Young ladies of Avignon

the Young ladies of Avignon is a painting of Pablo Picasso, carried out in 1907. This work is the starting point of the Cubisme. Observed profile, of three quarters, of face, backs, the bodies of the women are deformed; draperies which surround the models are also represented by geometrical forms. A new century starts, a new way of painting too. Let us note however that the composition is borrowed from the Jugement of Pâris of Raphaël seen out of mirror.

This table is preserved at the Museum off Modern Art with New York (see a reproduction of work).

Historical elements

In July 1907, Picasso completes a fabric of very large size (oil on fabric, 243.9 X 233.7 cm), undertaken during the winter, which breaks brutally with all that had been made before. Baptized in the beginning the Brothel of Avignon in remembering to square it of Avinyo - hot street of Barcelona - it takes the name of Demoiselles of Avignon in 1916. It does not remain any more that five women including one, on the left is vêtue, on the fabric. The preparatory drawings carried out show that in the beginning, two men were to appear: a sailor and a medical student holding a cranium in his hands, symbol of death, but also of the defect and the virtues. Little by little, the painter forsook the account - traditional narrative principle - to concentrate on the formal innovations which it intended to bring to the figures and space. Nevertheless, it is about a scene of Bordel for the friends of Picasso. But today, speech of " bordel" for an interpretation of the " Judgment of Pâris" , allows us to consider a new reading of the work of Picasso. The idea of Picasso was to destroy the image of the ideal of the woman. This work is thus a kind of caricature against the Turkish bath to Ingres, just as the 2nd figure of the woman on my left is Odalisque lying raised (cf the period of Orientalism of Ingres).

Matisse, Derain, Braque, Apollinaire, which discovers the fabric in the workshop of the Bateau-Lavoir, perceives it like a “terrorism”. Derain, in this connection, will say even to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler:

“One day, we will learn that Picasso was hung behind its large fabric”.

The contents - male prostitutes naked with the mutilated bodies - and the treatment of space and figures, which break radically with traditional art, are at the origin of this fear. Picasso saw itself in this work an act of Exorcisme. Undoubtedly it has translates its fears of the defect and the Maladie by the faces of the figures of right-hand side “whose deformations evoke the atrocious lesions of the Syphilis” (Rubin) - what is a plausible interpretation knowing that at the time, of the leaflets circulated on the physical consequences of this disease. But since 1907, it especially intends to find a new representation of the human figure.

The schematized forms of the figure of left at that time continue the research engaged around Iberian art. They already testify to the desire of the painter to seize the gasoline of the figures. But it is with the figures of right-hand side, in which Kahnweiler saw “the beginning of the cubism”, that Picasso reaches an objective representation. Altered in June 1907 following its visit with the Musée of Trocadéro, where are presented tribal objects, they take again a principle of the African Art which consists in showing what one knows and not what one sees . The first principle of the Cubisme is born thus with the woman from the bottom on the right, in which Picasso carries out a synthesis from various points of view. One passes from a pictorial mode perceptive to a conceptual mode .

As for the space, generated starting from contours of two types of figures, it is clearly divided into two. These abstracted spaces, stripped of depth, break radically with the rules of prospects and the principle for unit of the traditional style. By the cohabitation of the work carried out until the Still life in the caned chair (1912), work which leads to the synthetic Cubisme.

Symbolic system

This painting is a “interpretation” as Picasso will make some during all its life, of the Jugement of Pâris (left left) of Raphaël, which will be taken again by many painters of which Rubens, which will give several versions of them. In this painting of Picasso of 1907, five characters, as in the left part of the Judgment of Pâris . The three women introduced to Pâris are on the left. Pâris sat and hesitates. The shepherd is upright on the right. The apple is in the foreground, among other fruits. Pâris did not make its choice yet. The masks different and more “males” of the two characters from right-hand side could give reason to this assumption.

Anecdotes

In this painting, Picasso offers also a representation of a closed house inhabitant of Barcelona, located street Avinyo , which gives its name to the fabric, which not having thus, as opposed to what lets think its C-W communication, no relationship with the French city of Avignon.
the Young ladies of Avignon is the cheap Anagramme perfect of meaningless doodles (cheap griffonnages without significance), as that is mentioned in Da Vinci Code of Dan Brown (english language version).
the table celebrated its 100 years on January 31st, 2007. An exposure was devoted to him to the Picasso museum of Paris.

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