Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'' (''The Young Ladies of Avignon'', originally titled ''The Brothel of Avignon'') is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, Spain. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. The figure on the left exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are shown in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features. The ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force."

In this adaptation of primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. This proto-cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art.

''Les Demoiselles'' was revolutionary and controversial and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 ''Bathers with a Turtle''. Georges Braque too initially disliked the painting yet perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great detail. His subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the cubist revolution. Its resemblance to Cézanne's '' The Bathers,'' Paul Gauguin's statue ''Oviri'' and El Greco's ''Opening of the Fifth Seal'' has been widely discussed by later critics.

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral.''Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon''
edited by Christopher Green, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, Cambridge University Press, 2001 The work, painted in Picasso's studio in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, at an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon. It was at this exhibition that Salmon (who had previously titled the painting in 1912 ''Le bordel philosophique'') renamed the work its current, less scandalous title, ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'', instead of the title originally chosen by Picasso, ''Le Bordel d'Avignon''. John Golding, ''Visions of the Modern''
University of California Press, 1994, Anne Baldassari, ''Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso''
Recueil des Commémorations nationales 2007, France Archives, Portail National des Archives (French)] Picasso, who always referred to it as ''mon bordel'' ("my brothel"), or ''Le Bordel d'Avignon'', never liked Salmon's title and would have instead preferred the bowdlerization ''Las chicas de Avignon'' ("The Girls of Avignon").

Background and development

Picasso came into his own as an important artist during the first decade of the 20th century. He arrived in Paris from Spain around the turn of the century as a young, ambitious painter out to make a name for himself. For several years he alternated between living and working in Barcelona, Madrid and the Spanish countryside, and made frequent trips to Paris.

By 1904, he was fully settled in Paris and had established several studios, important relationships with both friends and colleagues. Between 1901 and 1904, Picasso began to achieve recognition for his Blue Period paintings. In the main these were studies of poverty and desperation based on scenes he had seen in Spain and Paris at the turn of the century. Subjects included gaunt families, blind figures, and personal encounters; other paintings depicted his friends, but most reflected and expressed a sense of blueness and despair.Melissa McQuillan, ''Pablo Picasso'', MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009
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He followed his success by developing into his Rose Period from 1904 to 1907, which introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work. The Rose period depictions of acrobats, circus performers and theatrical characters are rendered in warmer, brighter colors and are far more hopeful and joyful in their depictions of the bohemian life in the Parisian avant-garde and its environs. The Rose period produced two important large masterpieces: ''Family of Saltimbanques'' (1905), which recalls the work of Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) and Édouard Manet (1832–1883); and '' Boy Leading a Horse'' (1905–06), which recalls Cézanne's ''Bather'' (1885–1887) and El Greco's ''Saint Martin and the Beggar'' (1597–1599). While he already had a considerable following by the middle of 1906, Picasso enjoyed further success with his paintings of massive oversized nude women, monumental sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive (African, Micronesian, Native American) art. He began exhibiting his work in the galleries of Berthe Weill (1865–1951) and Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), quickly gaining a growing reputation and a following amongst the artistic communities of Montmartre and Montparnasse.

Picasso became a favorite of the American art collectors Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo around 1905. The Steins' older brother Michael and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew Allan Stein.

Gertrude Stein began acquiring Picasso's drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal ''Salon'' at her home in Paris. At one of her gatherings in 1905 he met Henri Matisse (1869–1954), who was to become in those days his chief rival, although in later years a close friend. The Steins introduced Picasso to Claribel Cone (1864–1929), and her sister Etta Cone (1870–1949), also American art collectors, who began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy, and Michael and Sarah Stein became important patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.

Rivalry with Matisse

The Salon d'Automne of 1905 brought notoriety and attention to the works of Henri Matisse and the Les Fauves group. The latter gained their name after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"),Louis Vauxcelles, ''Le Salon d'Automne'', Gil Blas, 17 October 1905. Screen 5 and 6. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
contrasting the paintings with a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.Chilver, Ian (Ed.)
''Fauvism''
The Oxford Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, 2004. 26 December 2007. Henri Rousseau scene '' The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope'' also hanging near the works by Matisse and which may have had an influence on the particular sarcastic term used in the press. Vauxcelles' comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaper ''Gil Blas'', and passed into popular usage.

Although the pictures were widely derided—"A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public", declared the critic Camille Mauclair (1872–1945)—they also attracted some favorable attention. The painting that was singled out for the most attacks was Matisse's '' Woman with a Hat''; the purchase of this work by Gertrude and Leo Stein had a very positive effect on Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work.

Matisse's notoriety and preeminence as the leader of the new movement in modern painting continued to build throughout 1906 and 1907, and Matisse attracted a following of artists including Georges Braque (1880–1963), André Derain (1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958). Picasso's work had passed through his Blue period and his Rose period and while he had a considerable following his reputation was tame in comparison to his rival Matisse. The larger theme of Matisse's influential ''Le bonheur de vivre'', an exploration of "The Golden Age", evokes the historic "Ages of Man" theme and the potentials of a provocative new age that the twentieth century era offered. An equally bold, similarly themed painting titled ''The Golden Age'', completed by Derain in 1905, shows the transfer of human ages in an even more direct way.

Matisse and Derain shocked the French public again at the March 1907 Société des Artistes Indépendants when Matisse exhibited his painting '' Blue Nude'' and Derain contributed ''The Bathers''. Both paintings evoke ideas of human origins (world beginnings, evolution) an increasingly important theme in Paris at this time. The ''Blue Nude'' was one of the paintings that would later create an international sensation at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City.''Matisse, Henri''. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' Online. Retrieved 30 July 2007.

From October 1906 when he began preparatory work for ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'', until its completion in March 1907, Picasso was vying with Matisse to be perceived as the leader of Modern painting. Upon its completion the shock and the impact of the painting propelled Picasso into the center of controversy and all but knocked Matisse and Fauvism off the map, virtually ending the movement by the following year. In 1907 Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). Kahnweiler was a German art historian and collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent in Paris beginning in 1907 for being among the first champions of Picasso, and especially his painting ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon''. Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized as one of the important leaders of Modern art alongside Henri Matisse, who had been the undisputed leader of Fauvism and who was more than ten years older than he, and his contemporaries the Fauvist André Derain and the former Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque.

In his 1992 essay ''Reflections on Matisse'', the art critic Hilton Kramer wrote,

After the impact of ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'', however, Matisse was never again mistaken for an avant-garde incendiary. With the bizarre painting that appalled and electrified the cognoscenti

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