“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” by Pablo Picasso. Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, and printmaker. He was born on october 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain, and died april 8, 1973 in Mounguis, France. Picaso was regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest and most influential artists. He contributed to the evolution of modern art. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso started the artistic movement known as cubism. “It uses geometric shapes to show human and other forms.The geometric touches became so strong over time that they sometimes overtook the forms that were represented, leading to a more pure level of visual abstraction”.
The art I chose, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ” (june-july 1907), is the first cubist painting of Picasso. According to the MoMA museum, the painting shows five naked women whose faces were inspired by Iberian sculpture and African masks and are made of flat, splintered planes. A slice of melon in the still life at the bottom of the composition teeters on an upturned tabletop, while the confined space they inhabit appears to project forward in jagged shards. The work’s title, Avignon, refers to a Barcelona street known for its brothels. Picasso uses five naked women to represent five prostitutes. We see how two of the women are looking straight and with their arms up, making a “sexy” pose by drawing the attention of the audience. The woman on the left has a mask, which is a darker color from her body. The other two women on the right, have different forms, colors, and structure on their faces, which are characterists of cubism. I think Picasso wanted to show different points of views through the women’s faces by making their faces noticeable. Also by drawing the womens naked, he’s showing sexual power. Picasso introduced the way for cubism and revolutionized the body and object representation in his painting. He emphasized the picture’s flat, two-dimensional nature and avoided traditional techniques like chiaroscuro and modeling. Picasso was inspired by African masks and sculpture. The painting was a revolutionary act against the tyranny of Renaissance art, whose dominant principles of perspective, shading, color, and composition had to be destroyed in order to usher in new ways of representing reality.
What drew me to this piece was the curious image of five women naked with different types of faces. I wanted to know the meaning behind those faces and what that painting has to do with females. Also that is a piece from Pablo Picasso, who was a spanish painter, so I wanted to know more about his painting. This piece really caught my attention because of the background of the painting and the different colors. Some questions that I have about this work are why he chose the colors brown, white, blue for the background? And why did he make the left girl look to the other side of the painting?
https://www.history.com/topics/art-history/history-of-cubism
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings-analysis/les-demoiselles-davignon.htm
Thanks for this post. It’s hard for us to understand just how shocking this painting was when Picasso first exhibited it. While there was, of course, a tradition of female nudes in European painting, this was so different; people didn’t know what to make of it. I agree with your suggestion that the women here seem powerful in their nakedness – again a difference from the way the female body was generally presented at the turn of the century.