subject: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Oil Painting [print this page] Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Oil Painting
Modernism in the arts is 100 years old, because Pablo Picasso's oil painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is now 100 years old. Picasso drew his first designs for what became Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the winter of 1906-07. He developed his ideas in a programme of conscious planning that resembled the great academic projects of Leonardo or Gricault, before finally painting his 8ft square canvas in the early summer. With that oil painting, the nature of reality was altered.
This is one centenary worth thinking about. It's not just 100 years in the life of an oil painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907. Consider the dates of other works of high modernism. In music, Schoenberg's Erwartung was composed in 1909 and Stravinsky began The Rite of Spring in 1910. James Joyce didn't get started on Ulysses until 1914, by which time Picasso was into the final stages of cubism.
You can make a case for many beginnings of modern art. Some would say it began with Manet's confrontational 1863 nude, Olympia. After Olympia, the late 19th century and early 1900s teem with provocative works of art that engage specifically with the same sexual territory as Picasso: Munch's Madonna, Klimt's Pallas Athene. In this context, you could argue that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is in fact a backwards-looking, unoriginal work of art, a recycling of the 19th century's biggest cliches - "loose women" cavorting in exotic interiors. So what is so new, so radical about this oil painting?
The oil painting is square to the eye which disposes you to attend to space and symmetry. Or rather, the squareness puts you on your mettle, to look at this perpetual motion machine that never loses its vitality.
Picasso worked on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as he had never worked on any oil painting before. One art historian has even claimed that the hundreds of oil paintings and drawings produced during its six-month gestation constitute "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?
He started out with the idea of a brothel scene. The oil painting was to have a male customer in it, a sailor, or the artist himself. It would have been a shocking slice of contemporary Parisian life, not that far removed from Toulouse-Lautrec or all the other cynically honest "painters of modern life". But you don't think about any of this, or make any of those connections, when you stand in front of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
This is true even in reproduction. Try an experiment. Look directly at Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and speculate on its meaning. You can't. You never get as far as deciding it is a painting of five women, let alone concluding that they're prostitutes, or that it reflects male fears, or reach for any of the neat ways we customarily turn images into words. In order to interpret it, you must look away, or unfocus your eyes. Actually looking at the painting means moving constantly from one facet to another; it never lets you settle on one resolved perception.
Most of all, this is a painting about looking. Picasso looks back at you in the central figure, whose bold gaze out of huge asymmetrical eyes has the authority of a self-portrait. It's interesting that we're trained to see transvestite self-portraits in the art of Leonardo or Marcel Duchamp, but it doesn't often occur to us to understand this painting in that way, misled as we are by the caricatures of Picasso as a patriarchal voyeur. What he painted in 1907 is a work of art that looks back at you with furious contempt.
After the first world war, Andr 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. Even in a world that no longer worships painting, this painting is unsurpassed. It anticipates the end of painting, gladly contemplates the cultural destructions Picasso was to step back from. There's something anarchist and ruthless about it that contains dada and Marcel Duchamp and punk.
So - a centenary. If you care about modern art, this is its centenary. Works of art settle down eventually, become respectable. But, 100 years on, Picasso's is still so new, so troubling, it would be an insult to call it a masterpiece.
