(classy piano music) - [Man] We're on the fifth floor of the The Museum of Modern Art looking at Domoiselles
d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso. - [Woman] Picasso is a Spanish artist, but he's Paris when he paints this. (murmuring) The title translates to The
Young Ladies of Avignon. - [Man] Which refers to a street that's not in France but is in Barcelona and associated with prostitution. What we're looking at is a brothel. The idea of rendering a woman who is available to the male viewer, but within a context
that goes back to Degas. But it also goes back to Manet, if you think about his painting Olympia. And you could go even further back to the Venetian Renaissance and look at paintings by Titian. - [Woman] For many art historians, this painting is seen as a break with the 500 years of European painting that begins with the Renaissance. - [Man] And many art historians see this as the foundation
on which Cubism is built. - [Woman] So it's this radical break that points to the future. And it's a radical break
with these conventions of representation that had
for so long been accepted in the West about how
you make a body in space, how you create a space. All of that is up-ended by
Les Domoiselles d'Avignon. - [Man] Gone is linear perspective. Gone is chiaroscuro,
that modulation of light and shadow that creates the illusion that Picasso, by the
way, was in love with, the magic of illusion. But here he's shattering it. - [Woman] He found the formal means to convey the ideas, I
think, that were behind Les Domoiselles d'Avignon,
ideas about sexuality, about the female nude, about
sexually transmitted diseases. This is a confrontational painting. - [Man] In the original sketches, the woman were focusing on
a male that was included, a sailor that was also a medical student. But he takes those men
out, and the women, then, turn their gaze outward,
like Manet's Olympia, to engage us, the viewer, directly. - [Woman] Those two male
figures give us a clue to some of the ideas behind the painting. A sailor, someone who's in
a brothel as a customer, who was seated at a table originally. - [Man] And then the medical student takes on a more analytical view, who looks at the women from a
more scientific perspective. But also maybe from a
more artistic perspective. Artists have a history of
dissecting human bodies, of understanding the bone
structure, the musculature, of looking at the body analytically. - [Woman] But let's not forget that that medical student carried, at least in some sketches, a skull. And of course it makes sense that a medical student studying anatomy might be carrying something related to his profession to tell us who he is. On the other hand, the skull, in art history, is a reminder of death. It's a memento mori. And so there seems to be some tension here between the sensuality that the sailor is indulging in and a moralizing reminder that the pleasures of life are short, indicated by the skull carried
by the medical student. - [Man] The faces of
the women on the right are often seen as
representations of African masks that we know Picasso was then looking at. The figure on the left
is an archaic figure, going back to Ancient Spain and going back to Iberian art before
the classical period. - [Woman] That's one of the
problems of this painting. We look at art and we
expect stylistic coherence. But here we have this
agglomeration of styles. - [Man] It's a kind of invention. Picasso is allowing his
laboratory to be exposed to us. There is a physical confrontation,
there is danger here. - [Woman] The figures
are really close to us. Space has become this palpable three-dimensional
fractured planes. - [Man] The curtains that seem to thread in between the figures are pressed right up
against those figures. There is no space behind or between. There is still some sense of illusion. There's still some shadow. There's still some highlighting. But Picasso has only created an illusion that goes back into space a few inches. It's a little bit difficult
to look at this painting without the hindsight of understanding where Cubism is going to go. But knowing that Cubism
is this deconstruction of three-dimensional
form, shattering that form and then placing those fragments back on a two-dimensional surface, has led some art historians
to look at the central figure as one that we're both looking across at, but also looking down at as
if we're standing over her while she lies on a bed. These were not ideas that Picasso came up with independently. Matisse had been exploring these ideas, and before him, Cezanne had done this. - [Woman] You can see why
artists who saw this painting in Picasso's studio soon after it was painted were horrified. Even Degas, when he
represented un-idealized women in a brothel, never came close
to the rawness, the ugliness. - [Man] Picasso was a
product of his culture. He's a product of this moment. The fact that he's
looking at African masks in order to represent danger is an expression of France's colonialism. Those objects, those masks,
were coming to France because France had large
colonial possessions in Africa. And Picasso at this time knew very little about the cultures that these came from. He was interested in them
for their formal qualities, for their formal inventiveness. Also because they represented otherness. - [Woman] This idea of needing to go outside the Western
tradition in order to express what the early twentieth century and the lat nineteenth century
felt like is important, this tendency toward
expressing the flatness of the picture plane, not denying it by creating this false illusion. This is a very important thing in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. - [Man] It speaks to the oppressiveness with which post-Renaissance
culture, mannerism, the Baroque neo-classism, the academies of the nineteenth century, all weighed on contemporary artists who were seeking a new visual language to
represent modern culture. (classy piano music)