Picasso

Picasso Perhaps the most radical painting of the twentieth-century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, hangs unobtrusively at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This large canvas, measuring 96" x 92", was to revolutionize modern painting by charting a new way of depicting reality. In 1907 its painter, Pablo Picasso, broke all of the rules that the "artistically correct" learned at the art academies: he disposed of three-dimensional perspective, abandoned harmonious proportion, used distortion, and borrowed from the art of primitive cultures. In fact, the painting was such a revolutionary statement that when the painting was first viewed by some French critics, the painter Derain even suggested to Picasso that he would one day commit suicide for the shame that he had brought on the art establishment. Originally Les Demoiselles was going to be an allegory of venereal disease, entitled "The Wages of Sin." In the study for the painting, Picasso sketched a sailor carousing in a brothel amongst prostitutes and a young medical student holding a skull, a symbol for mortality. But the subsequent painting is quite different from the original sketch: only the women appear. And these women are not the traditional nudes that viewers had become so accustomed to picasso, women, new, painting, different, modern, les, demoiselles, art, woman, way, view, space, onlooker, one, been, very, through, points, because, world, thus, since, perhaps, human, form, flat, fixed, faces, even, canvas, body, becomes, words, whereby, whereas