6.
The day finally came when Picasso was ready to reveal the painting that came to be called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He uncovered it first to Fénéon, then Uhde, Kahnweiler and Shchukin, before showing it to Fernande, Braque and Apollinaire. Fénéon’s reaction did not bode well: ‘You ought to do caricatures,’ he suggested. (‘And yet Fénéon was quite somebody,’ mused Picasso later.) As far as Kahnweiler was concerned, the painting was unfinished. Shchukin kept his opinion to himself, confiding only in Gertrude Stein: ‘What a loss for French art.’ Braque afterwards described seeing it as his first encounter of any consequence with Picasso:
My true meeting with him was in his studio, in the Bateau-Lavoir, in front of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I was with Apollinaire. There at once I knew the artist and the man, the adventurer, in the work he set down in spite of everything, as it seemed. People have talked about provocation. For my part, I found in it an unswerving determination, an extraordinary yearning for freedom asserted with a daring, one might almost say a calm fieriness, already sure of itself . . . But Picasso was very anxious, watching for my reaction.
At first, Braque was silent. Then, without revealing his true reflections, he said, ‘It’s as if you wanted to make us eat tow [hemp] or drink kerosene . . .’ (In other words, who do you expect your viewers to be, circus performers and fire-eaters?) Next to see it was Derain. He drily predicted that Picasso would probably be found hanged behind his own canvas. By any standards, the painting was shocking. A group of five nude women stared out at the viewer, looming larger than life, all nearly seven feet tall, like a startling cinematic close-up – almost as disconcerting, perhaps, as that train in the first film Parisian audiences ever saw, which had seemed about to come roaring out of the screen into the auditorium. The gigantic figures were outrageously, disconcertingly present, pressing to the surface of the picture plane, arrested in the moment as if placed on pause for a mere second, if at all. The scene was obviously a brothel. (But of course it was a brothel painting, Picasso told Braque, where else would you expect to find a group of naked women?) He was calling it El Bordel. Years later, André Salmon renamed it Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, after a bar in the Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona which (for no good reason) he claimed was a bordello. In the meantime, he, Max Jacob and Apollinaire nicknamed the painting Le Bordel philosophique (presumed to be their nod to the Marquis de Sade).
The disturbing nature of the work had to do not only with the size and attitude of the women: the flesh colours were disconcerting, rendering them starkly naked rather than acceptably nude. Unlike some of the earlier studies for the work, the final painting had a radically flattened perspective. Even the way the women were grouped was startling; there seemed to be no connection between them; each was engaged only with the viewer. They were clearly prostitutes – real prostitutes in the here and now, not artfully depicted courtesans distanced by their position within the frame with discreetly averted expressions or strategically placed drapery. Here, the drapery, such as it was, did nothing to subdue the overt sexuality of the figures; these were not only whores, but whores with attitude.
Though their impact was shockingly fleshy, they also had a carved appearance, like Picasso’s individual figure drawings, but they lacked the exuberance and vitality of the Fauvist-style coloured figures that animate the sketchbooks he filled while he worked on the initial stages of the painting. Individually, the outsized figures on canvas were equally disconcerting. The head of one standing figure was mask-like, like the head of an African or Iberian carving. Another masked figure squatted, legs splayed, to face the viewer. The gazes of at least two of the three others were so rivetingly expressionless – fixed in time – that the feeling of being watched by them seemed literally momentous, as if at any moment the expression of any one of the staring women might change. The sense of being locked by them into the moment, or frozen in time, only added to the bewildering impact of the work. The overall effect was of a moving image only momentarily stilled. ‘For me the role of painting,’ Picasso once said, ‘is not to depict movement, to show reality in movement. Its role, for me, is rather to halt movement. You must go further than movement in order to halt an image.’ The difficulty for the viewer was how to look at the picture. If you let the eye move across the frame from left to right, as in a conventional painting, you moved from naked, staring faces to masked ones. Looked at that way, there seemed to be no connection between the masked and the unmasked figures – no story. But, of course, that was not the intention: the impact was in the juxtaposition, and in the shock of the present moment there was no story, just the shock of confrontation.
The painting had undergone major changes during the six or so months of its gestation. In the sketch Picasso had begun with, there were seven figures: five women accompanied by a man standing to the left of the picture, drawing back the curtain, and, seated at the centre of the group, a sailor. (Was that figure included as Picasso’s irreverent nod to Matisse, and the sailor portraits he had painted in Collioure the previous summer?) In May, Picasso removed the standing man on the left, giving the curtain to one of the female figures, so that the women were effectively now unveiling themselves. Only in June did he remove the sailor seated at the centre. In his fourteenth notebook of sketches, he had reworked the composition, changing the rhythms, turning up the feeling of aggression across the picture and adding a mask to the faces of one of the standing women and the squatting girl in the foreground. The juxtaposition of masked with unmasked figures gave the impression of a painting in two halves. This may have been (as Mailer suggests) one reason why Picasso struggled to complete it, since he seems to have changed his mind halfway through and never worked out how to reconcile the two halves. The depictions of the figures are completely different in each. Perhaps, however, he had set out to extend the ‘splitting’ of the face first seen in Cézanne’s portrait of his wife to the treatment of a group of figures. Also in the final stages, Picasso changed the colour scheme, introducing predominantly pink and flesh tones with blue and white negative spaces, and disrupted the surface of the picture so that the relationship between figures and space became chaotic, splintered, as if the women were at the point of bursting through the painted surface.
Now, all five women turned to face the spectator in an arrested moment, the surface of the picture about to be – as it were – ‘unpeeled’ by the one on the left; the way the figures are smashed into the background drapery suggests they have just emerged or are about to emerge through a screen. The whole way in which a painting (and, perhaps, a woman) could be viewed seemed to have been subjected to a radical new interpretation. It’s as if Picasso is making the viewer look differently: he challenges the viewer’s traditional assumptions so that the elements of time, the relationship between surface and depth and the function of perspective collapse into kaleidoscopic chaos as the picture seems about to fold back in on itself. Even the traditional painterly prop, the bowl of fruit, normally introduced to establish both perspective and a link to nature and so make the picture more ‘real’, was transformed. Pieces of fruit, unconfined by a container of any kind, are placed not on a table but at the women’s feet – or perhaps just floating in space. Reduced to impossibly minuscule proportions in the foreground, they render the only remaining vestige of traditional composition in the painting absurd; each piece is shrunk from life-size in a dreadful conjuring trick, perhaps an instant earlier, like an absurdly transformed object in one of Méliès’ féerie films. Nothing in Picasso’s sketches gave an obvious indication of this degree of pictorial anarchy in the finished painting. Though the masks appear in a sketchbook, no preparatory drawing of the overall group reflects the stylistic disjunction between the three fleshy figures on the left and the two masked figures on the right. When he was asked later why the picture appeared to be in two ‘halves’, Picasso shrugged off the question, saying he had changed his mind halfway through but decided to leave it as it was, assuming everyone would understand what he meant. No one did.
The cryptic reactions of Braque and Derain aside, everyone who saw the painting that winter seemed lost for words – except Matisse. The painting struck him as a blatant mockery of all he had been striving for years to achieve; he made no secret of the fact that he saw it as a personal attack. Perhaps that was true. La Joie de vivre, his large Arcadian depiction of a group of female figures revelling in the freedom of their nudity, may have acted as an initial provocation. The next thing everyone wanted to know was: who were the women? Fernande, replied Picasso, was clearly back centre; two of the others were Marie Laurencin and Max Jacob’s grandmother. The artist was joking, of course: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had nothing to do with painting likenesses. It was an exploration of exaggeration and distortion and an experiment with visual rapports. (Indeed, one of Picasso’s sketches of the top of Fernande’s bowed head bears a passing resemblance to the masked face of one of the figures.) What, then, did this curious work amount to? Was it a cinema still in oils? A cynical urban Arcadia set in a seedy cabaret, Picasso’s anarchic retort to Matisse’s Arcadian ideals? An opium-fuelled muddle? A flawed masterpiece? A masterpiece? There was no name for this kind of painting; nothing like it had ever been seen before. Gertrude Stein had already perceived that it was no longer possible for a painter to say that he painted the world as he saw it, since ‘he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much’ – photographed, and now filmed, in mesmerizing, sequential images that could be slowed down, speeded up or arrested, subjected to unpredictable, instantaneous transformations before the viewer’s eyes. Perhaps Picasso’s aim in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to stun the viewer into experiencing the present moment, just for an instant, before the scene changed. Perhaps that was the point: perhaps Picasso’s nude figure group was neither an enduring image nor the illusion of reality but (merely) a projection. As Picasso himself remarked half a century later, ‘You have to give whoever is looking at it the means of painting the nude himself with his eyes.’
Perhaps it was a masterpiece. As Gertrude Stein wrote some decades later in ‘What are Master-pieces . . .?’, ‘Everything is against them. Everything that makes life go on makes identity . . . But what can a master-piece be about?’ Mostly, ‘it is about identity and all it does and in being so it must not have any’. Picasso had evidently succeeded in producing a dispassionate, disinterested work. His problem now was that, having collapsed the elements of time and proportion and destroyed the traditional rapport between surface and depth, for the time being there seemed nothing left for him to do. And he had shut himself away for too long. On emerging, he discovered that the dealers were still wary of his work, his friends no longer understood him; his relationship with Fernande seemed to have disintegrated. Stein, still on the subject of masterpieces: ‘It is very interesting that no one is content with being a man and boy but he must also be a son and a father and the fact that they all die has something to do with time but it has nothing to do with a master-piece.’ Picasso put the canvas away again. It would remain out of sight for another sixteen years.