Hey, ladies.

Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon) depicts five unconventionally-painted prostitutes, subjects from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona.  (The title comes from that street name, not the French city.)  The painting has a study of the human form accentuated by a small, central still-life.  Although he completed the first draft in 1907, he repainted the two rightmost heads after a breakup with a lover and did not exhibit the completed piece until 1916.  His display was met with fervent criticism as he was accused of destroying the human and womanly forms, reducing them to crude, unfeminine shapes.

Picasso drew inspiration from various sources of art from across time.  The composition and poses are reminiscent of post-Impressionist Cézanne's The Bathers.  The ladies' confrontational manner is supplanted from Manet's Olympia.  Between 1906 and 1909, after his Rose Period, Picasso modeled many of his works after African indigenous art, such as the mask above from the Dogon people of central Mali.  The faces of the three women on the left are instead interpretations of Iberian masks, with large, triangular noses and almond-shaped eyes.  (As hideous as art critics thought that the Demoiselles d'Avignon were, their facial features actually indicated feminine beauty in different cultures.)  The still-life of fruit is an exercise that many painters performed, but in Picasso's painting, it creates a lush feeling, the curvaceous fruit juxtaposed with the angular, unusually-formed women.

I chose this painting as a blog subject because it demonstrates techniques of early Cubism (proto-Cubism).  Cubist theory stems in part from an assertion by Cézanne that the shapes of natural objects could be reduced to cylinders, spheres, and cones.  New postulations in science about the nature of time, like Einstien's Theory of Relativity, influenced artistic visions.  Cubists often strove to evoke contemporaneity in simultaneous but different perspectives of the same subject.  At the same time, others sought to make their works seem like an incidental, miraculous intersection of many planes, a goal that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon appears to match more closely.  Beyond the techniques that distorted conventional shapes and viewpoints, cubists still wanted a unity across the canvas, as Les Demoiselles does with complimentary colors and neutral shadows and accents.  The painting marked a transition into a new and influential period of modern art that questioned standard perceptions of time, beauty, and form, trying to find the most basic possible representation of humans.