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Home , Cubism, Fernande Olivier, Georges Braque, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Olympia (Manet)

Historical Influences of ‘s Les Demoiselles d‘ Cory McKay Department of Physics McGill University 3600 University Street Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 2T8

Pablo Picasso‘s Les Demoiselles groundbreaking. Other well-known painters d‘Avignon (Plate 1) was a ground breaking had previously incorporated elements of , in terms of both its artistic and so- ”primitive‘ into their work, but Demoi- cial impact. Painted in 1907, it is raw, primi- selles was the first to portray African fet- tive and is deliberately meant to be shock- ishes. ing. It horrified many of those who first saw Demoiselles was a rejection of bour- it, critics and artists alike, but it eventually geois society, colonialism, traditional art, came to be regarded as a work of monumen- sexual inhibitions and outdated mores and tal influence and value. It portrays five na- conventions. The fetishes and the setting of ked prostitutes in a brothel, and was indeed a brothel were both devices to convey this, originally entitled Le Bordel d‘Avignon.1 and the new artistic devices he employed The leftmost one is shown in profile facing emphasized his social messages. the other four with her face painted in a reminiscent of Egyptian art. The two figures Picasso (1881-1973) was the Spanish in the center have Iberian features and are son of a master, and was an infant looking alluringly at the viewer, placing prodigy in the Art School.2 Dur- in the position of customer. The two figures ing his lifetime, he reinvented himself re- on the right have contorted bodies and faces peatedly, and was at the forefront of several that look much like primitive African . artistic movements. There is a distorted still-life in the fore- He came to at the age of nineteen, ground of the painting that at once gives it a and gained a following painting subjects grounding in traditional painting and em- such as beggars, outcasts and circus people. phasizes its extreme departure from tradi- He eventually tired of this, however, and tion. began to look elsewhere for inspiration. He Many of the techniques used, such as was introduced to primitive art and the work the use of flat planes, the deconstruction of of Primitivist European painters while in human bodies and the angularity of form Paris, and was profoundly influenced. had a revolutionary effect on painting. was a movement in the Along with the work of , in which painters attempted to escape the Demoiselles was one of the first Cubist confines of industrialized, urban Europe. pieces to be painted. It revolutionized per- Like , it was in part a reaction ceptions of art and the aesthetic, opening the against the negative results of the industrial door to subsequent artistic movements such revolution (pollution, overcrowding, etc.). as and Dadaism. The use of im- Artists looked to the directness, instinctive- agery borrowed from was also ness and exoticism of non-urban cultures for

1 Brassaï, Picasso and Company. Trans. Francis Price (New York: Doubleday & 2 E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (Hong Kong: Company, 1966), 163. Phaidon Press Limited, 1995), 573.

Plate 1: Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon. 1907. . inspiration.3 Painters such as . His ballet, The Rite of and (see plates 2 and 3) felt , depicted rituals of pagan tribes and that it was necessary to abandon urbanism imported ideas from primitive . The and ”advanced‘ European culture and search Rite of Spring caused a riot in its first per- for something more idyllic in rural or primi- formance in Paris in 1913.4 The violent and tive settings. overtly sexual nature of the choreography as well as the pounding rhythms and disso- Primitivism found expression in music nances had much the same impact on as well as in art, particularly in the work of

3 Jeremy Yudkin, Understanding Music (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1996), 330. 4 Ibid., 330.

Plate 3: The . 1910. Henri Rousseau.

Plate 2: Contes Barbares. 1902. Paul Gauguin. audiences as Demoiselles. Indeed, Picasso was an admirer of Stravinsky.5 There is some debate as to whether or not Picasso had been exposed to African fetishes prior to painting Demoiselles. Pi- casso himself claimed that he had not,6 but much of the evidence seems to contradict this. Both Matisse and assert the he was shown African statuettes and masks in the Trocadéro well before painting Dem- oiselles,7 and also contra- dicted Picasso‘s claim8. stated that —Picasso was becoming a fanatic on the subject of Negro works, and , masks, and fetishes from every country in Africa were accumulating in his apartment“9 In any event there is a clear resemblance between the faces of the two rightmost fig- ures in Demoiselles and African masks Plate 4: African .

