![]() Picasso draws on many other sources to construct Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Compare the woman standing in the center of Picasso’s composition to the woman who stands with elbows raised at the extreme left of Matisse’s canvas: like a scholar citing a borrowed quotation, Picasso footnotes. But while Picasso clearly aims to “out do” Matisse, to take over as the most radical artist in Paris, he also acknowledges his debts. Matisse’s pleasure becomes Picasso’s apprehension. The bodies of Picasso’s women look dangerous as if they were formed of shards of broken glass. Picasso has replaced the graceful curves of Bonheur de Vivre with sharp, jagged, almost shattered forms. Gone too, is the sensuality that Matisse created. Instead, the artist chooses deeper tones befitting urban interior light. Picasso has also dispensed with Matisse’s clear, bright pigments. Here are five prostitutes from an actual brothel, located on a street named Avignon in the red-light district in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia in northern Spain-a street, by the way, which Picasso had frequented. No longer set in a classical past, Picasso’s image is clearly of our time. ![]() Like Matisse’s later Blue Nude (itself a response to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), the women fill the entire space and seem trapped within it. (Note, for example, the squatting figure at the lower right.) His space is interior, closed, and almost claustrophobic. In very sharp contrast, Picasso, intent of making a name for himself (rather like the young Manet and David), has radically compressed the space of his canvas and replaced sensual eroticism with a kind of aggressively crude pornography.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |