The Avignon ladies

The Young Ladies of Avignon, The Young Ladies of Avignon or, more correctly, Las señoritas de la calle de Avinyó, is a painting by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso painted in 1907 in oil on canvas and its measurements are 243.9 x 233.7 cm. It is preserved in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This painting, which marked the beginning of his African Period or Proto-Cubism, is the key reference for talking about cubism, of which the Spanish artist is the greatest exponent and creator of the artistic movement. It prints a new starting point where Picasso eliminates all the sublime of tradition, breaking with Realism, the canons of spatial depth and the existing ideal of the female body until then, reducing the entire work to a set of angular planes without background or spatial perspective., in which the shapes are marked by light-dark lines.
Two of the faces, the most cubist of the five, which resemble masks, are due to the influence of African art, whose cultural manifestations began to be known in Europe at that time, while the two central ones are more Similar to the faces in medieval frescoes and primitive Iberian sculptures, the face on the left presents a profile reminiscent of Egyptian paintings.^{[citation required]}

The bases of this work are influenced by a reinterpretation of the elongated figures of El Greco, having pointed out a particular influence from his Vision of the Apocalypse; its environmental structure that recalls Cézanne's Bathers and Ingres' harem scenes. Ocher-reddish tones are characteristic of his black period.

Ibera sculpture of the third century or II a. C. You can appreciate its influence on the faces painted by Picasso.^{[chuckles]required]}

This work was highly criticized and misunderstood even among the most avant-garde artists, collectors and art critics of the time, who did not understand the new course taken by Picasso, who, together with Georges Braque, would create and continue the new cubist current until the start of the First World War.

It was exhibited at the Galerie d'Antin (Paris) in 1916, after which Picasso kept it in his studio, until it was acquired by Jacques Doucet in the early 1920s and exhibited at 1925 in the Museum of the Petit Palais. A short time later the painting was purchased by MoMA, where it is one of the most precious pieces in the collection.

This work is considered the beginning of modern art and belongs to the pictorial avant-garde of the XX century.

The title

Picasso almost never gave his paintings titles until well past time, sometimes up to two years after they were painted. In the case of this work the same thing happened, when Picasso presented the work to his friends it was an untitled work. There are no reliable and written data on this matter, but it is believed that it was his friend Apollinaire who gave it the title The Philosophical Brothel and later André Salmon called it Les demoiselles d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, where there were brothels. Except for those friends, no one knew about that street and soon the name of Avinyó began to be confused with the name of the French city of Avignon. When the painting was finally presented with a title, it was Les demoiselles d'Avignon and so it has reached the present time.

All those friends (a very small group) to whom Picasso showed the painting in private agreed in their comments about the great impact it produced on them. There was astonishment and also mockery. Picasso showed it and kept it until in 1916 (nine years later) it was exhibited. After another eight years, Picasso sold it for not a very high price.

Later, a play also named after it was written.

The sketches

As usual, Picasso worked on a few well-drawn sketches before devoting himself fully to the final work of the painting. This preliminary work of study consists of an oil painting, a watercolor and a large number of drawings that were duly studied and analyzed in an exhibition catalogue.

A first sketch in black pencil and pastel on paper, in horizontal format, reveals Picasso's first idea for the realization of this painting. The measurements of the canvas were going to be smaller, with seven protagonists, five women and two men. The men would be a student (presumably in medicine) entering the scene from the left side and holding a book (in other drawings it is a skull), and a sailor sitting in the middle of the room, in front of a round table. where there is a still life painted with three slices of watermelon, a jug of wine and a jug with flowers, all with their corresponding symbols. The distribution of the women was going to be: one to the right, entering and running the curtain, one with her back turned and sitting, another sitting next to the sailor and two behind and standing. Critics and historians have seen in this sketch a clear brothel scene.

The second sketch is a watercolor on paper, very close to the final painting. In it the male figures disappear and the five female figures remain. It maintains the horizontal format but with smaller measurements. The seated woman remains almost the same, only now she slightly turns her head towards the viewer. The woman on the right is still in position to draw the curtain. The student on the left is replaced by a woman very similar to the final painting. The still life in the center comes to the fore and the jug with flowers disappears. In this second sketch, a test of the colors of the finished work is already shown. The brothel scene is no longer as clear as in the previous sketch and each female figure takes center stage on its own.

In order to create these sketches, Picasso made a series of individual drawings of each character, their heads, bodies, legs, frontal and profile. Almost all these small works are preserved.

Description

The painting is divided into three sections delimited by a curtain. The figures are located in an unreal setting where there are no shadows or lights, however, in contrast to the light, the great variety of colors that abound in the work is remarkable, from ocher and white to red and blue.

The two figures in the center are positioned in such a way that they seem to be looking at us from above, also simulating that they are standing, but they are lying down, an action that reflects the position of the arms behind the head. It is also remarkable in this strip some tones of less strong colors than those on its sides such as white and light blue.

However, the most relevant part of the work is not located in the center, since the broken lines of the curtain that are found on the sides of the canvas cause the viewer's gaze to go outside the painting.

These fragmented lines are evident above all in the figures on the right, among which there is also an imbalance in the body, observable in the size of the head and trunk, something very characteristic of cubism. And it should be noted that the faces of the figures we are mentioning have a certain resemblance to African masks. The crouching figure is placed in such a way that the viewer can observe it from two points of view, both from behind and from the front.

On the left side, you can only see a figure in profile, whose face is characterized in the style of Iberian art, in addition, it can be seen in this figure how the breasts are reduced in a geometric way, in this case triangular.

In the lower part there is a still life, which is made up of a series of fruits, among which grapes, watermelon, an apple and a pear stand out. Although it seems that this part of the work does not have much relevance, in Actually they do, since it provides a symbology to the painting and its composition, thanks to the oblique lines that make up the fruits.

Regarding its function and its meaning, Picasso with this work will break the rule that an image can be exclusively represented from a single point of view, in addition to the work the influence that the author took from Paul Cézanne is appreciable.

Data

• It was painted between June 1906 and July 1907.
• In 1916 he was first exposed in the Salon d’Antin.
• The French critic and writer André Salmon first described the picture in 1912.
• In 1920, André Salmon first published the title of the painting.
• In the early 1920s the work was acquired by Jacques Doucet and exhibited in 1925 at the Petit Palais.
• In 1937 he bought it in Paris Germain Seligmann, for 150,000 francs. He was then exhibited at the American gallery Jacques Seligmann in an exhibition entitled 20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso 1903-1923.
• Later (1939) was purchased by the New York Museum of Modern Art for $28 000, thanks to the donations of Lillie P. Bliss ($18,000), Germain Seligmann and Cesar de Hanke ($10,000).