Picasso : ‘Les demoiselles d’Avignon’
When Picasso first came to Paris in 1899 he was most of all interested
in pushing for a career in the arts and did everything he could to enhance it.
Returning to
In 1906 Picasso realized that he had to take bold steps to make ‘real progress’;
this resulted in him stepping into the limelight with 'Les demoiselles d’Avignon',
a work that took him over a year to complete. Most people around him didn't get
what he was on to, were shocked even.
This courageous piece of work, often compared with Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’, reveals a highly exciting brand of imagery.
While the naked bathers of Cézanne, important as they were as first steps
towards abstraction, lack life, sensuality & most important of all, mystery,
( which may partly be due to the modest formats used by Cézanne) Picasso's 'Les demoiselles', being the result of an intense artistic struggle, emerged
as a striking, highly mysterious piece of work, revealing dark eroticism as
well as being a successful effort to effectively transcend, what is basically a group
of posing prostitutes, into carriers of the human mystery. An electrifying
vibration bounces off of this canvas into any possible direction.
He'd been working on his so brilliantly & smartly conceived & so
delicately yet forcefully depicted bleu & pink projects for years to, seemingly,
suddenly come up with this enigmatic most
confusing, rough piece of work, not knowing in any kind of way what it
all would lead him to.
The reward for this bold step, a path towards fortune & fame, was huge and deserved.
Studying his earliest work, consisting of lots of staggeringly cunning &
brilliant, impossibly mature works, conceived & executed by a then fourteen up to seventeen years old Picasso, it becomes clear that exactly this incredible & incomparably
gifted young talent was exactly the right artist to overthrow the old rules
because he, better than anyone else, could see that the old formulas were
outlived; he had to do 'something'.
Considering the fact that he was willing to sacrifice an already thriving commercial
career, which he sought desperately as well, to then change the arts forever, in
retrospect turned him into a classical
hero of the arts.
His struggle for ‘Les Demoiselles’
describes precisely why the most respected & daring artists are so looked
up to; they're willing to sacrifice an easy life, to willingly defy the laziness of the bourgeoisie.
No great art was ever made without often even greater sacrifices being made to
create it; unfortunately, as we all know, not all great artists were rewarded the way Picasso was.
The ambition to be a commercial succes was a big issue to Picasso; he fully
understood the importance of ‘making it’ as hardly any artist before or after
him did. He knew that was the only way how he could create the space needed to
make whatever came to him. He must have had deep understanding & intuitive
insight into what he had in store, had to offer to humanity in decades to come.
Even though Picasso has suffered in his early period in
Picasso’s philosophy was: "Get famous, to then do your own thing!", not: "Get famous & sell your soul to the devil!", as many seem to have as their credo.
The fact that he became a celebrity, acting
likewise in public life, didn't keep him from being an ultimate artist, one of the greatest geniuses in the arts
that ever lived. The 'royalty factor'
was an inescapable yet irrelevant symptom when it comes down to evaluating Picasso's work.
The arts, especially modern art ofcourse, are simply unimaginable without this unsurpassed comet, the unrivalled artist Picasso has turned out to be.
(c) Nov 23 2009 by Nils Wieland / Odyssee publishing
