 |
|
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
|
|
| Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings. |
|
|
|
We may rest assured that [an artist] . . . endowed with active imagination . . . is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call "modernity," . . . The aim for him is . . . to distill the eternal from the transitory.
—Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," 18631(p402)
I believe that the [preparatory] drawings have much to tell . . . whatever Picasso's initial idea had been, he did not abandon it, but discovered more potent means for its realization.
—Leo Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel"2(p12)
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [was my] first exorcism painting . . . If we give a form to these spirits, we become free.
— Pablo Picasso3(p16)
Pablo Picasso's monumental painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Women of Avignon), completed in 1907, is one of the most important paintings of the 20th century, representing, as it does, the beginnings of modern art. It constituted a decisive assault on the past, on representational painting and the traditional conception of pictorial space, to . . . [Full Text of this Article]
James C. Harris, MD
|
