Art App 101

Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon
Lekesha Fraley
Art 101
Instructor’s Mc Garth
October 3, 2011

                 


        Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon was a ground breaking painting, in terms of both artistic and social impact. Painted in 1907, it is raw, primitive and is deliberately meant to be shocking. It horrified many of those who first saw it, critics and artists alike, but it eventually came to be regarded as a work of monumental influence and value. Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso ( 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor who lived most of his life in France. He is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
    Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, and originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting of 1907. The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, giving them a savage aura. 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. The work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art. Demoiselle was revolutionary and controversial, and led to... [continues]

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