The Ladies of Avignon of the painter Pablo Picasso
The ladies of Avignon is a picture of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso painted in 1907 and is currently preserved in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (Zaton, 2019)
It is an oil painting on canvas and its measurements are 243.9 x 233.7 cm. In this picture, Picasso converges two key concepts for this work: the perception of spatial depth, different from Renaissance painting, and the abstraction of the female figure. In that way, he makes the work a set of bottomless angular planes or spatial perspective, in which the forms are marked by clear-dark lines (Bozal, 1990)
It presents three fundamental influences for the development of such an artistic work. First, the influence of the French painter Cazánne with his pictures of the bathers.
Then, the influence of the Greek painter El Greco, with his work from the Apocalypse. And finally, the primitive art exposed in the Trocadero Museum in Paris, with its African masks, similar to the heads of the two women on the right, where the shape of the heads and the simplification of their features completely deform the face of these two women. The other three figures also have chosen elements from other ancient cultures, such as the Egyptian influence observed in the lateral position of the figure found on the left. And the influence of the Iberian sculpture that is observed in the face and torso of the other two remaining women. (Gutiérrez, 2010).
Picasso elaborated a series of sketches before devoting himself to the final work. There are two sketches that especially call attention, where the painter shows how his initial idea changed. In the first sketch, seven main figures can be seen (five women and two men). In this sketch, the distribution of female figures, as well as the presence of men, suggested that it was a brothel scene. But in the second sketch, very close to the final painting, male figures disappear and women’s position is different. Piccaso transform these female figures into a set of geometric planes that adjusted to the two -dimensional surface of the canvas (Morgan, 1999). Where, the bare woman’s body now becomes a set of angular planes, more marked the more we go to the right.
In conclusion, this picture that, although at the beginning he received harsh criticism from his contemporaries, over time was defined as the first peak work of the twentieth century. In it he made changes that would cause the birth of a new era of avant -garde, Cubism. Where the faces of the characters are shown in front and profile at the same time, as if we saw the person in two simultaneous positions. With this, the artist managed to represent a person with multiple views of view in the same figure and give some depth to a completely flat space. In the work the free or empty space is not perceived, but on the contrary, the bodies and the intervals between them generate the broken space in planes and edges cut. In this painting, the artist feels the foundations for the cubist movement and influence a large part of the art of the twentieth century
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