Les Demoiselle d’ Avignon by Pablo Picasso

Les Demoiselle d’ Avignon by Pablo Picasso was paint in 1907. Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon composition is very provocative because it displays the prostitutes blunts and honestly. The women in the painting do not have a mathematical or methodical way of being placed. To the contrary, the women look like they are placed on top of one another. The lack of space between the women creates a claustrophobic like encounter the viewer experiences with the canvas. Picasso ability to immediately create discomfort for the view is not only in the provocative poses of the women. The poses are able to provoke the viewer because the sensual nature of prostitution that art has many years promoted even in controversial painting such as Olympia (1863) by Eduard Monet, the Father of Impressionism.

The poses of Picasso portrayal of prostitutes in a way that creates this idea of the viewer themselves getting solicited by the prostitutes, but in a greatly vaguer matter that Monet seemed only to allude to in Olympia. The contrast between the two paintings, which both promote prostitution, is  the different styles of between the artists. Monet abstract very little, in fact, it can be argued that there is very little abstraction in this painting to even acknowledge the realistic looks that it still maintains throughout the overall piece. The cubist way of abstraction furthers this discomfort of the view. No longer are the prostitutes portrayed in a seductive and allure manner. The cubist form of abstraction does not allow for such charm to be displayed. Instead, the viewer is subjected to the thought-provoking method of cubist abstraction that takes the sexual tension non-abstracted painting are able to readily create.

Cubism intentionally orients an object in multiple views and abstracts the objecting making it a challenge for the viewer to quickly understanding and identify in the subjects overall space. Cubism intentionally obscure and abstract the artist’s subject. In Macleod's paper these abstractions make the painting hard to distort for the viewer. Les Demoiselle d’ Avignon was created in the early development of cubism and lacks the in-depth analysis of angles from the second stage of cubism (1910-12) and the third stage of cubism Synthetic Cubism (1912-14) that mesh together objects and the subject of their canvas. However in this particular piece because this is early cubism and Picasso has yet to develop the Cubism of later years; Picasso relies on warm and cool tones of flesh to create dimension on the flatten shapes of the women. In fact, many deemed the piece as late primitivism (199-200). Picasso makes the women faces not painted in a euro-centric and realistic manner but paint them in the style of African Mask. In order for Picasso to further obscure the women in the painting he “others” racially the women in the painting that their class as being prostitutes would not have permitted earlier.

Picasso’s racialized portrayal of these prostitutes mirrors John Conrad’s portrayal of Africa in the Heart of Darkness (1899) the delayed decoding that Conrad uses to demonstrate an impressionist literary is evoked in Picasso’s style of cubism. “And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble and silence. And this stillness of life of like did not in the least resemble a peace” (41). Picasso creates this same mood by having the bodies be abstract of the prostitution be poised as if they remained in movement and Conrad creates a mood that makes the reader remain on edge.  The syntax disorients the reader because it is constantly changing between long sentences and short factual sentences. The verbs constantly change between past tense and present tense. These changing of tense causes the reader themselves to change the sense of time that has occurred in throughout the book.

Conrad relies on impressionism for Heart of Darkness and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon is an example of primitivism and early cubism. In their own right both Conrad and Picasso both deal with a European’s perspective trying to other understand the new World, specifically Africa. Therefore, the disorientation that they make their characters and subject undergo respectively is justified.