Pablo Picasso, born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain wanted to develop a new way of discerning that reflected the modern age, and cubism is how he achieved this goal. Throughout his life he painted a numerous amount of cubism paintings and one of the main ones was called as ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’. This painting we are going to discuss to explain cubism and what it is all about.
Picasso wanted to focus on the difference between a painting and reality. Thus, cubism involves different ways of seeing, or perceiving, the world around us. Picasso believed in the concept of relativity – he took grouped both his observations and his memories when creating a cubist image. He felt that we do not see an object from one angle or perspective, but rather from many angles selected by sight and movement. As a result of this belief, cubism became about how to see an object or figure rather than what the artist was looking at.
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‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ was painted in 1907. This painting was by far the most famous example of cubism painting in our time. In this painting, Picasso held back from all known form and representation of traditional art. This painting is credited to be a work of his that is a transitional work from an old era to the new one being cubism. Art critic John Berger states that ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ is the prevocational piece that led to cubism. Picasso used distortion of female's body and geometric forms in an unusual way, which challenge the expectation that paintings will offer idealized representations of female beauty. The woman pulling the curtain on the upper right is rendered with heavy paint. Her head is composed of sharp geometric shapes. It is the most cubist of all five. The way the figures are painted and twisted was made to shock us, to see something so out of this world.
In my opinion it is so weirdly painted and the shapes, the forms of the women are so unproportionate so unflattering that it is unusual to think of them as escorts. Maybe Picasso didn’t want us to see them as escort but more as a work of art, so different of any other women who show their body. The reason to my opinion why their bodies are so weirdly painted is because Picasso didn’t want us to see the beautiful and skinny women but however the unattractive women and a new and fresh way to see them. Women that are painted with no charm, no irony.
Adding to John Berger’s statement, in 1972, art critic Leo Steinberg argued that “far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer”. He as well notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare.
Some critics argue that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's ‘Le Bonheur de Vivre’ and ‘Blue Nude’. This painting is the most innovative painting since Giotto. It established a new pictorial syntax; it enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds, new awareness. Unambiguously, ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ is the first unambiguous 20th-century masterpiece, a principal set off of the modern movement, the cornerstone of 20th-century art. For Picasso it would also be a rite of passage: what he called an ‘exorcism’. It cleared the way for cubism. It likewise banished the artist's demons. For the next decade, however, Picasso would feel as free and creative and 'as overworked' as God.
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