Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Expressionism Art Girl Before a Mirror

Painting by Pablo Picasso

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
English: The Ladies of Avignon
Creative person	Pablo Picasso
Year	1907
Medium	Oil on sheet
Movement	Proto-Cubism
Dimensions	243.9 cm × 233.7 cm (96 in × 92 in)
Location	Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Heritance, New York City[1]

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon ( The Young Ladies of Avignon , originally titled The Brothel of Avignon )^[2] is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, Espana. Each effigy is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with athwart and disjointed body shapes. The figure on the left exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian manner. The 2 next figures are shown in the Iberian manner of Picasso'south native Kingdom of spain, while the two on the correct are shown with African mask-like features. The ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic manner of compelling, even cruel force."^{[3] [4] [v]}

In this adaptation of primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. This proto-cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early evolution of both cubism and modern art.

Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial and led to widespread acrimony and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke withal indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle. Georges Braque besides initially disliked the painting still perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great item. His subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the cubist revolution.^{[6] [7]} Its resemblance to Cézanne's The Bathers, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the 5th Seal has been widely discussed by later critics.

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was accounted immoral.^[8] The work, painted in Picasso's studio in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, at an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon. It was at this exhibition that Salmon (who had previously titled the painting in 1912 Le bordel philosophique) renamed the work its current, less scandalous title, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, instead of the title originally chosen by Picasso, Le Bordel d'Avignon.^{[two] [6] [9] [10]} Picasso, who always referred to it as mon bordel ("my brothel"),^[viii] or Le Bordel d'Avignon,^[9] never liked Salmon'southward championship and would take instead preferred the bowdlerization Las chicas de Avignon ("The Girls of Avignon").^[2]

Background and development [edit]

Picasso came into his own as an important artist during the first decade of the 20th century. He arrived in Paris from Spain around the turn of the century as a immature, aggressive painter out to brand a name for himself. For several years he alternated between living and working in Barcelona, Madrid and the Spanish countryside, and made frequent trips to Paris.

Past 1904, he was fully settled in Paris and had established several studios, important relationships with both friends and colleagues. Betwixt 1901 and 1904, Picasso began to achieve recognition for his Blueish Period paintings. In the main these were studies of poverty and desperation based on scenes he had seen in Spain and Paris at the plow of the century. Subjects included gaunt families, blind figures, and personal encounters; other paintings depicted his friends, simply almost reflected and expressed a sense of blueness and despair.^[11]

He followed his success by developing into his Rose Period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his piece of work. The Rose period depictions of acrobats, circus performers and theatrical characters are rendered in warmer, brighter colors and are far more hopeful and joyful in their depictions of the bohemian life in the Parisian advanced and its environs. The Rose period produced two of import large masterpieces: Family of Saltimbanques (1905), which recalls the work of Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) and Édouard Manet (1832–1883); and Boy Leading a Horse (1905–06), which recalls Cézanne's Bather (1885–1887) and El Greco's Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597–1599). While he already had a considerable following by the middle of 1906, Picasso enjoyed farther success with his paintings of massive oversized nude women, monumental sculptural figures that recalled the piece of work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive (African, Micronesian, Native American) art. He began exhibiting his work in the galleries of Berthe Weill (1865–1951) and Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), rapidly gaining a growing reputation and a following amongst the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse.^[11]

Picasso became a favorite of the American art collectors Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo effectually 1905. The Steins' older blood brother Michael and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein.^[12]

Gertrude Stein began acquiring Picasso's drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her breezy Salon at her home in Paris. At one of her gatherings in 1905 he met Henri Matisse (1869–1954), who was to become in those days his primary rival, although in later years a shut friend. The Steins introduced Picasso to Claribel Cone (1864–1929), and her sis Etta Cone (1870–1949), also American fine art collectors, who began to learn Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy, and Michael and Sarah Stein became important patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein connected to collect Picasso.^[13]

Rivalry with Matisse [edit]

Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre (1905–06), oil on canvass, 175 × 241 cm. Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA. A painting that was called Fauvist and brought Matisse both public derision and notoriety. Hilton Kramer wrote: "owing to its long sequestration in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, which never permitted its reproduction in color, information technology is the to the lowest degree familiar of modern masterpieces. All the same this painting was Matisse's own response to the hostility his work had met with in the Salon d'Automne of 1905."^[14]

The Salon d'Automne of 1905 brought notoriety and attending to the works of Henri Matisse and the Les Fauves grouping. The latter gained their name after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"),^[15] contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.^[16] Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), an artist whom Picasso knew and admired and who was not a Fauve, had his big jungle scene The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope as well hanging nigh the works by Matisse and which may have had an influence on the particular sarcastic term used in the printing.^[17] Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaper Gil Blas, and passed into popular usage.^{[16] [eighteen]}

Although the pictures were widely derided—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", declared the critic Camille Mauclair (1872–1945)—they also attracted some favorable attention.^[16] The painting that was singled out for the nearly attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat; the buy of this piece of work by Gertrude and Leo Stein had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.^[16]

Matisse's notoriety and preeminence every bit the leader of the new movement in mod painting continued to build throughout 1906 and 1907, and Matisse attracted a following of artists including Georges Braque (1880–1963), André Derain (1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958). Picasso'southward piece of work had passed through his Blue flow and his Rose catamenia and while he had a considerable following his reputation was tame in comparison to his rival Matisse. The larger theme of Matisse's influential Le bonheur de vivre, an exploration of "The Golden Age", evokes the historic "Ages of Human" theme and the potentials of a provocative new historic period that the twentieth century era offered. An equally assuming, similarly themed painting titled The Gilded Age, completed by Derain in 1905, shows the transfer of man ages in an even more direct way.^[19]

Matisse and Derain shocked the French public once more at the March 1907 Société des Artistes Indépendants when Matisse exhibited his painting Blue Nude and Derain contributed The Bathers. Both paintings evoke ideas of homo origins (world beginnings, evolution) an increasingly important theme in Paris at this time.^[19] The Blue Nude was one of the paintings that would afterwards create an international sensation at the Arsenal Prove of 1913 in New York City.^[20]