(plate 4), and Picasso himself acknowledged 5 Araianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, that he was eventually very influenced by Picasso Creator and Destroyer (New fetishes. York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 149. 6 Brassaï. Picasso and Company, 23-24. In contrast to others involved in the 7 Huffington. Picasso Creator and De- Primitivism movement, Africa did not repre- stroyer, 89-90. sent an idyllic, pre-European society to Pi- casso, but rather a (welcome) threat to 8 Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1989), 86. 9 Brassaï, Picasso and Company, 24. ject at the same time, some of which stand out clearly and some of which are blurred, one sees more of the true subject than one would in a meticulously realistic painting. The deconstruction of the form allows the audience to reconstruct it in their own way, attaching their own meanings to it.13 Plate 5 shows an example of how Picasso was to develop in later years.

This was part of a general artistic Plate 5: Violin and Grapes. Pablo Picasso. movement in the early twentieth century to reject established forms, to self-consciously civilized Europe.10 W hat struck Picasso pursue innovation. Artists, writers, intellec- most about the fetishes was not their form, tuals, poets and painters all reacted against although this was certainly evident in his established rules of art and looked for new, , but their spirit. As Picasso said, experimental forms of expression. At the —The masks weren‘t just like any other turn of the century, Europe was in a period pieces of . Not at all. They were of unusual stability. The economic growth, magic things . . . they were weapons. To increasing standard of living and scientific help people avoid coming under the influ- breakthroughs of the time all contributed to ence of spirits again, to help (the Africans) a sense of excitement and experimentation become independent. They‘re tools. If we which made artists and audiences more re- give spirits a form, we become independent. ceptive to experimental work.14 Spirits, the unconscious, emotion–they‘re Aside from the spiritual and artistic all the same thing. I understood why I was a meanings that were expressed in Picasso‘s painter.“11 use of fetishes, there were also important To Picasso, all of creation was his en- social messages. Picasso was a friend and emy, and his paintings were a defense disciple of , who was well against nature. He said, —Nature has to exist known for his anti-colonial satires on black so that we may rape it.“12 This manifesto Africa, and cannot help but have been influ- was very destructive, but it was accepted enced by him.15 and bought by the public partly because it Much of Africa was still independent in was a reflection of the destructiveness of the 1875, but by 1912 virtually all of it was un- previous century, the pitting of industrialism der the control of Europeans. There are sev- against nature. Primitive art had the same eral reasons for this rush to conquer Africa, purpose as modern industrialism: to keep including the desire to control mineral re- nature at bay. These destructive ideas were a sources, the need to control trade routes and part of his motivation for the deconstruction to establish new markets for European prod- in his Cubist paintings, of which Demoi- ucts, to help missionaries convert Africans selles was the first. and to gain control over strategic areas. Picasso and the other Cubists felt that it Once the scramble began, many countries was pointless to simply copy objects as real- ists did. In order to truly capture the essence of images, it was necessary to deconstruct them. By seeing different aspects of an ob-

