When Matisse saw Picasso’s just-completed, 8-ft-square painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the Spaniard’s studio in a ramshackle Paris building nicknamed ‘The Laundry Boat’, he was shocked at how raw, cacophonic and nasty it looked. Another modernist, Andre Derain, figured that Picasso had gone so far off the deep end that he’d soon commit suicide. Even Picasso’s loyal patron Gertrude Stein deemed the picture a “veritable cataclysm.” And you know what? It’s still pretty ugly. Even with generations of artists trying mightily to out-rad it, a permanent place on the walls of the august Museum of Modern Art in New York and an entire century for art lovers to digest it — Demoiselles was finished exactly 100 years ago — the painting refuses to go down smoothly. That’s only one reason, though, why Demoiselles is the most important work of art of the last 100 years. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicts five nude women in a brothel. But the subject matter is hardly where the shock comes from. In fact, ‘nude’ here means only that the painting has lots of chalky, peachy pink in it; genitals are either abstracted or hidden by the poses. What sticks in our esthetic craw, though, is Picasso’s merciless mishmash of styles: a bit of Matisse, some appropriation from African masks, a dash of casual realism and a fruit arrangement down in front, and a whole lot of cubism. That last one is the deal breaker as far as any conventional esthetics goes. Everything in the painting is broken and then squished, like a face pressed against a window. During the next several years, Picasso took cubism further, breaking up his figures and still lives into little pieces, twisting them back to front and top to bottom, and reassembling them every which way. Without cubism, there would have been no 1920 Dada photomontages or 1930 surrealist fantasies. Without those, there’d be no dizzying James Bond title sequences or Matrix movies.-Peter Plagens (Newsweek)
