ABSTRACT
In 1907, a time when Edwardian ladies were wearing large feathered hats, stiff
corsets, and gloves, Picasso painted the Demoiselles d’Avignon – five angular,
abstract, naked women in a brothel. Unlike the smooth odalisques of academic
painting, still and static in their alluring beauty, or even Renoir’s pink, fleshy
women, these prostitutes are charged with sexual energy, both titillating and
threatening. They boldly gaze at the viewer, spreading their legs and thrusting
their breasts. But their faces are like African masks, so we see not the allure of a
recognizable woman, but what the artist constructed as primitive, raw desire. At
the same time, the painting’s sharp Cubist angles and planes resemble the metal
machines of modern society; the body has become a machine, and women revealed
as commodities. The raw sexuality and the artistic innovation of the Demoiselles
were so shocking that Picasso did not put the painting on public display until 1916.