From Oct 1906 when he began preparatory work for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, until its completion in March 1907, Picasso was vying with Matisse to exist perceived as the leader of Modern painting. Upon its completion the shock and the touch of the painting propelled Picasso into the heart of controversy and all merely knocked Matisse and Fauvism off the map, virtually ending the motility by the post-obit yr. In 1907 Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris past Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). Kahnweiler was a German fine art historian and collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent in Paris beginning in 1907 for being amid the first champions of Picasso, and peculiarly his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized every bit i of the important leaders of Modern fine art aslope Henri Matisse, who had been the undisputed leader of Fauvism and who was more than than x years older than he, and his contemporaries the Fauvist André Derain and the onetime Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque.^[21]

In his 1992 essay Reflections on Matisse, the art critic Hilton Kramer wrote,

After the impact of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, however, Matisse was never again mistaken for an advanced incendiary. With the bizarre painting that appalled and electrified the cognoscenti, which understood the Les Demoiselles was at once a response to Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre (1905–1906) and an attack upon the tradition from which it derived, Picasso finer appropriated the role of avant-garde wild beast—a role that, as far as public opinion was concerned, he was never to relinquish.^[22]

Kramer goes on to say,

Whereas Matisse had drawn upon a long tradition of European painting—from Giorgione, Poussin, and Watteau to Ingres, Cézanne, and Gauguin—to create a modern version of a pastoral paradise in Le bonheur de vivre, Picasso had turned to an alien tradition of archaic fine art to create in Les Demoiselles a netherworld of strange gods and violent emotions. As between the mythological nymphs of Le bonheur de vivre and the grotesque effigies of Les Demoiselles, at that place was no question as to which was the more than shocking or more intended to exist shocking. Picasso had unleashed a vein of feeling that was to accept immense consequences for the art and civilisation of the modern era while Matisse's ambition came to seem, every bit he said in his Notes of a Painter, more express—limited that is, to the realm of artful pleasure. There was thus opened up, in the very first decade of the century and in the work of its two greatest artists, the chasm that has continued to divide the art of the modern era down to our own time.^[23]

Influences [edit]

Picasso created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the final work.^{[9] [24]} He long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced past African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke effigy from Congo and then owned past Matisse. It was later that nighttime that Picasso's offset studies for what would get Les Demoiselles d'Avignon were created.^[xix] Several experts maintain that, at the very to the lowest degree, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known afterward as the Musée de fifty'Homme) in the jump of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. ^{[25] [26]} He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, and so also considered examples of "primitive" fine art.^[xix]

El Greco [edit]

Pablo Picasso, Nus (Nudes), 1905, graphite on paper

El Greco'due south paintings, such as this Apocalyptic Vision of Saint John, take been suggested every bit a source of inspiration for Picasso leading up to Les Demoiselles d' Avignon.^[xi]

In 1907, when Picasso began work on Les Demoiselles, 1 of the quondam master painters he greatly admired was El Greco (1541–1614), who at the time was largely obscure and under-appreciated. Picasso'south friend Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945) caused El Greco'southward masterpiece, the Opening of the Fifth Seal, in 1897 for 1000 pesetas.^{[27] [28]} The relation between Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Opening of the Fifth Seal was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship betwixt the motifs and visually identifying qualities of both works were analyzed.^{[29] [thirty]}

El Greco'south painting, which Picasso studied repeatedly in Zuloaga'due south business firm, inspired not just the size, format, and composition of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, but also its apocalyptic ability.^[31] Later, speaking of the work to Dor de la Souchère in Antibes, Picasso said: "In whatever case, only the execution counts. From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Castilian origin and that I invented Cubism. We must expect for the Spanish influence in Cézanne. Things themselves necessitate information technology, the influence of El Greco, a Venetian painter, on him. But his structure is Cubist."^[32]

The relationship of the painting to other grouping portraits in the Western tradition, such as Diana and Callisto by Titian (1488–1576), and the same subject by Rubens (1577–1640), in the Prado, has also been discussed.^[33]

Cézanne and Cubism [edit]

Both Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) were accorded major posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in Paris between 1903 and 1907, and both were important influences on Picasso and instrumental to his creation of Les Demoiselles. Co-ordinate to the English art historian, collector and author of The Cubist Epoch, Douglas Cooper, both of those artists were particularly influential to the formation of Cubism and specially of import to the paintings of Picasso during 1906 and 1907.^[34] Cooper goes on to say however Les Demoiselles is ofttimes erroneously referred to as the first Cubist painting. He explains,

The Demoiselles is mostly referred to as the first Cubist picture. This is an exaggeration, for although it was a major first step towards Cubism it is not yet Cubist. The confusing, expressionist element in it is even contrary to the spirit of Cubism, which looked at the earth in a detached, realistic spirit. Nevertheless, the Demoiselles is the logical picture show to take as the starting point for Cubism, because it marks the birth of a new pictorial idiom, because in it Picasso violently overturned established conventions and because all that followed grew out of it.^[35]

Although not well known to the full general public prior to 1906, Cézanne's reputation was highly regarded in advanced circles, every bit evidenced by Ambroise Vollard's involvement in showing and collecting his piece of work, and past Leo Stein's interest. Picasso was familiar with much of Cézanne's work that he saw at Vollard's gallery and at the Stein's. After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly impacted the management that the advanced in Paris took, lending credence to his position equally ane of the about influential artists of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism. The 1907 Cézanne exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cézanne equally an important painter whose ideas were especially resonant especially to young artists in Paris.^{[11] [36]}

Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for their proto-Cubist works in Paul Cézanne, who said to detect and larn to run into and treat nature every bit if information technology were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Cézanne's explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Le Fauconnier, Gris and others to experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same bailiwick, and, eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus sparked one of the virtually revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.^[36]

Gauguin and Primitivism [edit]

Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage), partially glazed stoneware, 75 × 19 × 27 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Pablo Picasso's paintings of awe-inspiring figures from 1906 were directly influenced by Gauguin. The vicious power evoked by Gauguin's piece of work led directly to Les Demoiselles in 1907.^[37]

During the tardily 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Oceanic and Native American art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those cultures. Effectually 1906, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and other artists in Paris had acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture,^[38] African art and tribal masks, in function because of the compelling works of Paul Gauguin that had suddenly achieved center stage in the advanced circles of Paris. Gauguin'due south powerful posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1903^[39] and an fifty-fifty larger one in 1906^[40] had a stunning and powerful influence on Picasso's paintings.^[11]

