Pablo Picasso Gallery |
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Picasso went through the Blue Period (1901-1904) characterized by a predominantly blue palette and subjects focusing on outcasts, beggars, and prostitutes and the Rose Period (1904-1907) of pinks and beiges, light blues, and roses, with circus people and harlequins as subjects. Then came Cubism, the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time.
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Viewer | Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 233.7 cm).
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The painting depicts five naked prostitutes in a brothel; two of them push aside curtains around the space where the other women strike seductive and erotic poses—but their figures are composed of flat, splintered planes rather than rounded volumes, their eyes are lopsided or staring or asymmetrical, and the two women at the right have threatening masks for heads. The space, too, which should recede, comes forward in jagged shards, like broken glass. In the still life at the bottom, a piece of melon slices the air like a scythe. |
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