“…I understood what the purpose of the sculpture was for the Africans . . . [The scultpures] were weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits, to become independent. Tools. If we give form to the spirits, we become independent of them . . . I understood why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, the masks, the Red Indian dolls, the dusty mannequins. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms: but because it was my first canvas of exorcism.”
The Demoiselles marked a profound turning point, not just for Picasso but for modern art itself. It is one of the most sublimely beautiful and at the same time deeply disturbing works of art ever produced, by some standards the most important painting of the twentieth century. Prior to completing it, Picasso had seemed to race through one style after another, drawing inspiration from artists as far apart as El Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec, and periods ranging from ancient Greek to postimpressionist. Now he finally knew who he was as a painter.
The painting was unquestionably a breakthrough in purely formal terms. With its drastically flattened perspective and fractured planes, it leaped far beyond anything Cezanne had achieved, clearing the way for cubism's dazzling recomposition of forms, and smashing forever the idea that the main purpose of art was to produce beautiful, realistic-looking illusions. Western art had finally sprung free of its compulsion to render the human face and figure realistically in terms of its skeletal structure and musculature. Instead, shape, volume, and plane were now in the grip of a tradition that had never bowed to the ethic of representation.
Above all, however, the Demoiselles was a revolution in function. Perhaps no painting of human flesh so shocks us in its depiction of the artist's agonized relationship to his subject matter. As Picasso himself makes clear, what he overwhelmingly felt enthused by was the essentially magical purpose of African sculpture. By reframing art as exorcism, as an act of protecting oneself from domination by "unknown, threatening spirits," Picasso irrevocably changed the twin roles of artist and spectator. Painting transcended the status of object, effectively becoming a way of propitiating our spiritual and psychological demons. Cubism has come and gone, but the radical transformation Picasso prompted in how we look at art and the act of painting, as well as our own involvement in it as viewers, remains deeply embodied in the culture to this day.
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