In the autumn of 1906, Picasso followed his previous successes with paintings of oversized nude women, and awe-inspiring sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive art. Pablo Picasso's paintings of massive figures from 1906 were straight influenced by Gauguin'southward sculpture, painting and his writing as well. The vicious ability evoked past Gauguin's work lead directly to Les Demoiselles in 1907.^[11]

According to Gauguin biographer David Sweetman, Pablo Picasso every bit early on as 1902 became an aficionado of Gauguin's work when he met and befriended the expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio, in Paris. Durrio had several of Gauguin's works on paw because he was a friend of Gauguin'due south and an unpaid agent of his work. Durrio tried to aid his poverty-stricken friend in Tahiti by promoting his oeuvre in Paris. After they met Durrio introduced Picasso to Gauguin's stoneware, helped Picasso brand some ceramic pieces and gave Picasso a first La Plumage edition of Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin. ^[41]

Apropos Gauguin's impact on Picasso, art historian John Richardson wrote,

The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin'southward work left Picasso more than ever in this artist'due south thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the most disparate types of fine art—non to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths, and much else besides—could be combined into a synthesis that was of its fourth dimension yet timeless. An creative person could besides derange conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark gods (not necessarily Tahitian ones) and borer a new source of divine energy. If in later years Picasso played down his debt to Gauguin, at that place is no doubt that betwixt 1905 and 1907 he felt a very shut kinship with this other Paul, who prided himself on Spanish genes inherited from his Peruvian grandmother. Had non Picasso signed himself 'Paul' in Gauguin'due south honor.^[42]

Both David Sweetman and John Richardson signal to Gauguin's Oviri (literally meaning 'savage'), a gruesome phallic representation of the Tahitian goddess of life and death intended for Gauguin's grave. First exhibited in the 1906 retrospective, it was probable a straight influence on Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes,

Gauguin'south statue Oviri, which was prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso'southward involvement in both sculpture and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in print-making, though it was the element of the primitive in all of them which virtually conditioned the management that Picasso'southward art would have. This involvement would culminate in the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.^[43]

According to Richardson,

Picasso's interest in stoneware was further stimulated past the examples he saw at the 1906 Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d'Automne. The most agonizing of those ceramics (one that Picasso might have already seen at Vollard'due south) was the gruesome Oviri. Until 1987, when the Musée d'Orsay caused this little-known work (exhibited simply once since 1906) information technology had never been recognized as the masterpiece it is, let alone recognized for its relevance to the works leading up to the Demoiselles. Although merely under thirty inches loftier, Oviri has an crawly presence, as befits a monument intended for Gauguin'due south grave. Picasso was very struck by Oviri. fifty years afterward he was delighted when [Douglas] Cooper and I told him that we had come upon this sculpture in a drove that likewise included the original plaster of his Cubist head. Has it been a revelation, like Iberian sculpture? Picasso's shrug was grudgingly affirmative. He was always loath to acknowledge Gauguin's part in setting him on the road to primitivism.^[44]

African and Iberian art [edit]

Female musician from the "Relief of Osuna", Iberian, ca. 200 BC

Iberian female person sculpture from 3rd or 2nd century BC

This fashion influenced Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Europe's colonization of Africa led to many economic, social, political, and even creative encounters. From these encounters, Western visual artists became increasingly interested in the unique forms of African art, particularly masks from the Niger-Congo region. In an essay by Dennis Duerden, author of African Art (1968), The Invisible Present (1972), and a one-time director of the BBC World Service, the mask is defined every bit "very frequently a complete head-dress and non just that part that conceals the face up".^[45] This form of visual art and prototype appealed to Western visual artists, leading to what Duerden calls the "discovery" of African art past Western practitioners, including Picasso.

African Fang mask like in mode to those Picasso saw in Paris just prior to painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The stylistic sources for the heads of the women and their caste of influence has been much discussed and debated, in particular the influence of African tribal masks, fine art of Oceania,^[46] and pre-Roman Iberian sculptures. The rounded contours of the features of the three women to the left can be related to Iberian sculpture, but not obviously the fragmented planes of the two on the right, which indeed seem influenced by African masks.^[47] Lawrence Weschler says that,

in many ways, much of the moldering cultural and fifty-fifty scientific ferment that characterized the start decade and a half of the twentieth century and that laid the foundations for much of what we today consider mod tin be traced dorsum to ways in which Europe was already wrestling with its bad-faith, ofttimes strenuously repressed, knowledge of what it had been doing in Africa. The example of Picasso virtually launching cubism with his 1907 Desmoiselles d'Avignon, in response to the sorts of African masks and other colonial booty he was encountering in Paris'south Musee de 50'Homme, is obvious.^[5]

Congo masks published by Leo Frobenius in his 1898 volume Die Masken und Geheimbunde Afrika

Private collections and illustrated books featuring African art in this period were as well important. While Picasso emphatically denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art? Never heard of it!" (50'art nègre? Connais pas!),^{[9] [48]} this is belied by his deep interest in the African sculptures endemic by Matisse and his close friend Guiliaume Apollinaire.^[19] Since none of the African masks one time thought to have influenced Picasso in this painting were available in Paris at the time work was painted, he is thought now to have studied African mask forms in an illustrated volume by anthropologist Leo Frobenius.^[nineteen] Primitivism continues in his work during, before and subsequently the painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, from spring 1906 through the spring of 1907. Influences from ancient Iberian sculpture are as well important.^{[xi] [49]} Some Iberian reliefs from Osuna, and so simply recently excavated, were on display in the Louvre from 1904. Archaic Greek sculpture has besides been claimed as an influence.

