Evolution through painting
'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' is a fascinating work by Pablo Picasso. As it recently underwent a rather lengthy restoration process at MOMA (Museum of Modern Art), I thought I'd pay tribute to it, and the resounding affect it had- still has, for that matter- on the art world.
I also just like it a lot.
Here's what Gardner's "Art Through the Ages" (yes, I own this massive book) has to say about 'Les Demoiselles'-
"By 1906, Picasso was searching restlessly for new ways to depict form. He found clues in African sculpture (the expansion of colonial empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in wider exposure of European artists to art from Africa, India, and other far away locales), in the sculpture of ancient Iberia, and in the late paintings of Cezanne. The three sources come together in 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which opened the way for a radically new method of representing form in space. Picasso began the work as a symbolic picture to be titled "Philosophical Bordello," in which male clients intermingled with women in the 'receiving' room of a brothel. By the time the artist began the final canvas, he had eliminated the male figures and simplified the details of the room to a suggestion of drapery and a schematic foreground still life; Picasso had become wholly absorbed in the problem of finding a new way to represent the five female figures in their interior space. The artist did keep a sly reference to the original subject in his final title- 'Avignon' was the name of a well known street in Barcelona's red-light district.In stead of representing the figures as continuous volumes, Picasso fractures their shapes and interweaves them with the equally jagged planes that represent drapery and empty space. The treatment of form and space used by Cezanne is pushed here to a new tension between the representation of three dimensional space and a statement of painting as a two dimensional design lying flat on the surface of a stretched canvas. The radical nature of 'Les Demoiselles' is extended even further by the disjunctive styles of the heads of the figures and by the pose of the figure at the bottom right. The calm, ideal features of the three young women at the left were inspired by the sculpture of ancient Iberia, which Picasso saw during summer visits to Spain. The energetic, violently striated features of the two heads to the right came late in the making of the work and grew directly out of the artist's increasing fascination with the power of African sculpture....Gone is the traditional concept of an orderly, constructed, unified pictorial space that mirrors the world. In its place are the rudimentary beginnings of a new representation of the world as a dynamic interplay of time and space."
Go check it out. http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso188.html
I also just like it a lot.
Here's what Gardner's "Art Through the Ages" (yes, I own this massive book) has to say about 'Les Demoiselles'-
"By 1906, Picasso was searching restlessly for new ways to depict form. He found clues in African sculpture (the expansion of colonial empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in wider exposure of European artists to art from Africa, India, and other far away locales), in the sculpture of ancient Iberia, and in the late paintings of Cezanne. The three sources come together in 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which opened the way for a radically new method of representing form in space. Picasso began the work as a symbolic picture to be titled "Philosophical Bordello," in which male clients intermingled with women in the 'receiving' room of a brothel. By the time the artist began the final canvas, he had eliminated the male figures and simplified the details of the room to a suggestion of drapery and a schematic foreground still life; Picasso had become wholly absorbed in the problem of finding a new way to represent the five female figures in their interior space. The artist did keep a sly reference to the original subject in his final title- 'Avignon' was the name of a well known street in Barcelona's red-light district.In stead of representing the figures as continuous volumes, Picasso fractures their shapes and interweaves them with the equally jagged planes that represent drapery and empty space. The treatment of form and space used by Cezanne is pushed here to a new tension between the representation of three dimensional space and a statement of painting as a two dimensional design lying flat on the surface of a stretched canvas. The radical nature of 'Les Demoiselles' is extended even further by the disjunctive styles of the heads of the figures and by the pose of the figure at the bottom right. The calm, ideal features of the three young women at the left were inspired by the sculpture of ancient Iberia, which Picasso saw during summer visits to Spain. The energetic, violently striated features of the two heads to the right came late in the making of the work and grew directly out of the artist's increasing fascination with the power of African sculpture....Gone is the traditional concept of an orderly, constructed, unified pictorial space that mirrors the world. In its place are the rudimentary beginnings of a new representation of the world as a dynamic interplay of time and space."
Go check it out. http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso188.html