10 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 88. 13 Gombrich, The Story of Art, 574. 11 Huffington, Picasso Creator and Destroyer, 14 Yudikn, Understanding Music, 319. 90-91. 15 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 64-65, 12 Ibid., 91. 88-89. simply seized regions to prevent other coun- cause they would not submit passively to tries from getting them first.16 their yoke.“19 European officials felt that the govern- Many atrocities were committed under ments of African nations were incapable of white rule. Even the pro-colonial contempo- producing the economic changes needed to raries of the time were horrified by some of implement the trade that they wanted, so the acts committed. Sir H. H. Johnston, the they simply conquered the African states British Consul for Southern Nigeria and Por- and ruled over them directly. Faced with the tuguese East Africa, who repeatedly extolled newly invented machine gun, there was little the virtues of bringing civilization to the that the Africans could do to resist. For ex- ”savages,‘ wrote that the Belgian King Leo- ample, a force of 32 Europeans and 500 Af- pold II —debased himself in history by the rican mercenaries defeated the 31 000 strong exploitation of the position conferred on him army of the emir of Sokoto in 1898. Only at the Congress of . His agents were twenty Europeans died, but there were 11 allowed to inflict indescribable misery on 000 Sudanese casualties.17 millions of unhappy savages.“20 A British governor of Ashanti admitted that, —The To most Europeans, the nature and cul- reader will find much to deplore in the pub- ture of the conquered peoples in Africa had lic and private acts of many of the white little significance. They were confident of men who, in their time, made history.“21 their superiority, both cultural and other- wise, over ”primitive‘ societies. This self- The huge numbers of babies of mixed assured smugness is well displayed in works race that were born in Africa during the time such as Rudyard Kipling‘s White Man‘s of colonial expansion clearly shows that Burden. Pseudoscientific ideas like Social none of the European reverence for female Darwinism were used to justify this, and it chastity was extended to the Africans. was commonly believed that whites were Howitt had this to say of one of the colonies superior to blacks. Europeans recognized he visited: —The treatment of the females themselves as the rulers for whose benefit could not be described. Dragged from the the rest of the world existed.18 inmost recesses of their houses . . . the vir- gins were carried to the Court of Justice, The methods used to secure colonial where they might naturally have looked for lands were brutal. W illiam Howitt, an Eng- protection, but they now looked for it in lishman who traveled to several colonies, vain; for in the face of the ministers of jus- gives an example: —To secure the dominion tice, in the face of the spectators, in the face of these, (the Dutch) compelled the princes of the sun, those tender and modest virgins of Ternate and Tidore to consent to the root- were brutally violated . . . Other females had ing up of all the clove and nutmeg trees in the nipples of their breasts put in a cleft the islands not entirely under the jealous bamboo and torn off.“22 guard of Dutch keeping. For this they utterly exterminated the inhabitants of Banda, be-

