Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNONThe influence of “primitive” art
also surfaces in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon;
FIG. 35-12), which opened the door to a radically new method of rep-
resenting form in space. Picasso began the work as a symbolic picture
to be titled Philosophical Bordello,portraying two male clients (who,
based on surviving drawings, had features resembling Picasso’s) inter-
mingling with women in the reception room of a brothel on Avignon
Street in Barcelona. One was a sailor. The other carried a skull, an obvi-
ous reference to death. By the time the artist finished, he had elimi-
nated the male figures and simplified the room’s details to a suggestion
of drapery and a schematic foreground still life. Picasso had become
wholly absorbed in the problem of finding a new way to represent the
five female figures in their interior space. Instead of depicting the fig-
ures as continuous volumes, he fractured their shapes and interwove
them with the equally jagged planes that represent drapery and empty

space. Indeed, the space, so entwined with the bodies, is virtually illegi-

ble. Here Picasso pushed Cézanne’s treatment of form and space (FIGS.

31-20and 31-21) to a new level. The tension between Picasso’s repre-

sentation of three-dimensional space and his conviction that a painting

is a two-dimensional design lying flat on the surface of a stretched can-

vas is a tension between representation and abstraction.

The artist extended the radical nature ofLes Demoiselles d’Avignon

even further by depicting the figures inconsistently. Ancient Iberian

sculptures inspired the calm, ideal features of the three young women

at the left, as they had the head of Gertrude Stein (FIG. 35-11). The en-

ergetic, violently striated features of the two heads to the right emerged

late in Picasso’s production of the work and grew directly from his in-

creasing fascination with the power of African sculpture (see “Primi-

tivism and Colonialism,” page 920), which the artist studied in Paris’s

Trocadéro ethnography museum as well as collected and kept in his

Europe, 1900 to 1920 919

35-12Pablo Picasso,Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,1907. Oil on canvas, 8 7  8 . Museum of Modern Art, New York

(acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest).

African and ancient Iberian sculpture and the late paintings of Cézanne influenced this pivotal work, with which Picasso

opened the door to a radically new method of representing forms in space.

1 ft.