"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"

Paper Summary:

This essay surveys a number of the most important scholarly notions regarding Picasso's sources and influences, including Iberian and African sculpture, El Greco, more recent French painting, and Baudelaire, as well as the meanings that attach to the picture. The discussion includes the developing iconography of the piece, its public face, and its relevance to Picasso's life and psyche.

From the Paper:

"As a turning point in Picasso's art it is hardly overstated to say that it is the proto-Cubist painting "and stands as the ancestor" to the hundreds of Cubist works created by Picasso, Braque, Gris and others between 1909 and 1917 (Gedo 133). But the work has an emotional intensity that is a far cry from the almost classical coolness of the Cubist period. The style that preceded the Demoiselles was also "quite emotional," but this work was "sentimental and poignant rather than vicious in tone" (Gedo 133). Not everyone agrees that savagery or anger is the tone of the painting but, even though she disagrees with the conclusion, Chave has noted that there has been a widespread belief that, as Daniel Kahnweiler put it, the picture represented something "mad and monstrous"--mad in its form and monstrous in its subjects (quoted in Chave 597)."

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