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| Les Demoiselles d'Avignon |
Each art branch has an important name. Some of them come up with an innovative idea and some of them come forward with the art that they created. Picasso is one of them. Unquestionably Picasso is the most famous painter in the world, but most people do not know where Pablo's fame comes from.
We are looking at Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso. Picasso is a Spanish artist but he was in Paris when he painted this. The title could be translated as The Young Ladies of Avignon which refers to a street that's not in France but it’s in Barcelona and associated with prostitution. For many art historians, this painting is seen as a breaking point with the 500 years of European painting that begins with the Renaissance. Furthermore, they see this as the foundation on which Cubism is built. It radically breaks the conventions of representation which had been accepted in the West for a long time. But how you make a body in space, how you create a space? All of that is up-ended by Les Domoiselles d'Avignon.
There is no linear perspective and chiaroscuro, modulation of light and shadow creates the illusion: Les Domoiselles d'Avignon's
ideas about sexuality, about the female nude, sexually transmitted diseases. This is a confrontational painting.In fact, the faces of the women on the right are often seen as representations of African masks. African masks represent danger in order to an expression of France's colonialism. Those objects, those masks, were coming to France.Because Picasso knew very few know of the cultures that these came from. He was interested in them for their formal qualities, for their formal inventiveness.
The figure on the left is an archaic figure, going back to Ancient Spain. There is a physical confrontation and danger here.The figures are really close to us.The space has become three-dimensional fractured planes.There is no space behind or between. In addition to that, there is still some sense of illusion, some shadow and highlight in this painting. Picasso has only created an illusion that goes back into space a few inches. In fact, Cubism is this deconstruction of three-dimensional form.
The most important feature that makes him different than the others is the fact that naturalist and romantic painters have found their rate and he totally ignored artistic anatomy methods, for centuries since Renaissance.
