In “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), Picasso played with a very traditional subject, that is bathing nude women, which can be seen in the classical paintings of Titian and Reubens (for example, “The Judgement of Paris”, 1632). But it ended up being a turning point in the history of art. Painted more than a 100 years ago, this painting still looks rebellious, radical and quintessentially modern.
Now, what is Modern art? In the classical paintings, we see static and illusionary figures, trying to conceal the process of making. Here, in modern art, the process comes to the foreground and the problems or negativities of paintings in the classical era, e.g.- flat canvas, the opaqueness of colours etc. now become the pillars of expressions. Thus, modern art is expressive, open and less illusionary. We will discuss this later.
Picasso, the cultural thief, took influences from a vast range of sources like African Grebo Mask to western mythological paintings and applied it to a traditional subject like nude bathers. John Russell in his book “The Meaning of Modern Art” assumed that Picasso has picked up the format of “The Judgement of Paris”, that is three nudes in the left and two comparatively different and dressed figure in the right. But the pointedness, sharp angles, tension and violence in this piece of work are not familiar with the chosen subject.
If we compare the two works, in “The Judgement of Paris”, the figures are painted in naturalistically rounded and placed in a natural believable space. But in spite of being able to paint in a classical, realistic fashion (for example, the pencil sketch of Ambroise Vollard), Picasso deliberately barred the sense of distance and naturalism to emphasise expression rather than realism. Again the lady on the extreme left is either an ancient tribal woman or is wearing a non-European mask. Another lady sitting in the right bottom corner is shown from different viewpoints which have the germ of cubism in it.
Another source of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is Paul Cezanne’s series of bathers and especially “Les Granes Baigneuses” (1900–6) where the distortion of human figures is clearly visible. In the case of African influences in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, in Picasso’s own words, when he visited the Trocadero Museum, the dusty African masks felt not like regular pieces of sculptures, but magic utensils with spirits and emotions. Thus, interestingly the seed of Modern European art is hidden in Ancient African Art.
While researching for “Demoiselles”, Picasso picked up another source that is “The Scream” (1893) by Edvard Munch. A prominent example of Expressionism, in “The Scream” we can see extended perspective, sweeping movement, strident colour, simple face to not distract attention— everything is composed together to express the emotion of scream. Another influence was “Apocalyptic Vision of St John” (1608–14) by El Greco where we can see tensed non-classical distorted nudes. The non-natural expressive human faces in Catalan medieval mural like “Christ in Majesty” (1123), too, influenced Picasso which reflected the use of expressive colours in his “Gypsy Girl on the Beach” (1898).
The advancement of science and thinking opened new avenues in the 20th century and made deep impressions on art. The coming of modern technology obviously made impressions on the futurists. “Interpretations of Dreams”, where Freud proposed subconscious and unconscious minds, influenced many masterpieces of Dadaism and Surrealism. In “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, Nietzsche announced ‘God is dead’ and replaced artists as creators and influenced liberal freedom of artistic expression in society.
Most importantly with the invention of Cinematograph in 1895 by Lumiere brothers, which is a mobile recorder of running images and at the same time a film printer and projector, everything changed for painters pretty fast. Cinema and photography took away so many functions of painting like storytelling and image reproduction that painted art could not help but invent new dimensions rather than being static imagery for a fixed perspective. They started to reveal the abstract, pictorial qualities and expressive aspects of painting which became the stylistic basis of Modernism.
In this context, French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix criticised photography as it sees too much in a picture. For example, we do not see each blade of grass when looking at a photograph of a grassland. The eye takes from it what it needs to see. Thus, painting was expressively more advanced in comparison with photography.
In his book, “The Cubist Painters”, Guillaume Apollinaire clearly suggested that the new set of painters are in search of a fourth dimension. Thus Cubism, which developed from the studios of Picasso and Braque showed the dynamism of films, the restlessness of an eye and experiments with planes, just like the world map, which is actually a sphere, is distributed in planes and presented in a 2D format. In Braque’s own words, cubism is the quest for space, and the use of colour plays a minor role there.
Thus in Braque’s “Mandola”, obviously the subject is broken down in different facets from different viewpoints as if the viewers are looking at it from a number of perspectives. Some planes are distinctive and some planes are blurred as if the subject, i.e. the Mandola player is moving and the canvas is stretched to be a panorama with different facets of the subject coming in the same space. It is like painting both the bright side and dark side of the moon side by side on a flat space. Clearly here we can sense the influence of cinema and x-ray photographs.
In the same way, Picasso broke facets of the human face and painted “Ambroise Vollard” (1909–10) like an x-ray or like breaking objects in molecules. Not only perspective, but Cubists have also experimented with background and foreground too. In “Le Douanier Rousseau” (1910) Picasso interchanged the background and foreground as if they are shifting space in this double exposure photograph.
Even before Cubism, Gustave Courbet experimented with abstract qualities of paintings with naturalistic figures without any idealization. In his “The Winnower” (1853–4) he rejected the dogmas, swam to the opposite direction of the contemporary trend and portrayed the central character of the piece with her back on the viewer that has no intention to project a story unlike classical paintings of his contemporaries.
The characters are completely unaware of the viewer and doing different things disconnected with each other. Just like Courbet said in his manifesto to paint on his own term, clearly, the whole radical intention of this picture is just going opposite of mythological drama on stage with interconnected characters facing the front which is a stereotype of classical paintings.
In Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe” (1863), we can see a different kind of bathers tradition. Here the relationship of spectators takes center-stage rather than classical visual storytelling. Here the nude female seems to gaze directly to the viewer’s space and creates a bridge between them. The same style was explored by Rembrandt and Velazquez. The still life in the left bottom corner is also important in the usage of raw and revealing brush strokes.
Thus in the early 20th century, in the fast changing world with advancing science and thought, art and painting found a new dimension. The pictorial qualities, the narrative took a backseat with the advent of photography, (which primarily worked as an image reproduction machine and then etched its own path) and revelation of the process and meanings became crucial to art.