The influence of African sculpture became an event in 1939, when Alfred Barr claimed that the primitivism of the Demoiselles derived from the art of Côte d'Ivoire and the French Congo.^[50] Picasso insisted that the editor of his catalogue raissonne, Christian Zervos, publish a disclaimer: the Demoiselles, he said, owed nothing to African art, everything to the reliefs from Osuna that he had seen in the Louvre a year or and then before.^[51] Nonetheless, he is known to have seen African tribal masks while working on the painting, during a visit to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero with Andre Malraux in March 1907, about which he later said "When I went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market place, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed, I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, correct. The masks weren't like whatsoever other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things."^{[nine] [52] [53]} Maurice de Vlaminck is often credited with introducing Picasso to African sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.^[54]

Picasso biographer John Richardson recounts in A Life of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907–1916, art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's recollection of his starting time visit to Picasso'southward studio in July 1907. Kahnweiler remembers seeing "dusty stacks of canvases" in Picasso'south studio and "African sculptures of purple severity". Richardson comments: "so much for Picasso's story that he was non still aware of Tribal fine art.'"^[55] A photo of Picasso in his studio surrounded past African sculptures c.1908, is establish on page 27 of that aforementioned volume.^[56]

Suzanne Preston Blier says that, like Gauguin and several other artists in this era, Picasso used illustrated books for many of his preliminary studies for this painting. In addition to the Frobenius book, his sources included a 1906 publication of a twelfth-century Medieval art manuscript on architectural sculpture by Villiard de Honnecourt and a book by Carl Heinrich Stratz of pseudo-pornography showing photos and drawings of women from around the world organized to evoke ideas of homo origins and development. Blier suggests that this helps account for the diversity of styles Picasso employed in his image-filled sketchbooks for this painting. These books, and other sources such equally cartoons, Blier writes, also offer hints as to the larger significant of this painting.^[19]

Mathematics [edit]

An illustration from Jouffret's Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions. The volume, which influenced Picasso, was given to him by Princet.

Maurice Princet,^[57] a French mathematician and actuary, played a role in the birth of Cubism as an associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris and subsequently Marcel Duchamp. Princet became known as "le mathématicien du cubisme" ("the mathematician of cubism").^{[58] [59]}

Princet is credited with introducing the work of Henri Poincaré and the concept of the "time" to artists at the Bateau-Lavoir.^[60] Princet brought to the attending of Picasso, Metzinger and others, a volume past Esprit Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1903),^[61] a popularization of Poincaré'due south Scientific discipline and Hypothesis in which Jouffret described hypercubes and other circuitous polyhedra in four dimensions and projected them onto the two-dimensional surface. Picasso's sketchbooks for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon illustrate Jouffret's influence on the artist's work.^[62]

Impact [edit]

Although Les Demoiselles had an enormous and profound influence on modern art, its impact was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. At get-go, just Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work. Before long subsequently the belatedly summertime of 1907, Picasso and his long-fourth dimension lover Fernande Olivier (1881–1966) had a parting of the ways. The re-painting of the 2 heads on the far right of Les Demoiselles fueled speculation that it was an indication of the carve up betwixt Picasso and Olivier. Although they later reunited for a catamenia, the relationship ended in 1912.^[63]

A photograph of the Les Demoiselles was first published in an article by Gelett Burgess entitled "The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves", The Architectural Tape, May 1910.^[64]

Les Demoiselles would non be exhibited until 1916, and not widely recognized equally a revolutionary achievement until the early on 1920s, when André Breton (1896–1966) published the piece of work.^[24] The painting was reproduced once more in Cahiers d'art (1927), within an article dedicated to African art.^[65]

Richardson goes on to say that Matisse was fighting mad upon seeing the Demoiselles at Picasso'south studio. He let it exist known that he regarded the painting equally an endeavour to ridicule the modern movement; he was outraged to observe his sensational Blue Nude, not to speak of Bonheur de vivre, overtaken by Picasso's "hideous" whores. He vowed to get even and make Picasso beg for mercy. Just as the Bonheur de vivre had fueled Picasso's competitiveness, Les Demoiselles now fueled Matisse's.^[66]

Among Picasso'south airtight circumvolve of friends and colleagues there was a mixture of opinions about Les Demoiselles. Georges Braque and André Derain were both initially troubled by information technology although they were supportive of Picasso. According to William Rubin, 2 of Picasso'southward friends, the art critic André Salmon and the painter Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), were enthusiastic about it while Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) wasn't. Both the art dealer-collector Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), and Kahnweiler were more enthusiastic about the painting however.^[67]

According to Kahnweiler Les Demoiselles was the showtime of Cubism. He writes:

Early in 1907 Picasso began a foreign large painting depicting women, fruit and drapery, which he left unfinished. It cannot exist chosen other than unfinished, fifty-fifty though it represents a long catamenia of work. Begun in the spirit of the works of 1906, it contains in one section the endeavors of 1907 and thus never constitutes a unified whole.

The nudes, with big, quiet eyes, stand up rigid, like mannequins. Their stiff, circular bodies are mankind-colored, black and white. That is the style of 1906.

In the foreground, yet, conflicting to the fashion of the rest of the painting, appear a crouching figure and a bowl of fruit. These forms are drawn angularly, not roundly modeled in chiaroscuro. The colors are luscious blue, strident yellow, side by side to pure blackness and white. This is the beginning of Cubism, the outset upsurge, a drastic titanic clash with all of the problems at in one case.

—Kahnweiler, 1920^[68]

Public view and title [edit]

From xvi to 31 July 1916 Les Demoiselles was exhibited to the public for the first time at the Salon d'Antin, an exhibition organized by André Salmon titled 50'Art moderne en France. The exhibition space at 26 rue d'Antin was lent by the famous couturier and fine art collector Paul Poiret. The larger Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants had been airtight due to World War I, making this the only Cubists' exhibition in France since 1914.^[69] On 23 July 1916 a review was published in Le Cri de Paris:^[lxx]

The Cubists are not waiting for the war to terminate to recommence hostilities against good sense. They are exhibiting at the Galerie Poiret naked women whose scattered parts are represented in all four corners of the sail: hither an middle, there an ear, over at that place a mitt, a foot on top, a mouth below. M. Picasso, their leader, is possibly the to the lowest degree disheveled of the lot. He has painted, or rather daubed, five women who are, if the truth be told, all hacked up, and yet their limbs somehow manage to hold together. They have, moreover, piggish faces with optics wandering negligently above their ears. An enthusiastic fine art-lover offered the artist 20,000 francs for this masterpiece. M. Picasso wanted more. The art-lover did non insist.^{[69] [70]}

