The Ladies of Avignon - Short Commentary

The Avignon ladies or in French as it is also known Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, is one of the icons of painting throughout the twentieth century, as it was the initiator of a new movement avant-garde, Cubism, which was headed by one of the most important painters in history Of art, Pablo Picasso, that he made it in 1907. Next, in this lesson from a TEACHER we offer you a brief commentary on The Ladies of Avignon, which is currently exhibited at the MoMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Index

1. Theme of the Ladies of Avignon
2. Technical analysis of the Ladies of Avignon
3. Conclusion on the Ladies of Avignon

We will start this comment from The Avignon ladies speaking of the subject that is narrated in said work of art. Apparently Pablo Picasso at the time of making this painting was inspired by a brothel that was in the Barcelona street of Avignon, to which according to the artist he had a certain affection because that street was where he bought a lot of the papers and watercolors to paint.

The Avignon ladies It is a painting where you can see the presence of five nude female figures that can be arranged in three vertical lines:

The two central figures

Covered in part by towels but without hiding their nudity that is can be classified as the most "classic", because despite being reduced to the most schematic forms, the position of carrying the arms raised behind their heads can remind us of the "venus" of other artistic stages.

In addition, if we look closely, they are the only ones that have been represented since a frontal point of view, since in the other three figures the frontal and lateral point of view alternates.

The figure on the left

He appears in profile as if coming out from behind reddish curtains, with a kind of silk or satin robe, allowing us to see his thighs and breasts, this being the one with the darker skin tone perhaps alluding to the racial differences between the different prostitutes in the brothel.

The figure on the far right

We see again the presence of two figures, one that is squatting and the other standing, which are the ones that appear with a treatment that is more distant from what is conventional painting, since their faces are absolutely deformed perhaps keeping a certain resemblance to African masks.

All come to occupy almost the entirety of the canvas, in a flat space devoid of perspective, in which only two colors can be distinguished, the reddish of the curtain on the left and the blue that occupies the center and right of the painting, which makes it impossible for us to know if the scene takes place outdoors or inside.

In the lower part of the composition, the presence of a still life formed by a slice of watermelon, a bunch and grapes and a couple of pears that, like the women, have been reduced to more schematic and simplified geometric shapes.

We continue this brief comment from The Avignon ladies to talk now about the technique. Picasso used the technique of oil on canvas to paint this picture; As for the size of the format, they are 243.9 x 233.7 cm.

Regarding the colors, they are about warm colors, with wide brushstrokes, without using any type of degradation, that is to say, they are flat colors, ignoring the games of shadows, which in turn gave volume to the work, lighting and perspectives that until then had been one of the principles most followed and studied by artists, so the work is represented in the foreground, and lacks background.

Picasso was true to his principles cubists, this being one of his first paintings where he wanted to represent a new way of seeing reality. How? Making the impossible the possible, because he is going to capture all the dimensions seen from a single plane, which is what is known as "Multiple perspective", that is, to make it even clearer to us, if you face another person who is, for example, in profile, one of his eyes will not be able to see it.

Well, that's what Picasso is going to do in his cubist paintings that, although choosing a single point of view, will represent each and every one of the sides producing that deformation that also simplifies to schematic forms, although in this case they are still figurative.

In this other lesson from a TEACHER we will discover the relationship between Picasso and cubism.

To end this comment from The Avignon ladies we will give way to the conclusions. It is clear when contemplating this work that Picasso wanted to innovate and interpret reality in his own way, reducing everything to geometric and highly schematic shapes, something that Cézanne had done previously in his compositions and that Picasso was able to let himself be influenced by him, since on some occasion he made it clear that he was an artist who it was very interesting.

Also interesting is the fact that one of the women's faces closely resembles an african mask as we said before and it is that in those times many exhibitions took place in Paris linked to Iberian, Celtic, Egyptian, African art... which until then had never been seen before. They had seen, they were therefore very different from European cultures, and Picasso perhaps with this representation wanted to make it clear that he allowed himself to be swallowed by these beautiful civilizations.

As a curiosity we have to say that Picasso kept this painting for several years in his studio for fear that his work would not be understood, a work in addition where over six months Picasso would do around 800 between drawings and sketches where you can see the evolution that followed to represent what we see today.

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