19 W illiam Howitt, Colonization and Christianity (: Longman, orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838), 194. 16 Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary and Patricia 20 Sir H. H. Johnston, The Opening up of rd O‘Brien, Civilization in the West. 3 ed. Vol. II Africa (London: W illiams & Norgate, (New York: Addison-W esley Educational Pub- before 1927), 238. lishers Inc., 1998), 858. 21 17 du Bois,. The World and Africa, 32. Ibid., 860-61. 22 18 W . E. Burghardt du Bois,. The World and Af- Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, rica (New York: Viking Press, 1947), 26. 280-281. religious superstition in primitive societies and sexual ”perversions‘ in modern society. In the nineteenth century, middle-class women were worshipped, cherished, de- ferred to and considered vulnerable, virginal and remote pure angels to which men could seek refuge from the cruel world of business realities.24 Their husbands sheltered them from the realities of the ”vulgar‘ outside world. As James Fenimore Cooper wrote in 1828, the genteel wife lived —retired within Plate 6: , Edouard Manet. the sacred precincts of her own abode . . . preserved from the destroying taint of exces- By 1907, many Europeans, including sive intercourse in the world.“25 A London Picasso, were protesting against the atroci- court ruled in 1840 that a husband had the ties, although they often did not go so far as right to kidnap his wife and lock her up in to say that Africans should be given self-rule order to —protect her from the danger of un- until significantly later. By using African art restrained intercourse with the world.“26 in his work, Picasso was validating African W ell-bread women took on the virtuous aura fetishes, and thus African culture, as some- of the virginal Madonna, and were expected thing to be taken seriously, as true art rather to see sex as a revolting experience that than just curiosities. must occasionally be performed in order to European art traditionally portrayed ensure procreation. Dr. Alice Stockham woman as either the Madonna or the . went so far as to assert in 1894 that any hus- The former was an expression of purity and band who indulged in marital intercourse for virtue and the latter was an expression of any purpose other than procreation was turn- 27 sexuality and desire. Both were seen as pure ing his wife into a private prostitute. There forms, and while the eroticism of the Venus was a general consensus that married cou- form was socially acceptable, it was cer- ples should have sex no more than once a tainly unacceptable socially for a woman to month, and never during pregnancy or men- 28 be an erotic being. In a very real sense, both struation. the Madonna and the Venus could be con- The perception of woman as a pure an- sidered to be European fetishes. They dis- gel did not extend to working-class women. played aspects of womanhood in an ideal- They were often forced to work as part-time ized, supernatural form. W ith his Olympia prostitutes in order to support themselves (plate 6), Edouard Manet created a huge stir and their families, and they were certainly in 1865 by painting a well-known prostitute 23 given none of the special moral reverence in a pose associated with the Venus. He that was granted genteel women.29 Men was presenting a real person as a fetish. Pi- found an outlet for their sexual desires with casso took this idea further in Demoiselles these prostitutes that they could not with by mixing African fetishes, which had sex- their wives. Indeed, it was believed by many ual connotations because of their use in fer- that cool, unemotional sex with a prostitute tility rites, with the European sexual symbol of prostitutes. The link between the two was strengthened by the belief of some of the 24 Reay Tahhahill, Sex in History (New York: intellectuals of the time that the same psy- Scarborough House, 1992), 349. chological mechanisms were responsible for 25 Ibid., 351. 26 Ibid., 351. 27 Ibid., 355. 28 Ibid., 355. 23 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 84. 29 Ibid., 354. was less sinful than passionate sex with give no alms towards agencies that are set one‘s wife. This belief was partly based on on foot to win them back.“35 the writings of St. Augustine, who claimed Earlier versions of Demoiselles included that intercourse had been free from —unregu- a sailor sitting in the brothel and a student lated excitement“ in the Garden of Eden, presenting a skull to him and the prostitutes. and that Original Sin had only been commit- One interpretation of this is that the skull is ted when lust and passion became in- meant to remind the sailor and prostitutes of volved.30 This led several, such as Leopold death and the spiritual wages of sin. How- Deslandes, to claim that sex with a prostitute ever, given Picasso‘s negative attitudes to- was —generally attended with less derange- wards the church, it is more reasonable to ment“ than sex with a wife.31 believe that Picasso was commenting on the All of this caused to flourish hell of being a prostitute, a recurrent theme in European cities. Estimates put the number of his work from 1898 to 1904.36 of prostitutes in Paris in the 1860‘s in the By portraying prostitutes that repel range of 30 000 to 120 000 and up to 80 000 rather than attract in Demoiselles, Picasso in London. The average in Europe in the late was emphasizing the ugliness that was at the nineteenth century was one prostitute for core of being forced into prostitution. By every twelve men, with some areas such