Picasso referred to his but entry at the Salon d'Antin every bit his Brothel painting calling it Le Bordel d'Avignon but André Salmon who had originally labeled the work, Le Bordel Philosophique, retitled it Les Demoiselles d'Avignon so every bit to lessen its scandalous touch on on the public. Picasso never liked the championship, nonetheless, preferring "las chicas de Avignon", but Salmon's title stuck.^[2] Leo Steinberg labels his essays on the painting after its original title. Co-ordinate to Suzanne Preston Blier, the discussion bordel in the painting's title, rather than evoking a business firm of prostitution (une maison close) instead more than accurately references in French a complex state of affairs or mess, This painting, Blier says, explores not prostitution per se, just instead sex and motherhood more than by and large, forth with the complexities of evolution in the colonial multi-racial world. The proper name Avignon, scholars argue,^{[ who? ]} not only references the street where Picasso once bought his pigment supplies (which had a few brothels), simply besides the home of Max Jacob's grandmother, whom Picasso jocularly identifies as one of the painting'due south diverse modernistic day subjects.^[nineteen]

The just other time the painting might have been exhibited to the public prior to a 1937 showing in New York was in 1918, in an exhibition defended to Picasso and Matisse at Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris, though very little data exists nearly this exhibition or the presence (if at all) of Les Demoiselles.^[69]

Afterwards, the painting was rolled upward and remained with Picasso until 1924 when, with urging and help from Breton and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), he sold it to designer Jacques Doucet (1853–1929), for 25,000 francs.^{[71] [72]}

Interpretation [edit]

Pablo Picasso, Caput of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), 1907, oil on sail, 61.4 × 47.half-dozen cm, The Museum of Mod Art, New York

Picasso drew each of the figures in Les Demoiselles differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the upper correct is rendered with heavy paint. Composed of sharp geometric shapes, her head is the most strictly Cubist of all five.^[73] The curtain seems to blend partially into her trunk. The Cubist caput of the crouching figure (lower right) underwent at to the lowest degree ii revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. She besides seems to have been drawn from 2 dissimilar perspectives at once, creating a confusing, twisted figure. The woman in a higher place her is rather manly, with a night face and square chest. The whole picture is in a two-dimensional style, with an abandoned perspective.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, particular of the figure to the upper right

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, detail of the figure to the lower right

Pablo Picasso, Nu aux bras levés (Nude), 1907

Pablo Picasso, 1907, Nu à la serviette, oil on canvas, 116 10 89 cm

Pablo Picasso, 1907, Femme nue, oil on canvas, 92 10 43 cm, Museo delle Culture, Milano

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 ascendant understanding for over 5 decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the starting time director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York Urban center and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can exist interpreted as evidence of a transitional catamenia in Picasso'due south fine art, an effort to connect his earlier piece of work to Cubism, the style he would assistance invent and develop over the adjacent five or half-dozen years.^[i] Suzanne Preston Blier says that the divergent styles of the painting were added intentionally to convey to each women fine art "style" attributes from the five geographic areas each woman represents.^[19]

Fine art critic John Berger, in his controversial 1965 biography The Success and Failure of Picasso,^[74] interprets Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as the provocation that led to Cubism:

Blunted by the insolence of so much recent art, we probably tend to underestimate the brutality of the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. All his friends who saw it in his studio were at get-go shocked by information technology. And it was meant to daze…

A brothel may not in itself be shocking. But women painted without charm or sadness, without irony or social annotate, women painted like the palings of a stockade through eyes that expect out as if at death – that is shocking. And every bit the method of painting. Picasso himself has said that he was influenced at the time by archaic Castilian (Iberian) sculpture. He was likewise influenced – particularly in the two heads at the right – by African masks…here it seems that Picasso's quotations are simple, direct, and emotional. He is not in the to the lowest degree concerned with formal problems. The dislocations in this picture are the event of aggression, not aesthetics; it is the nearest yous can get in a painting to an outrage…

I emphasize the fierce and iconoclastic aspect of this painting because it is usually enshrined as the great formal exercise which was the starting bespeak of Cubism. It was the starting indicate of Cubism, in then far as it prompted Braque to brainstorm painting at the cease of the yr his ain far more formal respond to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon…however if he had been left to himself, this moving-picture show would never have led Picasso to Cubism or to any way of painting remotely resembling it…It has nothing to exercise with that twentieth-century vision of the future which was the essence of Cubism.

Yet it did provoke the beginning of the great period of exception in Picasso'due south life. Nobody can know exactly how the change began inside Picasso. Nosotros tin can only annotation the results. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, different any previous painting by Picasso, offers no evidence of skill. On the contrary, it is clumsy, overworked, unfinished. It is equally though his fury in painting it was so peachy that it destroyed his gifts…

By painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Picasso provoked Cubism. It was the spontaneous and, as always, primitive insurrection out of which, for skilful historical reasons, the revolution of Cubism developed.^[74]

In 1972, art critic Leo Steinberg in his essay The Philosophical Brothel posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches—which had been ignored by nigh critics—he argued that far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles tin be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer. He 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 just furthering the intensity of their glare.^[1]

The primeval sketches feature two men inside the brothel; a sailor and a medical student (who was often depicted holding either a book or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a memento mori, a reminder of expiry). A trace of their presence at a table in the middle remains: the jutting edge of a table near the lesser of the canvas. The viewer, Steinberg says, has come to replace the sitting men, forced to confront the gaze of prostitutes caput on, invoking readings far more than complex than a simple apologue or the autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso'southward own history with women. A world of meanings so becomes possible, suggesting the piece of work as a meditation on the danger of sex, the "trauma of the gaze" (to employ a phrase of Rosalind Krauss'southward invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large.^[1]

According to Steinberg, the reversed gaze, that is, the fact that the figures look directly at the viewer, also as the thought of the cocky-possessed woman, no longer in that location solely for the pleasance of the male gaze, may be traced back to Manet'southward Olympia of 1863.^[1] William Rubin (1927–2006), the erstwhile Managing director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA wrote that "Steinberg was the first writer to come to grips with the sexual subject of the Demoiselles."^[75]

A few years after writing The Philosophical Brothel, Steinberg wrote farther nigh the revolutionary nature of Les Demoiselles:

Picasso was resolved to disengage the continuities of form and field which Western art had and so long taken for granted. The famous stylistic rupture at right turned out to be just a consummation. Overnight, the contrived coherences of representational art - the feigned unities of fourth dimension and place, the stylistic consistencies - all were alleged to exist fictional. The Demoiselles confessed itself a picture conceived in elapsing and delivered in spasms. In this one work Picasso discovered that the demands of discontinuity could be met on multiple levels: by cleaving depicted flesh; past elision of limbs and abbreviation; by slashing the spider web of connecting space; by precipitous changes of vantage; and by a sudden stylistic shift at the climax. Finally, the insistent staccato of the presentation was found to intensify the picture's address and symbolic accuse: the beholder, instead of observing a roomfuI of lazing whores, is targeted from all sides. And so far from suppressing the bailiwick, the fashion of organisation heightens its flagrant eroticism.^[76]

At the end of the first volume of his (and then far) 3 volume Picasso biography: A Life Of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881–1906, John Richardson comments on Les Demoiselles. Richardson says:

It is at this bespeak, the commencement of 1907, that I suggest to bring this first volume to an stop. The 25-year-onetime Picasso is most to conjure up a quintet of Dionysiac Demoiselles on his huge new sheet. The execution of this painting would make a dramatic climax to these pages. Withal, it would imply that Picasso's smashing revolutionary work constitutes a conclusion to all that has gone earlier. It does non. For all that the Demoiselles is rooted in Picasso'south past, not to speak of such precursors as the Iron Historic period Iberians, El Greco, Gauguin and Cézanne, it is essentially a beginning: the most innovative painting since Giotto. Every bit we will run into in the side by side volume, it established a new pictorial syntax; it enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds, new awareness. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the first unequivocally 20th-century masterpiece, a master detonator of the modern motility, the cornerstone of 20th-century art. For Picasso it would also be a rite of passage: what he called an exorcism.' It cleared the fashion for cubism. It likewise banished the creative person's demons. Later, these demons would return and require further exorcism. For the adjacent decade, however, Picasso would experience as gratis and artistic and 'equally overworked' as God.^[77]

Suzanne Preston Blier addresses the history and pregnant of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in a 2019 book in a different way, one that draws on her African art expertise and an array of newly discovered sources she unearthed. Blier addresses the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of women from around the earth that Picasso encountered in function through photographs and sculptures seen in illustrated books. These representations, Blier argues, are key to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles equally global figures – mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, living the colonial world Picasso inhabited. She says that Picasso has reunited these diverse women together in this strange cavern-similar (and womb-resembling) setting as a kind of global "time car" – each adult female referencing a different era, place of origins, and concomitant artistic style, as part of the broader ages of man them important to the new century, in which core themes of evolution took on an increasingly of import function. The two men (a crewman and a medico) depicted in some of the painting's earlier preparatory drawings, Blier suggests, likely correspond the male authors of two of the illustrated books that Picasso employed – the anthropologist Leo Frobenius as sailor, i travels the earth to. explore diverse ports of call and the Vienna medical physician, Karl Heinrich Stratz who holds a man skull or volume consistent with the detailed anatomical studies that he provides.^[19]

Blier is able to engagement the painting to late March 1907 directly following the opening of the Salon des Independents where Matisse and Derain had exhibited their own bold, emotionally charged "origins"-themed tableaux. The large scale of the canvas, Blier says, complements the important scientific and historical theme. The reunion of the mothers of each "race" within this human evolutionary framework, Blier maintains, also constitutes the larger "philosophy" behind the painting's original le bordel philosophique title – evoking the strong "mess" and "complex situation" (le bordel) that Picasso was exploring in this work. In contrast to Leo Steinberg and William Rubin who argued that Picasso had effaced the ii right hand demoiselles to repaint their faces with African masks in response to a crisis stemming from larger fears of death or women, an early on photo of the painting in Picasso's studio, Blier shows, indicates that the artist had portrayed African masks on these women from the outset consistent with their identities as progenitors of these races. Blier argues that the painting was largely completed in a single dark following a debate nigh philosophy with friends at a local Paris brasserie.^[19]

Buy [edit]

Jacques Doucet's hôtel particulier, 33 rue Saint-James, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1929 photograph Pierre Legrain

Jacques Doucet had seen the painting at the Salon d'Antin, notwithstanding remarkably seems to have purchased Les Demoiselles without asking Picasso to unroll it in his studio so that he could see information technology again.^[69] André Breton later described the transaction:

I remember the twenty-four hours he bought the painting from Picasso, who strange equally it may seem, appeared to be intimidated past Doucet and fifty-fifty offered no resistance when the cost was set at 25,000 francs: "Well then, it's agreed, M. Picasso." Doucet then said: "You lot shall receive 2,000 francs per month, commencement next month, until the sum of 25,000 francs is reached.^[69]

John Richardson quotes Breton in a letter to Doucet virtually Les Demoiselles writing:

through it one penetrates right into the core of Picasso'due south laboratory and because it is the crux of the drama, the center of all the conflicts that Picasso has given rise to and that volition last forever....It is a piece of work which to my mind transcends painting; it is the theater of everything that has happened in the last l years.^[78]

Ultimately, information technology seems Doucet paid thirty,000 francs rather than the agreed price.^[69] A few months afterwards the buy Doucet had the painting appraised at between 250,000 and 300,000 francs. Richardson speculates that Picasso, who by 1924 was on the top of the art world and didn't demand to sell the painting to Doucet, did so and at that low cost because Doucet promised Les Demoiselles would go to the Louvre in his will. However, after Doucet died in 1929 he did not leave the painting to the Louvre in his volition, and it was sold similar nigh of Doucet'south collection through individual dealers.^[69]

In Nov 1937 the Jacques Seligman & Co. art gallery in New York Urban center held an exhibition titled "xx Years in the Development of Picasso, 1903–1923" that included Les Demoiselles. The Museum of Modern Art caused the painting for $24,000. The museum raised $18,000 toward the purchase price by selling a Degas painting and the remainder came from donations from the co-owners of the gallery Germain Seligman and Cesar de Hauke.^[79]

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition on 15 November 1939 that remained on view until vii Jan 1940. The exhibition, entitled Picasso: 40 Years of His Fine art, was organized by Alfred H. Barr (1902–1981), in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition contained 344 works, including the major and then newly painted Guernica and its studies, as well as Les Demoiselles. ^[80]

Legacy [edit]

In July 2007, Newsweek published a two-page article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing information technology as the "most influential work of art of the concluding 100 years".^[81] Art critic Holland Cotter argued that Picasso "inverse history with this work. He'd replaced the benign ideal of the Classical nude with a new race of sexually armed and dangerous beings."^[82]

The painting is prominently featured in the 2018 season of the television series Genius which focuses on Picasso's life and work.

