The young ladies of Avignon: analysis and characteristics of Picasso's painting

Picture The Avignon ladies by Pablo Picasso, also known as The damsels of Avignon or The damsels of (the street) Avinyó, is considered the awakening of the cubist movement in the twentieth century. It is inserted in the proto-cubist stage of the painter from Malaga.

Picasso, who had already passed through various artistic stages, had encountered a limit. He thought that in art everything was done, that the work of the masters of the past could not be surpassed. He necessarily touched the rupture, the revolution, not only with the history of art, but with his own artistic path. It was thus that he began to work on this work in 1906 until it was completed in 1907.

The first exhibition of the work took place in 1916 at the Salon de Antin, Paris. It had no title, although it seems that Picasso called it The philosophical brothel. Name The Avignon ladies (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon) was awarded to him by the painter and critic André Salmon, as it reminded him of a brothel on Avinyó street in Barcelona, ​​in which the women were presented completely naked.

In that exhibition, held in the middle of World War I, the canvas went unnoticed and was necessary the intervention of figures such as Breton and Aragon for Jacques Doucet to buy it in 1921. In 1937 it was exhibited at the International Exhibition and finally, in 1939, it was acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in the United States, where it remains to this day.

Analysis

Santiago Sebastián tells in his book The "Guernica" and other works by Picasso: iconographic contexts, that Picasso did not let any visitor to his studio see his painting during the process of making, except for his fellow painters, from whom he expected an affirmation. However, most of them criticized him severely:

Matisse, to his irritation, thought the painting was an outrage and a mockery of modern art, and Georges Braque He gave the following comment: “It is as if we want to exchange our current food for another of tow and Petroleum". Apollinaire... stated that "they are like extensions of Nature... and do not pass through the intellect." (Santiago Sebastian)

The researcher rescues, however, the judgment of two key people in understanding, accepting and promotion of this Picassian canvas: Kahnweiler and Wilhelm Uhde, who gave a boost to the painter. What value did they find in this work? Why the box The Avignon ladies changed the history of art?

Iconographic description

On canvas with an area of ​​243.9 × 233.7 cm, Pablo Picasso depicts five naked or nearly naked women totally naked, which can be classified into two groups: the left and the right.

The group on the left is made up of three women standing in counterpost, barely dressed in a kind of suggestive tunic or cloth. The first of them poses in profile. The middle of her body seems to indicate the presence of a pink tunic that covers from her shoulder to her hips, and leaves her chest and legs exposed.

The second and third show more. While the second, fully facing the viewer, she barely has one thigh wrapped in the tunic, leaving the sex to the uncovered, the third, half-profile, covers her hips and genitals with the translucent cloth, which she calls to look through he.

The group on the left we see two women: one standing and the other sitting. Their human faces have been disfigured. Completely naked, the faces stand out because they look like African masks. The seated woman opens her legs and exhibits her sex openly, but this has not been detailed by the painter, but replaced by a flat surface.

The fund has lost all importance. The women seem to be wrapped in fabrics that hang from the ceiling, but the volume has disappeared. In front of all the women, just in the lower margin of the painting, a table with a basket of fruits can be seen. The table is angled towards the center of the frame. In the fruit bowl you can see an apple, a pear, a bunch of grapes and a melon. Who are they offered to? Perhaps the clients (spectators), perhaps the women?

The style

The aesthetic formulation of The Avignon ladies it foreshadowed Cubism, the first great avant-garde movement of the 20th century that would change art history. It was the result of the artistic path traveled by Picasso, who had previously passed different stages, all of them anchored to a certain extent to the tradition of academic art. In this context, the words of the art critic Santiago Sebastián make sense, because for him, The Avignon ladies “More than a painting it was an event”.

Inspired by the work of the post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, Picasso develops a new proposal. One of the essential references of Cézanne, who had died in 1906, would be the painting The three bathers. This painting by Cézanne may have inspired the drawing of one of the seated figure in the right corner of the Picassian canvas.

Experts have also found correspondences between The Avignon ladies with the work Vision of the apocalypse del Greco; the play Judgment of Paris of Rubens; African art; Assyrian and Egyptian art; Iberian art (of which he kept some pieces) and, finally, scientific studies on the fourth dimension. With all this in mind, the painter from Malaga would reorient his artistic path.

On The Avignon ladies, Pablo Picasso reveals a new way of conceiving plastic language, in which, without losing figurativeism, he decomposes or synthesizes figures by means of geometric elements.

Likewise, Picasso introduces the superposition of different planes on a single surface (even on each figure). Thus, we see "incongruous" elements such as eyes from the front and noses in profile, to refer to an example. Picasso wanted to represent all possible points of view on a single surface. This then constituted a true break with the Western pictorial tradition.

The volume of the figures has been reduced to its minimum elements, as well as the spatial depth. Picasso returns the solidity of the objects that impressionism had vaporized with the elimination of the line. The volume is deliberately confusing: on the same canvas, Picasso flattens most of the surfaces, but gives volume to those that he is interested in highlighting through the arbitrary use of chiaroscuro.

