Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso, 1907 · Gallery 502 · Floor 5

So. This painting has a seam. Look at the faces on the left. Calm. Almost ancient. The two in the middle especially. Arms up, eyes staring out like statues. Now look at the two on the right. Masks. Blunt planes. Slashes across the faces. They barely look like they belong in the same painting. And, in a way, they don't. Picasso worked on this thing for months. The faces on the left grew out of the Iberian sculpture he'd been looking at all year. Then, midway through the painting, he goes to the Trocadéro. The old ethnographic museum in Paris. African and Oceanic masks. Wooden figures. Stuff he'd never seen like this before. He comes back to the canvas and those two faces on the right change completely. Not a perfect before-and-after. But pretty close. You can almost watch the painting change its mind. Look at the woman crouching in the bottom corner. Her body twists one way. Her face snaps straight at you. She's on the after side of the seam. And when Picasso's friends saw the finished painting, basically nobody knew what to do with it. Matisse thought it was an outrage. Derain supposedly said Picasso would end up hanged behind it. Braque hated it too. Then Braque came back. And within a year, he and Picasso were working side by side on what became Cubism. Picasso didn't show this painting publicly for almost nine years. But years later, he explained what had happened to him at the Trocadéro. Those masks didn't feel like art to him. They felt like protection. Weapons against things you were afraid of. And suddenly this whole painting made sense to him that way. He called it his first exorcism.

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