Picasso's Great Masterpiece Was Created a 100 Years Ago

Many people say Les Demoiselles D'Avignon is the greatest masterpiece of the twentieth century. It was created in 1907 by the young Picasso and started a revolution in the Visual Arts. Even now the picture looks violent and shocking, but at the time it must have been quite an experience to see it. The painting is so radically different from what went before and was so important to what came after that more than any other work it can be seen as pivotal in the development of Modern Art.

You don't look at this picture and think "How beautiful". It seems determined to be ugly, in fact by standards of the time it must have seemed slapdash, though apparently Picasso made around 800 studies for it. The figures are unrealistic and the whole space of the picture looks broken. The painting seems to have gone through several stages and the way some figures are painted is very different from others. Famously, some of the figures are inspired by Iberian sculptures, but the more brutally painted ones resemble African masks. It looks as if it was painted in a reckless manner, even after so long; Picasso obviously disregarded any requirement for the painting to be attractive and instead created a breakthrough painting, one that broke up the imaginary picture plane that most other painters used. The picture was only later understood to be crucial in the development of Modern Art, and when you look at it, it is a very forceful and compelling painting, both because it has an immediacy and because of how Picasso's art and the History of Art changed after this painting.

There's an interesting article on the Financial Times site which reminds us a little of the context of the Demoiselles. The writer, Jakie Wullschlager, says that other artists were also searching to reinvent the old outmoded methods of representation and they were also looking to art from other cultures to inspire them, as Picasso had looked to iberian and african art. The same article mentions the El Greco painting "The Opening of The Fifth Seal (The Vision of St. John)" as a major influence on Picasso at this point. I wasn't entirely convinced by that, but it's an interesting idea.