See also	Surviving Picasso
Wikimedia	Picasso at Wiktionary  •  Picasso at Wikibooks  •  Picasso at Wikiquote  •  Picasso at Wikisource  •  Picasso at Commons  •  Picasso at Wikinews