LAS SEÑORITAS DE AVIGNON

DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON

Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or Avinyó is a picture of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso painted in 1907. It’s made by technique of oil on canvas and her measurements are 243.9 × 233.7 cm. It is preserved in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This table, which marked the beginning of their African or Protocubismo Period is the key reference to talk of Cubism, which the Spanish artist is the best example. Gives a new starting point where Picasso removes all the sublimity of breaking tradition to Realism, the canons of spatial depth and the existing one ideal female body, all the work reduced to a set of angular planes without substance or spatial perspective , in which the forms are marked by light-dark lines.

Two of the faces, the Cubist-looking five, resembling masks, due to the influence of African art, whose cultural events began to be known in Europe at that time, while the two plants are related to faces of medieval frescoes and primitive Iberian sculpture, the face of the left has a profile reminiscent of Egyptian paintings.

The basis of this work are influenced by a reinterpretation of the elongated figures of El Greco, having identified a particular influence of its Vision of the Apocalypse, its environmental structure that recalls the Bathers by Cézanne and Ingres’s harem scenes. Ocher-red tones are characteristic of his era black.

Work heavily criticized and misunderstood even among artists, collectors and art critics most avant-garde of the time, they did not understand the new direction taken by Picasso, who, along with Georges Braque, create and continue the new trend Cubist to the onset of First World War.

Was exhibited at the Galerie d’Antin (Paris) in 1916, after which Picasso kept it in his studio until the early 20’s was bought by Jacques Doucet and exhibited in 1925 at the Petit Palais. Shortly after the painting was bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is one of the most precious pieces of the collection.

This work is considered the beginning of modern art and a new stage in the twentieth century painting.

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