Topic > A review of the painting Les Demoiselles D'avignon by Pablo Picasso

'Few could imagine at the time it was made that the painting on which Pablo Picasso worked in the winter of 1906-1907, and which is now known as Les Demoiselles D'avignon Demoiselles d'Avignon, was destined to have such a decisive effect on all modern painting." Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The painting shows a group of naked whores, two of them on the right side horribly deformed and two others staring, facing the viewer. This image is disturbing "both in its raw sexuality and in the violence it does to conventions of spatial illusion, figural integrity, and compositional unity." This painting was influenced by Iberian sculpture and African art. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon can show problematic social struggles under conditions of gender and class issues. Georges Braque was extremely impressed by Picasso's achievements and influenced his work in many ways, as is evident in his painting Nude, created in the winter of 1907-1908. In this painting the shapes are simplified and the volumes are emphasized and are defined with heavy contours, the shape is suggested by broad parallel brushstrokes. Braque submitted six recent paintings to the Salon, but they all rejected them. He was extremely upset, so he decided to exhibit his work with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler opened a small gallery on Rue Vignon in 1907, and purchased a large quantity of Picasso, Braque and Derain's work. This shows how impressed he was with their paintings and thought that the style of Cubism would be immense. The poet Apollnaire prefaced the exhibition catalogue, which marked his debut as an art critic. In 1908, Braque began to paint landscapes in which he intended not to reproduce more or less transitory color imitations, but to use the safest elements of the landscape. He began to limit his palette to only ocher and different shades of green, brown and bluish gray. Braque's technique was very similar to Picasso's. In 1909 Picasso began dividing large volumes into series of smaller volumes. After a while the Cubists began to have a change of interest towards planes instead of volumes. Louis Vauxcelles wrote in an article in Gil Blas, in November 1908, 'M.Braque is a very bold young man. He builds metallic, distorted, scandalously simplified figures. He despises form and reduces everything - houses, landscapes and figures - to geometric designs, to cubes." The painters proceeded cautiously, sometimes stopping along the way and occasionally reverting to previous methods. 1910 was considered an important year for Cubism as it marked the beginning of a new era. Picasso and Braque abandoned the traditional way of seeing that had been used for over four centuries. They stopped using the single point of view of perspective and now looked at the object from multiple angles thus obtaining a new complete and more effective vision. This was known as analytical cubism. By 1911, Picasso and Braque no longer conveyed the pure color of the depicted objects and began to introduce writing, occasionally printed on the painting. Braque explained that the reason for including the letters was to "demonstrate their purity and total absence of distortion and the fact that they were no longer governed by the laws of perspective." And Braque explained that adding writing gives a little more reality to the paintings. In 1912, Cubists began to replicate textures, and during this time manufacturers produced wallpaper that imitated woodwork, marble, and fabrics. And soon after they began to use pieces of newspaper, matchboxes and stamps glued on their works. This was known as"papiers colles" or "collage" as it is known today. This also gave the paintings more reality. Cubism was not just about Picasso and Braque, but was a source of inspiration for other Cubists such as Gris, Leger, Gleizes, Metzinger, and later Delaunay and Marcel Duchamp. In 1913-14, when all the most important discoveries were made, Cubist painting became freer and more decorative. However, due to the war, Cubism suffered a temporary hiatus. Picasso, Braque and Gris were isolated from each other so a breakup was predictable. However, Picasso did not abandon Cubism, although he experimented with other art forms in 1915. Furthermore, the post-war sale of the Kahnweilers gallery led many to believe that Cubism was deteriorating. Cubism owed much to the art of the previous fifty years. , the Cubists opposed van Gogh and admired Seurat "for his intellectual objectivity, his classical detachment and formal purity". Gauguin had a great influence in the formation of Cubism, as young painters working in Paris in the early 20th century saw him as the "true discoverer of the aesthetic value of primitive art". However there was only one 19th century artist who played a clear and direct role in the formation of Cubism, C. C provided a link between 20th century painting and traditional Western art. Impressionists painted objects as they saw them and not as they were trained. They gave the paintings the maximum intensity of color and "got rid of the prevailing squalor of most academic painting." However, when focusing on color, they often forgot shape and volume, except C. C interpreted shape and color by means of small individual brushstrokes. 'Line and color are inseparable' he told Emile Bernard. Picasso addressed this problem faced by C, although he was still primarily concerned with representing volume on a two-dimensional scale. Vivid colors were replaced by a limited range of muted tones, drawings lost their freedom and fluidity and were limited to rendering the outlines of objects reduced to a minimum. According to the cubists «the object has an absolute form, an essential form and to present it we should eliminate chiaroscuro and traditional perspective». And they believed that an object has many complete forms, as many as there are planes in the region of perception. In a letter dated 15 April 1904, C writes to Emile Bernard stating: "Nature should be treated in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone and the whole arranged in perspective, that is, so that each side of an object or a plane converges at a central point". prototypical geometric patterns". One influence of "reality" and "realism" that inspired Cubist ideas was the philosopher Henri Bergson effect. "Bergson's philosophy was profoundly anti-materialist and idealist" and argued that "reality" was what 'we all grasp from the inside' and which is evoked by each person's experience and perception of the world rather than 'external objectivity or simple analysis'. Bergson saw reality as a regular flow and that each individual's idea of ​​reality is fabricated from memories, experiences of the past, which are present in the individual consciousness.'It is evident that the technical processes of the works of Picasso and Braque from 1909 to 1911 had been developed at the expense of conventional representation. The later paintings are very far from iconic dependence and conventional notions of realism, as something dependent on likeness. Cubism, despite intellectual prejudices and clear'.