Picasso Final Paper

Final Paper William Kidwell ART101: Art Appreciation Instructor: Patricia Venecia-Tobin October 8, 2012 Evaluate Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. How did this work reshape the art of the early 20th century? Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a wonderful piece of art, and the style in which the picture is painted is very typical of Picasso. The artist completed the picture in the beginning of the previous century, in 1907, and used oil on canvas. Generally, Pablo Picasso is famous for unnaturally distorted figures in his paintings of that year, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a great example.The picture is now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Pablo Picasso hated discussing his art, yet once he spoke frankly about â€Å"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,† his greatest painting and a touchstone of 20th-century art that is 100 years old this summer. On this occasion, Picasso did not address the subjects that tran sfix art historians — the origin of Cubism, the supplanting of old avant- gardes, and the impact of non-Western art. He cut through academic dissertations to offer one of his most heartfelt admissions about why he made art. He spoke of artworks as â€Å"weapons . . . gainst everything . . . against unknown, threatening spirits,† and he affirmed that â€Å"‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' . . . was my first exorcism painting — yes absolutely! † His encounters also return us to the idea of art as â€Å"exorcism. † When Picasso spoke about art being a weapon, he was specifically describing African â€Å"fetishes. † He called them defensive weapons: â€Å"They're tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. † In this sense, the splintered spaces and awesome creatures of â€Å"Les Demoiselles† vividly embody looming malevolent and seductive forces — and stop them in their tracks.Picasso's painting pushes us to th e edge of primal confrontation. It projects human savagery only to trap it in the painted crust. [Jacques Doucet] failed to offer the painting to the Louvre, and a few years after his death the 10-year-old Museum of Modern Art acquired not only a masterpiece but international stature as the leading museum of contemporary art when it purchased the painting in 1939. Since that date, â€Å"Les Demoiselles† has been almost continuously on public view (a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, â€Å"Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon at 100,† is up through Aug. 7 and displays the painting with 11 related works). Yet only in the past few years have we had the chance to see it almost as it looked when it left Picasso's studio in 1924. In 2003-04, MoMA undertook a full-scale conservation effort and stripped the picture of layers of varnish that someone other than Picasso had applied. For generations, the varnish masked the physical texture and mass of Picasso's brushwork under an anodyne sheen. Now we see the painting the way Picasso left it — a raw, intensely fractured skin of ideas. ( Fitzgerald, M. (2007, Jul 21).PURSUITS; leisure & arts — masterpiece: His unladylike young ladies; in 1907, picasso's ‘les demoiselles' shattered convention. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://search. proquest. com/docview/398999057? accountid=32521) [Pablo Picasso] worked on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as he had never worked on any painting before. One art historian has even claimed that the hundreds of paintings and drawings produced during its six- month gestation constitute â€Å"a quantity of preparatory work unique not only in Picasso's career, but without parallel, for a single picture, in the entire history of art†.Certainly, it matches the work artists had traditionally put into history paintings and frescoes. Picasso knew he was doing something important, even revolutionary – but what? What struck Picasso about Af rican masks was the most obvious thing: that they disguise you, turn you into something else – an animal, a demon, a god. Modernism is an art that wears a mask. It does not say what it means; it is not a window but a wall. Picasso picked his subject matter precisely because it was a cliche: he wanted to show that originality in art does not lie in arrative, or morality, but in formal invention. This is why it's misguided to see Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as a painting â€Å"about† brothels, prostitutes or colonialism. The great, lamentable tragedy of 18th- and 19th-century art, compared with the brilliance of a Michelangelo, had been to lose sight of the act of creation. That's what Picasso blasts away. Modernism in the arts meant exactly this victory of form over content. That doesn't mean it is disconnected from the world. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon could not be more earthily, pungently affective – it is, after all, full of sex.It's a sexuality that bears no res emblance to that of, say, Klimt. Although it emerges from the same decadent milieu, it does things no artist of the fin- de-siecle had contemplated. In this painting Picasso anticipates the discoveries he made explicit in his cubist pictures: he all but obliterates the 500-year-old western tradition of perspective by flattening his flesh silhouettes in a space that goes nowhere. It's this visual violence that liberates his eroticism, because it erases any meaning or narrative.Such a tremendous unbinding of desire was unprecedented in art, not to mention Christian culture. After the first world war, Andre Breton came to Picasso's studio, saw Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and recognised it as the definitive modern masterpiece. Breton, the leader of the surrealists, saw in it a painting about the revolutionary menace of the unconscious, and he was right. (Jones, J. (2007, Jan 09). G2: Arts: Pablos punks: It’s exactly a century since Picasso painted les demoiselles d'avignon.Jonathan Jones reveals why this explosion of sex, anarchy and violence gave birth to the whole of modern art. