Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is 100 years old this year, so MoMA is throwing an extended birthday party for it all summer. Even at an advanced age the painting still strikes us as profoundly weird. Michael Kimmelman describes Les Demoiselles as "an acrid billboard of five preening prostitutes," but unlike Manet's scandalously frank nude Olympia (1863), Picasso's figures are barely distinguishable from the background. Picasso's prostitutes are at once objectified and wounding; they’re like alluring shards of glass. The painting is a stage, and a familiar one at that: a 19th-century fantasy of nubile primitives cavorting naked in exotic interiors. We are sovereign viewers of this drama, but, like the figure of man in Foucault's analysis of Velázquez's Las Meninas, we're an "enslaved sovereign, observed spectator." We are immobilized by our own desire to see and trapped in the painting's theatricality.
Picasso was no less trapped by the painting. He produced hundreds of preliminary paintings and drawings over six months, a level of planning generally reserved for history paintings and frescoes in earlier periods. The famous African masks were added late in the process, reinforcing the painting's juxtaposition of highly cultivated modernity and wild energy from an earlier state of nature. In this painting Picasso is the destructive character in Walter Benjamin's sense. The setting of Les Demoiselles is second nature: once natural reproductive processes commodified into the sex trade. But within this second nature the archaic forces of first nature appear--not just in the African masks, but the painting's jagged fetishism as a whole. Picasso called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon "my first exorcism painting," explaining "If we give spirits a form, we become independent." Benjamin said the destructive character tore apart reified forms in order to release pent-up energies and suppressed meanings. In this way the destructive character tries to invoke epochal change, and in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso gave us a glimpse into a completely new world--and one that's immeasurably old.
picasso is fully awesome!!!!!! lol
im studying his stuff right now and its reall good and how like the lines are all straight and squarish, real siicckkk!!!!!
Posted by: Jasmine tupperware | August 06, 2009 at 08:49 PM
totally agree brah, picasso knows his shit big time. sers... i love women.
Posted by: Eugenie Levicorpus | August 06, 2009 at 08:52 PM
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