As for color, he opts for a opaque palette, soft, that invites the viewer to focus their attention on the graphic elements: the line, the angles, the shapes, the use of the planes, etc., that is to say, the new elements that the painter introduces for the first time with this canvas.

He may interest you Analysis and meaning of the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso.

Meaning

The table points towards the center of the painting, as if entering the scene. Fruits are offered. Women look at the viewer, and this is known to be observed by them... Speculation about the meaning of The Avignon ladies they are diverse. Some believe they see a moral position on the canvas. Others, as we have seen, stress the importance of form over content. Victoria Charles says that Picasso:

I was looking for the power of expression, but not in the subject, the theme or the object per se, but in the lines, colors, shapes, brush strokes and brushwork, taken from their own independent meaning, from the energy of writing pictorial.

It was for this reason, says the author, that Picasso turned to “artistic systems archaic ”, that is, to those artistic manifestations considered primitive, barbaric or exotic. His main inspiration, in this case, would be in African art. The knowledge of this art was not deep. By then, there was no strong enough critical literature to interpret it fairly, but even so, the influence was felt.

The work was not the result of improvisation. On the contrary, it was the result of thoughtful reflections and experimentation, reflected in his sketches. In one of them, we can see how Picasso had devised to represent a group of seven people, including two men.

His sketches, says the researcher Santiago Sebastián, serve as clues to observe that Picasso reflected around the problem of love, virtue and death, despite the fact that, finally, he ended up schematizing his concept. Over time, Picasso eliminated these male characters, and made the female characters direct their gaze to the viewer, breaking the fiction.

For the researcher Santiago Sebastián, the contrast between the three figures of the group of the left with the two figures of the group on the right, whose faces have been transformed into authentic masks African.

The critic interprets this contrast as an expression of the painter's conflict between two conceptions of art: one traditional and the other of rupture, with a sinister expressive tone. But even so, the critic suggests that the plastic elements are not developed as a value in themselves, but rather are a function of the expressive needs of the painter.

Santiago Sebastián finds resonances between The Avignon ladies and a baroque work called The judgment of Paris by Pedro Pablo Rubens when we have the information. The Department of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools of the Prado Museum, informs on its website that:

The mythological account of the Judgment of Paris has its origin in the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, where Eris, goddess of discord, I challenge the most beautiful goddess present to pick up a golden apple that she had thrown among the present. Juno, Minerva and Venus, started a dispute and Jupiter decided to give the apple to Mercury and that he gave it to Paris, who would act as judge. The Judgment is narrated by the Roman poet Ovid in his work Heroidas (XVI, 65-88), where Paris finally chose Venus as the victor. In return, the goddess gave him the hand of Helen of Troy, unleashing the Trojan War.

The theme of the Judgment of Paris was used by Rubens on several occasions, allowing him to revel in the ideal of feminine beauty and also to consider the consequences of love and passion.

In the scene that Rubens represents, he presents a golden apple to the goddesses which, according to Sebastian, is a fruit associated with Venus, beauty, youth, desires and renewal. For the critic, this gesture would be present in Picasso's work but transformed. It refers to the basket of fruit on the table that replaces the apple.

The scant wardrobe of the women represented in the Picasso canvas also reminds us of the fine fabrics that surround the immodest parts of the goddesses in Rubens' canvas. But not all the ladies of Avignon hide their sexes. The painter has introduced a variation. For what purpose?

The critic Sebastián sees in all this a moralizing sense, the same as Rubens, although displacing his sense of it to a new reality. The hypothesis would be that the canvas The Avignon ladies he underlines a reflection on the relationship between women, virtue and vice. Does Santiago Sebastián suggest that the fruit basket has been offered to these women? Are they goddesses? Has Picasso clothed these women of suspicious trade with a halo of divinity? Are these fruits a symbol of female sexuality?

Biography of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Malaga, Andalusia (Spain) and died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France. He was a painter and sculptor, considered to be the creator of the Cubist movement along with the artists Georges Braque and Juan Gris.

From a very young age he showed talent for the arts and was exposed to training in this area. He received art classes from his father, a drawing teacher at the San Telmo School. Upon reaching 13 years of age, Picasso was enrolled at the La Loja School of Arts in Barcelona. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. In 1900 he went to Paris, where he came into contact with the artistic world, and where he lived most of his life.

Picasso's work was extremely prolific and has been a fundamental influence in the contemporary world. Parallel to his artistic life, Picasso was famous for his military as a member of the Communist Party of France until his death.

References

• Castaños Alés, Enrique: A new concept of form and pictorial space. One hundred years have passed since the creation of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Originally published in the journal South from Malaga on April 20, 2007.
• Charles, Victoria (2011): Pablo Picasso, Parkstone International.
• Department of Flemish Painting and Northern Schools of the Prado Museum: The judgment of Paris. Recovered from: museodelprado.es.
• Gombrich, Ernst (1989), History of art, Mexico: Diana.
• Santiago Sebastián, Pablo Picasso (1984): The "Guernica" and other works by Picasso: iconographic contexts. Spain: Editum.