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://search. proquest. com/docview/246571101? accountid=32521) This painting was painted in 1907. It was called the most innovative painting since the work of Giotto, when Les Demoiselles d'Avignon first appeared it was as if the art world had collapsed. Known form and respresnetation were completely abandoned. The reductionism and contortion of space in the painiting was incredible, and dislocation of faces explosive.Like any revolution, the shock waves reverbetrated and the inevitable outcome was Cubism. This large work, which took nine months to complete, exposes the true genius and novelty of Picasso's passion. Suddenly he found freedom of expression away from current and classical French influences and was able to carve his own path. Picasso created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the final work. It was painted in Paris during the summer of 1907. Demoiselle was revolutionary and controversial, and led to anger and disagreement amongst his closest associates and friends.Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. Demoiselle is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musee d'Ethnographie du Trocadero in the spring of 1907 where he saw and was unconsciously influenced by African and Tribal art several months before completing Demoiselles.Some critics argue that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude. Picasso drew each figure differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right has heavy paint application throughout. Her head is the most cubists 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. 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, the style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.Since the late 18th century, artists had been re-evaluating the Renaissance's concept of pictorial space, created through the means of linear and atmospheric perspective, whereby a fixed spectator observed a cube of space in which the sense of depth was created by a geometric diminution of objects in sc ale and in clarity as, apparently, they receded into the distance.. For Picasso, this rendering of space was no longer valid because the â€Å"fixed spectator† no longer existed.Now the modern spectator had been transformed into someone who was in constant movement, forced to look at objects from several points of view. Picasso became obsessed with what he regarded as the anachronistic artistic rules governing the representation of three-dimensional form on a flat surface and with reconciling them with the new modern acceleration. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon represents a working out of this reconciliation. His solution was to paint five nude contorted women. Now let's examine why he would portray them in such a manner.If we examine the seated woman to our right, you'll notice that her face and arms are facing us but her torso, buttocks and extremities are turned away from us. In other words, Picasso lets us simultaneously glimpse at different aspects of this woman that a fixed viewer could not ordinarily do so. In other words, Picasso is trying to show us a composite of this woman from as many different points of view as possible so that we may experience her in her totality. Picasso does the very same thing to the woman standing to our left.If we examine her closely, we will notice that she is ambiguously portrayed. First of all, her face is depicted both laterally and frontally. She is posed like an ancient Egyptian form who looks to the side but whose eye looks directly to the front. Furthermore, if we inspect her body, we will discover something very odd. Her right side is depicted dorsally, whereas her left side is portrayed frontally. It's as if Picasso has twisted her body so that we may get a glimpse of as many aspects of her as possible.In other words, Picasso wants to show us this woman in her entirety. In rendering the new reality, Picasso also abandons harmonious bodily proportions. This, of course, was done on purpose since Picasso had been t rained at art school how to render the human figure through mathematical proportions. The woman located at the very center of the canvas is quite disproportionate, elongated as though she were a figure out of an El Greco painting. If we focus on her extremities, they seem to go on forever, as if her short-waisted torso was out of context with the rest of her body.And so it goes for the rest of the figures in the picture. Was there any precedent for doing such a thing? Picasso's Les Demoiselles is homage to Paul Cezanne's The Bathers. Not only do both works echo Cezanne's dictum of â€Å"the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere,† but both paintings distort the human body. However, whereas Cezanne distorts the women in The Bathers in order to bring the viewer into the pictorial plane and to balance the figures and structures within the painting, Picasso does so for a different purpose.Picasso distorts each of these women to show who is in power—that