Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Redefining Space, Form and Beauty ...

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with its vicious, fantastical, fragmented representation of prostitutes on display, is a leading example of the modernist imperative to destroy ordinary expectations of beauty and conventional styles of perception, and to compel confrontation with experience beyond the limits of social acceptability.

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The three on the left are angular deformations of Classical figures, while the brutally dislocated features and bodies of the other two have all the barbaric qualities of primitive art.

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The woman standing on the left is holding the curtain open, forcing us to watch the scene. The sense of revelation is strongly implied but in contrast to Renaissance paintings with revelatory themes such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Picasso’s is definitely not revealing the divine and pure but rather the temporal and decadent.

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Shattered were spatial depth and the ideal form of the female nude, which Picasso modernized into harsh, angular planes

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hree dimensionality.

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There are no exact divisions of light and darkness that might lend shape to the women’s bodies, and together with the combination of several angles, this adds to a general impression of disorientation in space

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The intense, severe coloring of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a departure from the agreeable roses, blues, and greens of the impressionists.

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with this painting he wanted to demolish the whole of Western art since the early Renaissance. By going back to Primitivism, Picasso illustrates his refusal to follow society’s rules

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the nudes that frame the composition already express the decisive change of direction in Picasso’s art that stimulated the modern artistic current of Cubism

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