During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Oceanic and Native American art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those cultures. Around 1906, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and other artists in Paris had acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and tribal masks, in part because of the compelling works of Paul Gauguin that had suddenly achieved center stage in the avant-garde circles of Paris. Gauguin's powerful posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1903 and an even larger one in 1906 had a stunning and powerful influence on Picasso's paintings.
Concerning Gauguin's impact on Picasso, art historian John Richardson wrote,
<blockquote>The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin's work left Picasso more than ever in this artist's thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the most disparate types of art—not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths, and much else besides—could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark gods (not necessarily Tahitian ones) and tapping a new source of divine energy. If in later years Picasso played down his debt to Gauguin, there is no doubt that between 1905 and 1907 he felt a very close kinship with this other Paul, who prided himself on Spanish genes inherited from his Peruvian grandmother. Had not Picasso signed himself 'Paul' in Gauguin's honor.</blockquote>
Both David Sweetman and John Richardson point to Gauguin's Oviri (literally meaning 'savage'), a gruesome phallic representation of the Tahitian goddess of life and death intended for Gauguin's grave. First exhibited in the 1906 retrospective, it was likely a direct influence on Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes,
<blockquote>Gauguin's statue Oviri, which was prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso's interest in both sculpture and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in print-making, though it was the element of the primitive in all of them which most conditioned the direction that Picasso's art would take. This interest would culminate in the seminal .</blockquote>
According to Richardson,
<blockquote>Picasso's interest in stoneware was further stimulated by the examples he saw at the 1906 Gauguin retrospective at the Salon d'Automne. The most disturbing of those ceramics (one that Picasso might have already seen at Vollard's) was the gruesome Oviri. Until 1987, when the Musée d'Orsay acquired this little-known work (exhibited only once since 1906) it had never been recognized as the masterpiece it is, let alone recognized for its relevance to the works leading up to the Demoiselles. Although just under 30 inches high, Oviri has an awesome presence, as befits a monument intended for Gauguin's grave. Picasso was very struck by Oviri. 50 years later he was delighted when [Douglas] Cooper and I told him that we had come upon this sculpture in a collection that also included the original plaster of his Cubist head. Has it been a revelation, like Iberian sculpture? Picasso's shrug was grudgingly affirmative. He was always loath to admit Gauguin's role in setting him on the road to primitivism.
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African and Iberian art
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Europe's colonization of Africa led to many economic, social, political, and even artistic encounters. From these encounters, Western visual artists became increasingly interested in the unique forms of African art, particularly masks from the Niger-Congo region. In an essay by Dennis Duerden, author of African Art (1968), The Invisible Present (1972), and a former director of the BBC World Service, the mask is defined as "very often a complete head-dress and not just that part that conceals the face". This form of visual art and image appealed to Western visual artists, leading to what Duerden calls the "discovery" of African art by Western practitioners, including Picasso, for example at the 1907 Colonial Exhibition in Paris.
thumb|African [[Beti-Pahuin|Fang mask similar in style to those Picasso saw in Paris just prior to painting ]]
The stylistic sources for the heads of the women and their degree of influence has been much discussed and debated, in particular the influence of African tribal masks, art of Oceania, and pre-Roman Iberian sculptures. The rounded contours of the features of the three women to the left can be related to Iberian sculpture, but not obviously the fragmented planes of the two on the right, which indeed seem influenced by African masks. Lawrence Weschler says that, <blockquote>in many ways, much of the moldering cultural and even scientific ferment that characterized the first decade and a half of the twentieth century and that laid the foundations for much of what we today consider modern can be traced back to ways in which Europe was already wrestling with its bad-faith, often strenuously repressed, knowledge of what it had been doing in Africa. The example of Picasso virtually launching cubism with his 1907 Demoiselles d'Avignon, in response to the sorts of African masks and other colonial booty he was encountering in Paris's Musee de l'Homme, is obvious. this is belied by his deep interest in the African sculptures owned by Matisse and his close friend Guiliaume Apollinaire. Some Iberian reliefs from Osuna, then only recently excavated, were on display in the Louvre from 1904. Archaic Greek sculpture has also been claimed as an influence.
Contentions about the influence of African sculpture were fueled in 1939 when Alfred Barr said the primitivism of the Demoiselles derived from the art of Côte d'Ivoire and the French Congo. Picasso subsequently insisted his catalogue raissonne's editor Christian Zervos publish a disclaimer in which Picasso certified that he was not aware of African art until after Demoiselles was completed, but that he had instead drawn from Iberian art he had seen a year or so earlier, in particular from the Louvre's Osuna reliefs. Contradictingly, in 1944 Picasso recounted seeing African art and being greatly moved by it during Demoiselles creation, adding that the experience was revelatory and a pivotal moment in the painting's formulation. To Andre Malraux he said the revelations of African sculpture came to him from visiting to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero. As Picasso recalled, "When I went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed, I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren't like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things." Maurice de Vlaminck is often credited with introducing Picasso to African sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.
Picasso biographer John Richardson recounts in A Life of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907–1916 art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's recollection of his first visit to Picasso's studio in July 1907. Kahnweiler remembers seeing "dusty stacks of canvases" in Picasso's studio and "African sculptures of majestic severity". Richardson comments: "so much for Picasso's story that he was not yet aware of Tribal art.'" A photograph of Picasso in his studio surrounded by African sculptures c.1908, is found on page 27 of that same volume.