as putting the viewer in the position of the cus- having one for every seven men.32 tomer, Picasso forced him or her to openly As their numbers continued to increase, both confront the reality of prostitution and its the legal and moral authorities who had pre- prevalence in European society. This was viously vocally denounced yet tolerated shocking to many, who felt that prostitution prostitution began to take serious measures was certainly not something that should be to curb it. This was also due in large part to dealt with in polite company. the spread of syphilis. In the 1860‘s, 60% of the prostitutes sentenced to the prison Saint As mentioned earlier, part of the motiva- Lazare were infected.33 tion of Cubism was to deconstruct things so that the viewer could consider them in new Prostitutes were treated with the utmost ways. This is exactly what Picasso is doing disdain, partly because they were blamed for with sexuality in Demoiselles. He forced the spread of syphilis, but mostly because people to confront their attitudes about they were ”fallen women.‘ According to one sexuality, and perhaps reconsider them. nineteenth century article in the Westminster Review, they were treated as —outcasts, Pari- Picasso also brought together the ideas ahs, lepers. Their touch, even in the extrem- of Primitivism and his opposition to Euro- ity of suffering, is shaken off as if it were pean conceptions of sexuality. The ”Iberian‘ pollution and disease . . . They are kicked, women in the middle of the painting are cuffed, trampled on with impunity by every- prostitutes on display, while the ”African‘ one.“34 Little was done to help them. As the women on the right can be seen as mocking Bishop of Newcastle remarked in 1898, —too this display and challenging bankrupt west- many professing Christians repudiate all ern society.37 Rather than the Europeans responsibility for these outcasts of society. looking down upon African culture as primi- They will say no prayer for their conversion, tive and savage, now African culture is judg- ing Europeans and their moral hypocrisy. Perhaps Picasso was thinking of how the Africans must have been judging the Euro- 30 Ibid., 141-42. 31 Ibid., 356. 32 Ibid., 356-357. 33 Ibid., 364-365. 35 Ibid., 102. 34 Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (New 36 Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 85. York: Holmes & Meier, 1976), 101. 37 Ibid., 88. peans for the atrocities that they committed Howitt, W illiam. Colonization and Christianity. upon them. London: Longman, orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838. By dealing with two of the most op- pressed groups of his time, black Africans Huffington, Araianna Stassinopoulos. Picasso and prostitutes, and by breaking artistic Creator and Destroyer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. boundaries, Picasso was at once challenging moral, political and artistic traditions. Dem- Kishlansky, Mark, Patrick Geary and Patricia rd oiselles established him as an original voice O‘Brien. Civilization in the West. 3 ed. Vol. in the Primitivism movement and was the II. New York: Addison-W esley Educa- most significant painting in the birth of tional Publishers Inc., 1998. Cubism. He forced people to openly con- Leighten, Patricia. Re-Ordering the Universe. front problems in society when they looked Princeton: Press, 1989. at his painting. As Andre Salmon writes, Lyttle, Richard B. Pablo Picasso the Man and —The expression on (the prostitutes‘) faces the Image. New York: Macmillan Publishing, are neither tragic nor passionate. These are 1989. masks almost entirely freed from humanity. Johnston, Sir H. H. The Opening up of Africa. Yet these people are not gods, nor are they London: W illiams & Norgate, before 1927. Titans or heroes; not even allegorical or symbolic figures. They are naked problems, Mahood, Linda. The Magdalenes. London: white numbers on the blackboard.“38 Routledge, 1990. Even Picasso‘s followers were initially McCully, Marilyn ed. A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences. Lon- horrified by the ugliness of the faces and the don: Thames and Hudson, 1981. subject matter of the painting.39 Matisse and Gertrude Stein, two of his most important Pivar, David J. Purity Crusade. London: Green- associates, temporarily distanced themselves wood Press, 1973. from Picasso upon seeing it. However, by Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell and Sharon the time Picasso finally sold Demoiselles in Thompson eds. Powers of Desire. New York: 1925, it was well on its way to becoming the Monthly Review Press, 1983. monumentally influential work that it is. Tahhahill, Reay. Sex in History. New York: Scarborough House, 1992. BIBLIOGRAPHY Trudgill, Eric. Madonnas and Magdalens. New Arnoldi, Mary Jo, Chritraud M. Geary and Kris York: Holmes & Meier, 1976. L. Hardin, eds. African Material Culture. New Yudkin, Jeremy. Understanding Music. Upper York: Indiana University Press, 1996. Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1996. Brassaï. Picasso and Company. Trans. Francis Price. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966. du Bois, W . E. Burghardt. The World and Africa. New York: Viking Press, 1947. Gombrich, E.H. The Story of Art. Hong Kong: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995.

38 Andre Salmon, —La Jeune Peinture Francaise,“ in A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, ed. Marilyn McCully (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 57. 39 Huffington, Picasso Creator and Destroyer, 93.