![]() Multiple perspectives are used in the rendering of the center female’s face, and solids and voids become ambiguous. The Cubist elements of the picture include the simplification of forms into flat geometrical shapes, and the way the forms are fragmented and rearranged. The figures are “in your face” leaving no room for escape. The crowded composition spills outward towards the viewer, rather than receding into depth, resulting in a confrontational kind of space that permits no entry. The colors are cool, rather than warm, and the women’s expressions are threatening rather than inviting. While Matisse’s Joy of Life used warm pastel colors and soft flowing forms to express the theme of innocent pleasure, Picasso’s forms are angular and sharp, more threatening than inviting. In the finished work, Picasso eliminated the male customers, and placed his figures on the foreground picture plane so that we become the “customers” in this sordid brothel scene. In an early drawing he included a sailor and a medical student holding a skull, a likely allusion to the threat of venereal disease. ![]() Picasso originally intended the picture to be a brothel scene (the title refers to Avignon Street, a red light district in Barcelona). Painted as a direct response to Matisse’s Joy of Life, which Picasso saw at the home of Gertrude Stein, the picture depicts five women who brazenly flaunt themselves in front of the viewer. Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon is reputed to be the first Cubist painting, but it is first and foremost an expressionist work. Museum of Modern Art Pablo Picasso, Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, pencil and pastel (Basel Kunstmuseum) Pablo Picasso, The Demoiselles D’Avignon, 1907 ![]() The resulting picture is a mosaic of shifting and fragmented planes, as if the subject were being viewed in a fractured mirror. The object is no longer seen from a fixed position in time and space, but is rather seen from multiple viewpoints.Ĭubism therefore destroyed once and for all the Renaissance conception of the painting as a “window.” After Cubism, painting was conceived as a flat surface upon which the artist arranges elements. Rather than represent things as a fixed object in space (say a cup), the Cubists fragmented three-dimensional forms into their two-dimensional components (remember Cézanne?) and rearranged them on the canvas (so we would see our cup from the top, the side, and maybe even the bottom all at once). The Cubists wanted to break free from this old-fashioned, static way of seeing and invent a new way of representing experience as unfolding over time and through space. According to the “old way” of painting, objects were arranged on an imaginary picture-stage in relation to a fixed viewpoint in time and space, using such familiar devices as chiaroscuro, foreshortening, and linear perspective. The first phase of Cubism is called “Analytic Cubism.” It involved a complete re-analysis of how we “see,” and how we represent what we see on canvas. Inspired by the shifting planes and ambiguous spatial relations of Cézanne’s paintings, Cubism represented a deeply intellectual analysis of form and space, and the invention of an entirely new way of seeing. Cubism was the creation of two artists – Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso – who worked closely together between 1908-1914.
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