Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a celebrated painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel, in the Avignon Street of Barcelona. The controversial eye-catching painting now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Les Demoiselles d Avignon work represents a major milestone in the history of modern art. Picasso's controversial and powerful painting broke all traditional concepts and perspective of ideal beauty. It distinguished him from other artists and ushered in the new artistic movement of cubism.
In the months leading up to the painting's creation, Picasso struggles with the subject -- five women in a brothel. In 19th century art, prostitutes played a significant role as they were regarded as subversive and disruptive to the social and sexual status quo . Picasso's awareness of this theme must be remembered when examining this work since it aided the painting in becoming the most important artwork of the century. The painting began as a narrative brothel scene on Avignon Street in the city of Barcelona where Picasso was a young up and coming artist. Here he created more than 100 sketches and preliminary paintings before his final design.
Initially the painting had five naked prostitutes and two men, a patron surrounded by the women, and a medical student holding a skull, perhaps symbolizing that "the wages of sin are death. " The sailor seemed to be walking into this curtained room where the ladies stand and the woman on the far left now has the traces of having been that man entering the room, and you even feel a certain masculinity in the sort of sculptural carving of her body and the way that very large foot is stepping toward the others. But the painting metamorphosed as he worked on it. In the final composition, the patron is gone and the medical student, who has been called a stand-in for the painter himself, has become a fifth woman with a primitive mask, holding back the crimson curtain to gaze out at the viewer, their faces terrifyingly bold and solicitous and reveal her "sisters."
One striking aspect of this painting is the way this stage on which these women are painted is almost looming out at the viewer. Rather than feeling like these women are nice and safely set back in some kind of room that you are peering into, I, at least, feel like the women are almost piled atop of each other and piled in such a way onto the canvas that they almost could step out of it at the viewer. It's part of the desire of the painting to confront you physically, psychologically, as well as intellectually, with everything that's going on in it. By redefining the three-dimensional space and forcing the characters to take on the full focus of the viewer, Picasso forces the observer to take an undiluted look at the women without the comfort of a beautiful landscape on which to fall back. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marks a radical break from traditional composition and perspective.
There is a strong undercurrent of sexual anxiety. Picasso drew each of the figures differently. The far woman on the left appears without clothes, except for the piece of red drapery strewn across the right side of her body. Each successive figure shows her full body with the exception of where the drapery covers her. Two of the prostitutes push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses, but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided or staring or asymmetrical. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right’s head is the most cubist of all five, featuring sharp geometric shapes. The cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. While the women and the background mold into one, the only indication of any three-dimensional space is a small fruit basket in the foreground The fruit give the observer a sense of intrusion; it seems as if the observer has entered a private party of prostitutes and that we have interrupted their eating. It containing a piece of melon slices the air like a scythe, grapes and two apples, the fruit basket sits on either a little table or stool just in front of the ladies.
The faces of the figures at the right are influenced by African masks, which; The features of the three women to the left were inspired by the prehistoric sculpture that had interested him in the summer; those of the two to the right were based on the masks that Picasso saw in the African and Oceanic collections in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris . Picasso assumed that the masks had functioned as magical protectors against dangerous spirits. A specific danger he had in mind was life threatening sexual disease, a source of considerable anxiety in Paris at the time. Although no specific African or Pacific sources have been identified, Picasso was deeply impressed by what he saw in these collections, and they were to be one of his primary influences for the next several years.
