LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON
PABLO PICASSO, 1907
This painting has a seam. Look at the faces on the left. Calm, almost classical, lifted off ancient sculpture. The two in the center especially, arms up, eyes staring out like statues. Now the two on the right. Masks. Blunt planes, slashes for mouths. They don't belong in the same painting. They're painted in two different languages. Here's what happened. He'd worked the left side for months. Those faces were basically done, the same ancient-sculpture faces he'd been painting all year. Then he walks into the Trocadéro, the old ethnographic museum, and stops dead in front of a room of African and Oceanic masks. He comes home, walks back to this exact canvas, and repaints the whole right side in a completely different language. Leaves the left alone. So you're looking at before and after, in one frame. That squatting woman, bottom right? Her body faces one way and her face is on backwards. She's on the after side. Now, the part the museum tends to skip. When he finished it, he rolled it up and shoved it in a corner. Didn't want to show it. For nine years, almost nobody saw it. Matisse saw it and was furious, sure Picasso was making a fool of the whole modern movement. Even Derain, who'd just helped set painting on fire with Matisse, told their dealer they'd find Picasso hanged behind it one day. Braque hated it too. Then he couldn't stay away. Within a year, the two of them used it to build Cubism. Picasso said later those masks felt like protection. The kind of thing you make when you're scared. He called this painting his first exorcism. Strange word for what got crowned the most important painting of the century. Probably the honest one, though. He was young and genuinely terrified. Of women, of disease, of dying. And he made an enormous painting to get some of it out. You can watch him change his mind halfway through. Then watch him roll it up and walk away for nine years.