Suzanne Preston Blier says that, like Gauguin and several other artists in this era, Picasso used illustrated books for many of his preliminary studies for this painting. In addition to the Frobenius book, his sources included a 1906 publication of a twelfth-century Medieval art manuscript on architectural sculpture by Villiard de Honnecourt and a book by Carl Heinrich Stratz of pseudo-pornography showing photos and drawings of women from around the world organized to evoke ideas of human origins and evolution. Blier suggests that this helps account for the diversity of styles Picasso employed in his image-filled sketchbooks for this painting. These books, and other sources such as cartoons, Blier writes, also offer hints as to the larger meaning of this painting. a French mathematician and actuary, played a role in the birth of Cubism as an associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris and later Marcel Duchamp. Princet became known as "le mathématicien du cubisme" ("the mathematician of cubism").
Princet is credited with introducing the work of Henri Poincaré and the concept of the "fourth dimension" to artists at the Bateau-Lavoir. Princet brought to the attention of Picasso, Metzinger and others, a book by Esprit Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1903), a popularization of Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis in which Jouffret described hypercubes and other complex polyhedra in four dimensions and projected them onto the two-dimensional surface. Picasso's sketchbooks for illustrate Jouffret's influence on the artist's work.
Impact
Although Les Demoiselles had an enormous and profound influence on modern art, its impact was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. At first, only Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work. Soon after the late summer of 1907, Picasso and his long-time lover Fernande Olivier (1881–1966) separated. The re-painting of the two heads on the far right of Les Demoiselles fueled speculation that it was an indication of the split between Picasso and Olivier. Although they later reunited for a period, the relationship ended in 1912.
A photograph of the Les Demoiselles was first published in an article by Gelett Burgess entitled "The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves", The Architectural Record, May 1910.
Les Demoiselles would not be exhibited until 1916, and not widely recognized as a revolutionary achievement until the early 1920s, when André Breton (1896–1966) published the work.
Richardson goes on to say that Matisse was irate upon seeing the Demoiselles at Picasso's studio. He let it be known that he regarded the painting as an attempt to ridicule the modern movement; he was outraged to find his sensational Blue Nude, not to speak of Bonheur de vivre, overtaken by Picasso's "hideous" whores. He vowed to get even and make Picasso beg for mercy. Just as the Bonheur de vivre had fueled Picasso's competitiveness, Les Demoiselles now fueled Matisse's.
Among Picasso's closed circle of friends and colleagues there was a mixture of opinions about Les Demoiselles. Georges Braque and André Derain were both initially troubled by it although they were supportive of Picasso. According to William Rubin, two of Picasso's friends, the art critic André Salmon and the painter Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), were enthusiastic about it while Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was not. Both the art dealer-collector Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), and Kahnweiler were more enthusiastic about the painting however.
According to Kahnweiler Les Demoiselles was the beginning of Cubism. He writes:
Public view and title
From 16 to 31 July 1916 Les Demoiselles was exhibited to the public for the first time at the Salon d'Antin, an exhibition organized by André Salmon titled L'Art moderne en France. The exhibition space at 26 rue d'Antin was lent by the famous couturier and art collector Paul Poiret. The larger Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants had been closed due to World War I, making this the only Cubists' exhibition in France since 1914. On 23 July 1916 a review was published in Le Cri de Paris:
<blockquote>The Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense. They are exhibiting at the Galerie Poiret naked women whose scattered parts are represented in all four corners of the canvas: here an eye, there an ear, over there a hand, a foot on top, a mouth below. M. Picasso, their leader, is possibly the least disheveled of the lot. He has painted, or rather daubed, five women who are, if the truth be told, all hacked up, and yet their limbs somehow manage to hold together. They have, moreover, piggish faces with eyes wandering negligently above their ears. An enthusiastic art-lover offered the artist 20,000 francs for this masterpiece. M. Picasso wanted more. The art-lover did not insist. Leo Steinberg labels his essays on the painting after its original title. According to Suzanne Preston Blier, the word bordel in the painting's title, rather than evoking a house of prostitution (une maison close) instead more accurately references in French a complex situation or mess. This painting, Blier says, explores not prostitution per se, but instead sex and motherhood more generally, along with the complexities of evolution in the colonial multi-racial world. The name Avignon, scholars argue, not only references the street where Picasso once bought his paint supplies (which had a few brothels), but also the home of Max Jacob's grandmother, whom Picasso jocularly identifies as one of the painting's diverse modern day subjects.
Between September 1984 and January 1985, Les Demoiselles was displayed in an exhibition entitled "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The exhibition displayed modern pieces by artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso alongside artifacts from tribal groups from Africa, Oceania and North America in order to reveal how modern artists have interpreted tribal art. The display of this painting among African tribal masks was intended to correlate the masks as the inspiration for the features Picasso painted on the women in Les Demoiselles.
The exhibition's catalogue states that the pejorative ethnographic and political connotations of 'primitivism' were not the lens of the exhibition's curation. Nevertheless, the exhibition was controversial, as some critics believed it exemplified western intrigue with the 'different' and the harmful notion that Western culture is the modern and 'ideal' future. The curtain seems to blend partially into her body. The Cubist head of the crouching figure (lower right) underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. She also seems to have been drawn from two different perspectives at once, creating a confusing, twisted figure. The woman above her is rather manly, with a dark face and square chest. The whole picture is in a two-dimensional style, with an abandoned perspective.
thumb|upright|Pablo Picasso, , detail of the figure to the upper right
thumb|upright|Pablo Picasso, , detail of the figure to the lower right
thumb|upright|Pablo Picasso, Nu aux bras levés (Nude), 1907
thumb|upright|Pablo Picasso, 1907, Nu à la serviette, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm
thumb|upright|Pablo Picasso, 1907, Femme nue, oil on canvas, 92 x 43 cm, Museo delle Culture, Milano
Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, the style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years. Suzanne Preston Blier says that the divergent styles of the painting were added intentionally to convey to each women art "style" attributes from the five geographic areas each woman represents. interprets as the provocation that led to Cubism: