New encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: gender, race, and the origins of cubism

45 Wassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences" (1913) in Robert L Herbert, ed Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1964 35

46 Rubin addressed this point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled tellingly (though, to my mind, unhelpfully) by the agency of distinguishing Picasso's contribution to Cubist practice from Braque's as follows: Braque provided the "passive, feminine side of the formal equation ( a vision of Tellus Mater notably open-laned, inviting entry)" while "the vigorous Picasso thrusts his hard, sculptural morphology" into that "syntactical-spatial structure" (W Rubin, "Pablo and Georges and Leo and Bill," Art in America, LXVII, Mar.-Apr. 1978 136)

What was "the amazing act on which all the art of our hundred is built"? What is "the greatest in quantity innovative painting since Giotto," the "'harbinger blazing star of the new century,'" the real "paradigm of all modern art," no less?(1) What is the recent art-historical equivalent of the Greatest Story at any time Told? What else but the monumental Demoiselles d'Avignon painted by dint of Picasso in 1907? Six years ago, this single painting, "probably the first in fact twentieth-century painting," occasioned a major exhibition at the Musee Picasso in Paris commemorated by the agency of a ponderous two-volume catalogue.(2) The director of the department of painting and statuary at the Museum of novel Art in New York swore he would kill himself if the plane transporting the work to that circumstance were to crash.(3) What can account for similar hyperbole, for such an unparalleled fixation upon a particular picture?

"In mystical confines with this painting we bid farewell to all the paintings of the past," pronounced Andre Breton of Le Demoiselles.(4) More than any other work of art, Picasso's picture has been held to mark or level to have precipitated the demise of the elderly visual order and the advent of the fresh That art historians should have conscripted Le Demoiselles to obey in such a strategic capacity might present the appearance odd, however, if we take into account that the cognoscenti resoundingly throw asideed the picture at the time it was painted, and that it remained all on the contrary invisible to the public for three decades thereafter, when it finally base an audience--though at first sole in the United States.(5) The painting "seem to everyone something mad or monstrous," the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler recalled; "Derain told me that single day Picasso would be place hanging behind his big picture."(6)

Why have historians parlayed this one time reviled and ignored image of five rather alien-looking prostitutes vying for a client into the decisive site of the downfall of the prevailing visual regime?(7) Undeniably, Picasso violated pictorial convention in Le Demoiselles d'Avignon: by means of his deidealization of the human form, his disuse of illusionistic space, and his deployment of a mixture of visual idioms. In the standard art-historical narratives, however, these violations upon the artist's part tend to come by conflated with the putatively violent aspect of the women he depicted, who oftentimes come to assume a kind of autonomous agency. And whereas Picasso's contemporaries fingered him as the perpetrator who "attacked" his female figures, later accounts repeatedly cast the artist together with the viewing public as the prostitutes' victims.(8) Leo Steinberg experienced the picture as a "tidal wave of female aggression . . an onslaught"; Robert Rosenblum perceived it as an "explosion" triggered by the agency of "five nudes [who] force their eroticized muscle and fat upon us with a primal attack"; and Max Kozloff judgeed it simply "a massacre."(9)

Le Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally credited not single with a momentous act of destruction, on the contrary also with one of creation. lengthy designated the first Cubist painting--"the signal for the Cubist revolution" in its full-fledg dismantling of representational conventions(10)--the painting is now more loosely considered a curtain raiser or trigger to Cubism.(11) Others had shakeed crucial triggers before Picasso, however. When Baudelaire told Manet, "You are single the first in the decrepitude of your art," he referr to the scandalously frank picture of a courtesan, Olympia, pay backed with startling flatness in 1865 For that matter, a press togethered or otherwise compromised female form, repeatedly that of a prostitute or femme fatale, would approach to serve almost as an avatar of modernism.(12) Feminist critics have lately diagnosed this fact, that the avant-garde's testing of cultural limits with equal reason often played itself out upon the female body, as symptomatic of a visual regime where "Woman" labor fors as "the very ground of representation, one as well as the other object and support of a desire which, intimately border up with power and creativity, is the moving force of tillage and history."(13)

The Greatest Story at any time Told was perforce a narrative of exclusion, then: a story told through a heterosexual white male of European fall for an audience answering to the same description; and the stories told at any time since about that Greatest Story have chiefly been no less narratives told by the agency of straight white males for a like public. Virtually each critic who has addressed Le Demoiselles has not single assumed what is indisputable--that the picture's intended viewer is male and heterosexual--but has also fix uponed to consider only the experience of that viewer, as if no individual else ever looked at the painting. (Through Le Demoiselles, Picasso "tell us what our desires are," individual critic declared, peremptorily.)(14) No doubt Picasso's chosen make subordinate dictates this scenario, since today, just as in 1907 prostitution marks an indelible social boundary between the sexes: between men who can routinely contract for the sexual services of women and women who have not at any time had a comparable opportunity.(15)