Painting materials [edit]

In 2003, an examination of the painting by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy performed by conservators at the Museum of Mod Art confirmed the presence of the post-obit pigments: lead white, bone black, vermilion, cadmium xanthous, cobalt blueish, emerald green, and native earth pigments (such as brownish ochre) that comprise iron.^{[83] [84]}

Notes [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b c d eastward} Steinberg, L., The Philosophical Brothel. October, no. 44, Spring 1988. 7–74. First published in Art News vol. LXXI, September/Oct 1972
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Richardson 1991, xix
3. ^ Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, Modernistic Art, Prentice-Hall, New York, 1977, pp. 135–136
4. ^ Gina Thousand. Rossetti, Imagining the Archaic in Naturalist and Modernist Literature, University of Missouri Press, 2006 ISBN 0826265030
5. ^ ^{a b} Weschler, Lawrence (31 January 2017). "Destroy this mad brute": The African root of World State of war I. ISBN9781632867186.
6. ^ ^{a b} John Golding, Visions of the Mod, University of California Press, 1994, ISBN 0520087925
7. ^ Emily Braun, Rebecca Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Drove, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014, ISBN 0300208073
8. ^ ^{a b} Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, edited by Christopher Greenish, Courtauld Constitute of Fine art, University of London, Cambridge University Printing, 2001
9. ^ ^{a b c d e} The Private Life of a Masterpiece Archived v February 2009 at the Wayback Car. BBC Serial 3, Episode ix. 17, 18
10. ^ Anne Baldassari, Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso, Recueil des Commémorations nationales 2007, France Archives, Portail National des Archives (French)]
11. ^ ^{a b c d e f chiliad} Melissa McQuillan, Pablo Picasso, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford Academy Press, 2009
12. ^ Picasso Portrait de Allan Stein. Jump 1906 Archived 9 February 2009 at the Wayback Motorcar. duvarpaper.com. Retrieved 27 November 2008.
13. ^ Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. Henry Holt, 2003. ISBN 0-8050-7351-five
14. ^ Kramer, Hilton. The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005, 2006, Reflections on Matisse, p. 162, ISBN 0-15-666370-viii
15. ^ Louis Vauxcelles, Le Salon d'Automne, Gil Blas, 17 Oct 1905. Screen 5 and six. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ISSN 1149-9397
16. ^ ^{a b c d} Chilver, Ian (Ed.). Fauvism, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, 2004. 26 December 2007.
17. ^ Smith, Roberta. Henri Rousseau: In imaginary jungles, a terrible beauty lurks. The New York Times, 14 July 2006. Retrieved 29 December 2007.
18. ^ Elderfield, 43
19. ^ ^{a b c d e f thou h i j k} Blier, Suzanne Preston (2019). Picasso's Demoiselles: the Untold Origins of a Mod Masterpiece . Durham, Northward Carolina: Duke University Press. ISBN978-1478000198.
20. ^ Matisse, Henri. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved thirty July 2007.
21. ^ "The Wild Men of Paris". The Architectural Tape, July 2002 (PDF). Retrieved 15 February 2009.
22. ^ Kramer, Hilton. "The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005, 2006". Reflections on Matisse. 162. ISBN 0-15-666370-eight
23. ^ Kramer, pp.162–163
24. ^ ^{a b} Richardson 1991, 43
25. ^ Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907–1916. pp. 24–26, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. ISBN 978-0-307-26665-1
26. ^ Timeline. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 20 April 2009.
27. ^ "The Vision of Saint John". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 18 February 2009.
28. ^ Horsley, Carter B. The Shock of the Old. The City Review, 2003. Retrieved 2 April 2009.
29. ^ Johnson, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Theater of the Absurd. 102–113
30. ^ Richardson, J. Picasso's Apocalyptic Whorehouse. forty–47
31. ^ Richardson 1991, 430
32. ^ D. de la Souchère, Picasso à Antibes, 15
33. ^ Green, 45–46
34. ^ Cooper, xx–27
35. ^ Cooper, 24
36. ^ ^{a b} Joann Moser, Jean Metzinger in Hindsight, Pre-Cubist works, 1904–1909, The University of Iowa Museum of Fine art, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press 1985, pp. 34-42
37. ^ Frèches-Thory, Claire; Zegers, Peter. The Art of Paul Gauguin. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Fine art, 1988. pp. 372–73. ISBN 0-8212-1723-2
38. ^ Blunt, 27
39. ^ Gauguin at the Salon d'Automne, 1903
40. ^ Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, 1906
41. ^ Sweetman, 563
42. ^ Richardson 1991, 461
43. ^ Sweetman, 562–563
44. ^ Richardson 1991, 459
45. ^ Duerden, Dennis (2000). The "Discovery" of the African Mask. pp. 29–45.
46. ^ Light-green is careful to use the two terms together throughout his give-and-take, 49–59
47. ^ Light-green, 58–ix
48. ^ Picasso's words were transcribed past Fels F., "Opinions sur l'fine art nègre". Action, Paris, 1920; and Daix, P. "Il n'y a pas d'art nègre dans les Demoiselles d'Avignon". In Gazette des Beaux-Arts Paris, Oct 1970. Both are quoted in Anne Baldassari, "Corpus ethnicum: Picasso et la photographie coloniale", in Zoos humains. De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows, Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, Eric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire, Edition La Découverte, 2002. 340–348
49. ^ Richardson 1991, 451
50. ^ Barr 1939, 55
51. ^ Daix, Pierre. "Il northward'y a pas d'art nègre dans les Demoiselles d'Avignon". Gazette des Beaux Arts, Paris, October 1970. 247–70
52. ^ Dark-green, 2005, discusses the visit, and also postcards of African people endemic past Picasso. 49–58
53. ^ "A magical encounter at the root of modern art". The Economist, 9 Feb 2006
54. ^ Edwards & Wood, 162
55. ^ Richardson 1991, 34
56. ^ Richardson 1991, p. 27
57. ^ Miller, Arthur I. (2001). Einstein, Picasso: Space, Fourth dimension, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. New York: Basic Books. p. 171. ISBN978-0-465-01860-4.
58. ^ Miller (2001). Einstein, Picasso. pp. 100. ISBN978-0-465-01859-8. Miller cites:
    • Salmon, André (1955). Souvenir sans fin, Première époque (1903–1908). Paris: Éditions Gallimard. p. 187.
    • Salmon, André (1956). Souvenir sans fin, Deuxième époque (1908–1920). Paris: Éditions Gallimard. p. 24.
    • Crespelle, Jean-Paul (1978). La Vie quotidienne à Montmartre au temps de Picasso, 1900-1910. Paris: Hachette. p. 120. ISBN978-2-01-005322-1.
59. ^ Décimo, Marc (2007). Maurice Princet, Le Mathématicien du Cubisme (in French). Paris: Éditions L'Echoppe. ISBN978-two-84068-191-five.
60. ^ Miller (2001). Einstein, Picasso. pp. 101. ISBN978-0-465-01859-8.
61. ^ Jouffret, Camaraderie (1903). Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions et introduction à la géométrie à n dimensions (in French). Paris: Gauthier-Villars. OCLC 1445172. Retrieved 6 Feb 2008.
62. ^ Miller. Einstein, Picasso. pp. 106–117.
63. ^ Richardson 1991, 47, 228
64. ^ Gelett Burgess, "The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves", The Architectural Record, May 1910
65. ^ Cahiers d'art : bulletin mensuel d'actualité artistique, 1927 (N1,A2)- (N10,A2), Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de French republic
66. ^ Richardson 1991, 45
67. ^ Rubin, 43–47
68. ^ Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, The Ascent of Cubism, New York, Wittenborn, Schultz. This is the starting time translation of the original German text entitled Der Weg zum Kubismus, Munich, Delphin-Verlag, 1920
69. ^ ^{a b c d eastward f m} Monica Bohm-Duchen, The Private Life of a Masterpiece, University of California Press, 2001, ISBN 9780520233782
70. ^ ^{a b} Lettres & Fine art, Cubistes, Le cri de Paris, 23 July 1916, p. 10, A20, No. 1008, Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
71. ^ Fluegel, 223
72. ^ Franck, 100
73. ^ Lemke, 31
74. ^ ^{a b} Berger, John (1965). The Success and Failure of Picasso. Penguin Books, Ltd. pp. 73–77. ISBN978-0-679-73725-four.
75. ^ Rubin (1994), 30
76. ^ [one] Leo Steinberg selections, http://world wide web.artchive.com. Retrieved 24 Feb 2009.
77. ^ Richardson John. A Life of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881–1906, Dionysos p. 475. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. ISBN 978-0-307-26666-viii
78. ^ John Richardson, with Marilyn McCully, A Life Of Picasso The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932, Albert A. Knopf 2007, p. 244, ISBN 978-0-307-26666-viii
79. ^ Fluegel, 309
80. ^ Fluegel, 350
81. ^ Plagens, Peter. Which Is the Virtually Influential Work of Art of the Last 100 Years?, Art, Newsweek, 2 July/ix July 2007, pp. 68–69
82. ^ Cotter, Holland (x February 2011). "When Picasso Changed His Tune". New York Times . Retrieved 1 June 2017.
83. ^ Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Conserving a modernistic masterpiece, Website of Museum of Modern Art, New York
84. ^ Pablo Picasso, 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' ColourLex

