Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: The Use of Art Schema

I would like to build on Solso’s analysis on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Solso brings up the similitude between Picasso’s rendering of the ladies and the Egyptian’s images of women and African masks. The artist “drew partially recognizable features from different views on the same canvas.”

The women in the painting are held in mid action. One woman is entering into the visual frame from the left. Her eyes as Solso had mentioned is represented in a similar fashion as Egyptian art. Her arms are rendered in a cylindrical shape, giving her the illusion of three-dimensionality. Another woman is crouching with her back to the spectator. She wears a mask that is eerily swivelled towards the back of her head. The woman on the right drawing the curtain is entering the scene. The two central women with arms held up is half covered in what appears to be a sheet. They appear to be echoing a more traditional image of the female nude. They are posing like renditions of Titian’s Venus and stand in stark contrast to the dynamic qualities of the masked figures.

So there is a mixture between representations of traditional European beauty and art in the two central females, and the other three with masks on. There is also a mixture in dimensional representation. The image as a composite is a depiction of a brothel with women all vying for the male spectator’s attention, but there is a severe lack of cohesion in spatial and linear perspectives in the painting. The figures and the ground are being held by the situation of the frame only and the contextual fact that all figures are nude. Each woman appears separate from one another and from the space that surrounds them.They appear unaware of one another occupying the same space. They seem to be jumping out of the canvas.

This separateness contributes to an image of anxiety. The painting is a prelude to Cubism; it also marks an anxiety towards inter-racial sexual relations. The crudely drawn image of the sacred African masks seems to tug at the spectator’s consciousness of the idea of sexuality and male dominance to take in a woman from an exotic culture. The masked pros who are situated around the unmasked figures, in their juxtaposition with the unmasked appear to be acting in aggression against the male fantasy of the commodified woman.

However, Picasso’s painting does even more than mark aggression from a gender being treated as objects, but by applying the masks he addresses the idea of exotic cultures being preyed upon by men. Picasso exposes an implicit truth about racial relations in Western culture where the male sex sexually exploits a gender and a culture. However, Picasso’s effect is twofold, a female spectator could discern from her own personal schema and art schema.

If this is indeed a brothel then we the spectators are forced to take on the role of the customer. Picasso’s placement of African masks over the faces is not simply as a symptom of stylistic influence of African-Oceanic tribes, but the discomfort stunts the viewer in gazing at the prostitutes.

Upon first glance the image of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is at once jarring and frightening because of the unconventional visualization of the painted female nude on a 96in. x 92in. surface. With all five female figures nearly lifesize standing before the observer, the image addresses the spectator more than any other work before. Picasso violates lines of spatial and linear perspective in the painting and uses multiplicity of art styles and geometric form to work off the spectator’s personal art schema. Relying heavily on top-down processing in this engagement with the art schema artwork unleashes startling political implications. While the visual dissonance of Picasso’s innovative formal techniques strikes the viewer with corresponding discomfort.

How did everyone else interpret this painting and did you get the same immediate reaction as I did from the discordant mixing in style, perspective, and form?