Project 4: Frames of Reference

MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) search results for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, viewed 14 March 2011 < http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79766 >

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)

Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 233.7 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

333.1939

1. Choose one of the artworks mentioned in the article and write a paragraph in your own words that summarises Spalding’s interpretation of the work.

Spaulding interpretation of the work is based on his knowledge of Picasso’s life - gifted painter at the age of sixteen; desire to paint feelings; studying and viewing art of the world; and a subject and fear that Picasso knew, brothels and venereal disease. Spaulding’s interpretation is woven with all of these aspects of Picasso’s life to provide a rational for the painting and his break from the conformity of painting traditions of the time and creating a new art form – cubism.

2. Write a paragraph that summaries the work from your personal perspective. Is your perspective different from Spalding’s? Why? What are the factors (social, cultural, political, educational etc.) that have contributed to the forming of your opinion?

This is an interesting exercise in that had I been given a copy of the image without reading Spalding and trying to locate a copy of the image and then reading several texts on the MoMA site my response would probably be entirely different but I’ll try to form the opinion I might have had before the readings.

I suspect I would have been inclined to say I didn’t understand the work. I’d need a gallery label to provide the context for me. The title I could roughly translate “The women of Avignon” but that is of no use to my understanding.

I’d question the gender of the subjects and might consider the person on the left to be a male figure and the seated one could either male or female. The faces of the two on the right did not seem to me to be masks but the artist’s distortion of their faces for some unknown reason. Since I saw male and female figures; white sheets – togas maybe; fruit on a table my mind though of an orgy; which might explain two of the party having their faces painted or masked to provide anonymity or intrigue. The reference to an orgy probably comes from historical readings about Romans – no wine here so not Romans – and social and cultural readings and movies involving orgies. If my reading is correct the artist’s intent may have to shock his audience considering the sheer size of the work 8 x 7 foot (approx 2.4 x 2.1 m). Picasso could also have been making a cliché statement about beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

Additional readings providing other reading of the image form staff at the MoMA

MoMA Gallery Label Text (same source as above)

2006

The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.

Publication Excerpts (same source as above)

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 64

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is one of the most important works in the genesis of modern art. The painting depicts five naked prostitutes in a brothel; two of them push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses—but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided or staring or asymmetrical, and the two women at the right have threatening masks for heads. The space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass. In the still life at the bottom, a piece of melon slices the air like a scythe.

The faces of the figures at the right are influenced by African masks, which Picasso assumed had functioned as magical protectors against dangerous spirits: this work, he said later, was his "first exorcism painting." A specific danger he had in mind was life-threatening sexual disease, a source of considerable anxiety in Paris at the time; earlier sketches for the painting more clearly link sexual pleasure to mortality. In its brutal treatment of the body and its clashes of color and style (other sources for this work include ancient Iberian statuary and the work of Paul Cézanne), Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective.

Other Texts (same source as above)

Audio Program excerpt

MoMA Audio: Collection, 2008

Curator, Ann Temkin: This painting is titled, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, "The women of Avignon," and it's Avignon Street in the city of Barcelona where Picasso was a young artist. The Demoiselles d'Avignon are actually five prostitutes, and these are five women—obviously naked—and they're looking at us as much as we're looking at them.

The very early studies show a sailor walking into this curtained room where the ladies stand and the woman on the far left now has the traces of having been that man entering the room, and you even feel a certain masculinity in the sort of sculptural carving of her body and the way that very large foot is stepping toward the others. It almost seems like its a build-up of geometric forms, and if you look at the chest of the woman at the very top right, you can see one of these cubes making up the space underneath her chin, thus the name Cubism.

One striking aspect of this painting is the way this stage on which these women are painted is almost looming out at the viewer. Rather than feeling like these women are nice and safely set back in some kind of room that you are peering into, I, at least, feel like the women are almost piled atop of each other and piled in such a way onto the canvas that they almost could step out of it at the viewer. It's part of the desire of the painting to confront you physically, psychologically, as well as intellectually, with everything that's going on in it.