Lecture 46: Cubism and Early Modern Painting
art of El Greco, like the later art of Goya, was to become an important source
for many Expressionistic painters of the early 20th century.Our next example is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The title of this
painting was a private joke. There was a notorious brothel on Avignon
Street in Barcelona, and the subject here is a brothel. Picasso later said that
he disliked the title. In May or June 1907, Picasso had a “revelation” about
African sculpture during a visit to the Trocadero ethnographic museum
in Paris. Matisse had already begun to collect such sculpture, but Picasso
had not paid much attention to it. After his revelation, he repainted the
Demoiselles with the African mask–inÀ uenced faces of the ¿ gures on the
right. The painting was much more explicit in its ¿ rst state. It included a
sailor in port who was visiting the brothel and examining the “merchandise.”
That ¿ gure was soon removed, which at once made the painting less explicit
and more ambiguous. The angles from The Old Guitarist are reintroduced
here in a different tonality and with a different subject. Note the angularity of
the arms, breasts, and torsos of these ¿ gures, as well as the background. The
spaces between the ¿ gures suggest broken glass.The Demoiselles is most indebted to the bather compositions of Cézanne, one
of which we see here for comparison, Four Bathers (1888–1890). Picasso
had unquestionably seen some of these paintings before 1907 and, from their
alien presence, distilled his own strong brew. Note the central nude with
her arms raised in Cézanne’s painting and the similar pose of the central
¿ gure in Demoiselles. Picasso understood not just the compositional and
structural ideas of Cézanne’s pictures but their emotional and psychological
core. Cézanne’s paintings are not super¿ cial, not just about ¿ nding the right
color or shape or line, but about uncovering and reproducing in paint the
essential, organic relationships in nature, and he did it stroke by stroke, while
simultaneously trying to bring every part of the picture to the same degree of
completion. This is why so many Cézannes seem to be still in progress while
nonetheless satisfying us with the overall resolution that he has achieved.We see this quality in one of Cézanne’s many paintings of
Mont-Saint-Victoire (1904–1906). Note the insistent structure in this
painting, every brushstroke counterbalancing another, every part of the
painting brought to the same degree of completion. Late work by Cézanne