References [edit]

• Blier, Suzanne Preston. "Picasso'southward Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece." Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2019.
• Blunt, Anthony & Pool, Phoebe. Picasso, the Formative Years: A Report of His Sources. Graphic Society, 1962.
• Cooper, Douglas. The Cubist Epoch. Phaidon Press, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970. ISBN 0-87587-041-4
• Edwards, Steve & Forest, Paul. Art of the Avant-Gardes: Fine art of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. ISBN 1478000198
• Everdell, William R., Pablo Picasso: Seeing All Sides in The First Moderns, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
• Fluegel, Jane. Chronology. In: Pablo Picasso, Museum of Modernistic Art (exhibition catalog), 1980. William Rubin (ed.). ISBN 0-87070-519-nine
• Franck, Dan. Maverick Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Mod Art. Grove Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8021-3997-3
• Golding, J. The Demoiselles d'Avignon. The Burlington Mag, vol. 100, no. 662 (May 1958): 155–163.
• Light-green, Christopher. Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-300-10412-X
• Green, Christopher, Ed. Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Cambridge University Printing, 2001. ISBN 0 521 583675 PDF
• Klüver, Billy. A Day with Picasso. The MIT Press, 1999. ISBN 0-262-61147-three
• Kramer, Hilton,The Triumph of Modernism: The Art Earth, 1985–2005, 2006, ISBN 0-fifteen-666370-8
• Leighton, Patricia. The White Peril and Fifty'Art nègre; Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism. In: Race-ing Art History. Kymberly N. Pinder, editor, Routledge, New York, 2002. Pages 233–260. ISBN 0-415-92760-9
• Lemke, Sieglinde. Primitivist Modernism: Black Civilization and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. Oxford: Oxford Academy Press, 1998. ISBN 0-xix-510403-Ten
• Richardson John. A Life of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881–1906. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. ISBN 978-0-307-26666-8
• Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907–1916. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. ISBN 978-0-307-26665-1
• Richardson, John. A Life of Picasso The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932. New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2007. ISBN 978-0-307-26666-8
• Rubin, William. Pablo Picasso A Retrospective. MoMA, 1980. ISBN 0-87070-519-nine
• Rubin, William. Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism. HNA Books, 1989. ISBN 0-8109-6065-6
• Rubin, William. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. MoMA, 1994. ISBN 0-87070-519-9
• Rubin, William, Hélène Seckel & Judith Cousins, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, NY: Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 1995
• Sweetman, David. Paul Gauguin, A life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. ISBN 0-684-80941-9

External links [edit]

• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the MoMA Online Drove
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Conserving A Modern Masterpiece
• Julia Frey, Beefcake of a Masterpiece, New York Times Review of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon By William Rubin, Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins
• Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves, 1910 (PDF)
• Pablo Picasso, 1907, Five Nudes (Written report for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"), watercolor on wove paper, 17.5 x 22.five cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

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