ABSTRACT
The basic subject is one common enough in Old Master painting: beauty on parade. In several of his first sketches for the Demoiselles. Pablo Picasso introduced some clothed male figures: patrons of the house, for whose benefit the parade was being mounted. Picasso himself seems never to have regarded it as finished but simply to have turned its face to the wall and got on with other things. Picasso had in mind the epic scale which Matisse had lately attempted in such pictures as his Joy of Life. Georges Braque had been introduced to Picasso by Apollinaire toward the end of 1907. Throughout the Demoiselles Picasso continually shifts his ground as far as visual conventions are concerned. Picasso painted the Demoiselles at a time when civilization was identified to a considerable extent with the ideology of scientific progress—with the idea, in other words, of a triumphal advance toward a firmer grasp of the conditions of modern life.