Pablo Picasso further distinguishes himself from other artists with his portrayal of the human figure by breaking up traditional forms of the body. In creating the figures of five naked women, Picasso rejects all classical teachings; he showed angular breasts without nipples, knees at sharp angles, and a nose that resembles a triangle, off-center eyes, no navel, and no pubic hair on any of his models. In short, he seems to reject any mildly photograph-like portrayal of his women. For instance, the woman on the far right has a face of silver colored with green and the woman to our left of her is colored blue from her nose to her chin that reflect his interest in African art. Picasso paints his models how he feels they should look, not how they would really look if one saw them on the street. With the emergence of the camera, there was not a need to paint exact replicas of the women. Therefore, Picasso decides that instead of painting a classical from of reality, he paints the reality that exists only in his head. Also, he chooses to arouse the viewer's interest in their view of beauty. By having his models shamelessly exposing themselves and their distorted bodies, Picasso forces the critic to reexamine whether his or her conventional view of beauty exists in his art world. Besides their obvious exposing of their bodies, Picasso's models also engage the spectator in eye contact. Each woman makes eye contact with the viewer, although not all of their bodies actually face the audience. He makes the audience become an integral part of the work, as the interaction between the women and the viewer make the viewer shy back from the cold stares in the party that he has interrupted.
Picasso forces his audience to ask why these unconventional women embrace their nakedness and revel in their self-confidence. In turn, he trounces previous models of beauty and makes one wonder that if the women are satisfied with themselves as they are, does it matter whether the viewer sees them as pretty or not? Pablo Picasso chooses, as his five models for his first cubist work, women who employ themselves as prostitutes. To compliment his breaking of the rules of art, Picasso might have found it easier to distort women whose morals were already distorted in the public mind. This being his first foray into the act of breaking all the classical rules for art , Picasso can easily show unflattering views of women who were not previously thought of as high-class ladies . While such women were morally questionably, their beauty usually was not questioned. Therefore, Picasso can show the beauty that he sees in his mind on women who the public already views as pretty; the audience does not have to stretch its mind as much.
Also, to further distinguish his art from art of the past, Pablo Picasso chooses highly unconventional colors for both the figures and the drapery behind the women. To display the women, he uses light blue, silver, green, dark blue, and gold. Classically trained artists do not use such colors to paint a human figure; the colors would be more fitting of a landscape. To show the drapery, he uses maroon, pink, light blue and gray-white. Not only does Picasso violate all rules of what colors on the palate to use, he also paints with colors that do not necessarily agree with each other, nor are they pleasing to the eye. Besides succeeding in painting his recital of the women, but he also shows classical artists that he can paint with whatever rules he wants and still accomplish his task. His breaking of the mold of the classically correct colors to use serves to further distinguish his new brand of art from the classical works.
Pablo Picasso, in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, takes his maiden attempt at breaking all the rules of classical art and training. He uses different colors, shapes, dimensions, and figures. Picasso paints how the women appear in his mind, not how they should appear or how they appear as filtered through his eyes. By shattering art's rules and codes, Picasso forces his audience to reexamine their views of beauty and to decide whether what their view of beauty is matters or not. In turn, the observer must re-access what has previously been considered beautiful in previous art works. While his subject matter is important and thought provoking, it truly does not matter what the overall message of his art is. The real impact of Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon lies just in the fact that he painted a work to break all the previously laid out rules. By redefining the rules of art by breaking each rule, Picasso succeeded in distinguishing himself from every other artist in history. In creating Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso turns his back on middle-class society and the traditional values of the time, opting for the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel.
The originality of Picasso's vision and execution in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon help plant the seeds for cubism, the widely acclaimed and revolutionary art movement that he developed in years to come.

Works Cited

Chave, Anna C. “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and 
Origins of Cubism.” The Art Bulletin 76.4 (1994): 596-611. JSTOR. Lib., California State University. April 2013
Davies, Russell. "Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles." The Private Life of a Masterpiece. BBC, Burbank, CA. 2006. 20 Nov. 2012. 4 Apr. 2013

Leja, Michael. “Le Vieux Marcheur And Les Deux Risques: Picasso, Prostitution, 
Venereal Disease, And Maternity, 1899-1907.” Art History 8.1 (1985): 66-81. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Lib., California State University. 29 April 2013
Lomas, David. “A canon of deformity: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and physical 
anthropology.” Art History 16.3 (1993): 424-446. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Lib., California State University. 12 April 2013

Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907. MOMA, Paris.

"Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." PBS. PBS. 28 Apr. 2013

Picasso, Pablo, and Christopher Green. Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

"Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon: Perspectives." Wicked Ladybug. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 May 2013.

Weiss, Jeffrey S., Valerie J. Fletcher, Kathryn A. Tuma, and Pablo Picasso. Picasso: The cubist portraits of Fernande Olivier. Washington [D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2003