he can take control and mangle them—and that, in the final analysis, they still threaten him as human beings. But this distortion and use of pure geometrical shapes are not the only elements that Picasso borrows from Cezanne's work. Picasso limits his palette just as Cezanne does because both are concerned more with the rendering of form than with the use of color. To have used more colors than the blues, pinks, ochres, rusts, and grays that he employs would have been distracting.Furthermore, these colors are totally flat, as though to suggest that these women are linearly rendered, â€Å"constructed† rather than modeled. Les Demoiselles is also disturbing in the ghastly and violent way that the women's faces are portrayed. Georges Braque went so far as to say that â€Å"Picasso was drinking turpentine and spitting fire†. But these women appeared the way they do for very specific reasons. These women are, after all, prostitutes who are cold, calculating businesswomen who dabble in sex for a profit and who practice a â€Å"savage† profession.The three women on the left look as though they were made from stone, and, remember, the onlooker is a sexual voyeur who is experiencing sexual anxiety. There is nothing inviting about either of them. Their faces are derived from the pre-Roman Iberian bronzes that Picasso had seen in the Louvre and had been experimenting with since 1906. The two remaining women's faces are borrowed from African sculpture, a jarring juxtaposition. Perhaps one of the reasons why he did this is to suggest the dark, uncivilized nature of the â€Å"oldest† profession.Another reason is that these women represent a composite of the Spanish people, descended from native tribes the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, and middle-eastern Jews. Furthermore, perhaps Picasso is even alluding to the final stages of syphilis, whereby the human face becomes a bulbous mask of thickened skin. But maybe Picasso’s interest in deforming their fac es is purely a formal one, a means of negating realism and embracing abstraction and distortion.Nevertheless, this plundering of African art was revolutionary in that Picasso uses it to shock the viewer through brutality and savagery. Painting was never to be the same. Originally Les Demoiselles was going to be an allegory of venereal disease entitled â€Å"The Wages of Sin. † In the study for the painting, Picasso sketched a sailor carousing in a brothel amongst prostitutes and a young medical student holding a skull, a symbol for mortality. But the subsequent painting is quite different from the original sketch: only the women appear.And these women are not the traditional nudes that viewers had become so accustomed to in the 1880's when Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec had begun to capture them in the moment of the â€Å"parade,† whereby prostitutes announced their wares and services to their clients. Nor are these women feminine and beautiful as Ingres’ Venus Anad yomene. Then who are these women in this brothel in Barcelona's Avignon Street and why do they appear the way they do? Perhaps the answers to these questions lie in Picasso's fear of women in general. Their flesh is not depicted as being soft and inviting but sharp and knifelike.In fact, their flesh suggests castration and fear of women. As Robert Hughes implies, â€Å"No painter put his anxiety about impotence and castration more plainly than Picasso did in Les Demoiselles, or projected it through a more violent dislocation of form. Even the melon that sweet and pulpy fruit, looks like a weapon†. But are there any other reasons why Picasso gives these women these shocking forms? Looked at in this way, it could be said that Les Demoiselles carries a message of filth and disease through its representation of these prostitutes, the crouching figure the most so.It is as if Picasso has deliberately mutated the figures as a way to express the rising cultural awareness and effects of venereal disease, which had become a major threat to prostitutes’ and their clients lives and each prostitute in the painting depicts a stage in the effects of sexual disease and decay. The whole painting gives an impression of uneasiness, because it breaks all the traditional rules of Art and also because it shows a disturbing scene that offers no sensuous interpretation; the Demoiselles are not pretty, they look barely human and some even interpret their distorted faces as the signs of illness.Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a wonderful piece of art, and the style in which the picture is painted is very typical of Picasso. The artist completed the picture in the beginning of the previous century, in 1907, and used oil on canvas. Generally, Pablo Picasso is famous for unnaturally distorted figures in his paintings of that year, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a great example. The picture is now hanging in the Museum of Modern Ar t in New York. In collusion, Picasso contributed a great deal to the world.He gave the world 50,000 timeless pieces of work. He helped express his opinions on violence and the Spanish Civil War. And finally Picasso contributed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and cubism. Picasso was and extremely talented person and artist who gave the world a great deal of innovations and opinions and artwork. References www. faculty. mdc. edu www. pablopicasso. org http://search. proquest. com/docview/398999057? accountid=32521) http://search. proquest. com/docview/246571101? accountid=32521) www. ttexshevles. blogspot. com