Les Demoiselles d' Avignon

Introduction

As an artist, Pablo Picasso was well prepared for fame. There was always the spotlight on him. His stage might have been small and without glamour to begin with, but he was always aware that he had an audience. Even in late 1890s, as an apprentice modernist in Barcelona, he was recognised to be the prodigious talent. He first showed in Paris at age of nineteen, when he was selected for official exhibition of Spanish art at Universal Exhibition of 1900. Within the year, two of new galleries showing young 'independent' painting in Paris, Berthe Weill's and Ambroise Vollard's, were buying from him.

In May 1901 Vollard gave Picasso the show all to himself, the rare accolade. Between 1901 and 1904, he kept aloof from commercial success, painting underclass poverty from vantage point of bohemian poverty mostly in Spain, but after he settled finally in Paris in April 1904, the circle of collectors and dealers keen to buy from him formed quickly enough. By 1906, among them was American writer Gertrude Stein, whose portrait he completed that autumn (Fig. 15). Her support and that of her brothers and sister-in-law (Leo, Michael, and Sarah) gave him the position comparable to that of older Henri Matisse, acknowledged leader of 'Fauves', for they had been among first buyers of Matisse's 'Fauve' work in 1905. Though still only in his mid-twenties, it was, therefore, as an emerging modernist leader - at least for the select few - that Picasso started work early in 1907 on huge, almost square painting that would become known as Les Demoiselles d'Avignonl (Fig. 1).

By 1914, Picasso was as famous the modernist leader as Matisse, acknowledged inventor of another major -ism, 'cubism'. It took the further twenty-five years for Demoiselles to begin to emerge as one of most important paintings not only in his oeuvre but in early history of modernism altogether. And yet, even while he was at work on canvas, before summer of 1907, talk of it had reached not only Vollard, but young German dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, newly launched in Paris, who would become Picasso's dealer, and Felix Feneon, manager of Galerie Bernheirn-Ieune, who would become Matisse's. It may not have been exhibited at that time, but many came to see it in Picasso's Montmartre studio, artists and writers besides dealers and collectors, friends like poet Andre Salmon and painters Andre Derain and Georges Braque, visitors like English painter Augustus John. As Picasso himself had, Demoiselles made an impact before it became famous, and, for its small but influential audience, that impact was so great because it was so dramatically different from anything Picasso himself or any other artist working in Paris had so far painted.

There was much about the Demoiselles that was not different. Picasso had painted prostitutes before, and brothel subjects were a late-nineteenthcentury genre. He had also taken on the theme of sexuality and danger before. His major painting of 1903, Life, uses allegory to do the job. And he ...