PICASSO'S EYES
PABLO PICASSO, LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON, 1907
(Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Modern art looks at us with a strong, steady gaze.
Modernism is a thing with eyes.
Consider the following brief cinematic montage:
–the coolly appraising glance of Victorine Meurent in Manet’s Olympia
–the haunted and haunting, no-bullshit stare of Vincent Van Gogh in the Musée D’Orsay
Self-Portrait
–the razor-sliced eye in Un Chien Andalou
–Man Ray’s photograph of an eye affixed to a metronome
–the right eye of Magritte’s wife, painted on a small circle and placed in a box
--the weird eyes that capture our own amidst the roiling forms of de Kooning's
Excavation
But of all the eyes of modern art, none are more powerfully disturbing than those that stare back at us from the work often considered the first truly Modern painting, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. When I stand in front of it at MOMA, I can’t escape from the eyes of these five women. Their gazes are fascinating, transfixing. I try to look elsewhere, to investigate the painting’s depths, but the eyes always bring me back to the surface; the eyes of these large, dominating women (the painting is about eight feet square) hold me here, and I cannot move beyond them. (I am not passive or hypnotized, however; the work keeps my eyes in motion, moving from face to face, stare to stare.) It is through these eyes that my eyes feel the power of this work. And the longer I look, the more I feel. That’s why the painting hasn’t lost its power, even after a century of criticism and reams of reproductions. The longer we look, the stronger and more mysterious it seems. Eventually we must walk away, and this always feels something like an admission of defeat. The Demoiselles always wins. It is endless.
And endlessly difficult to write about. John Russell called it "the white whale of modern art: the legendary giant with which we have to come to terms sooner or later."1 Beyond the inherent difficulties of the painting itself lie the volume and variety of interpretations it has accrued over the past hundred years. Countless would-be Ahabs have tried to sink their Formalist or Freudian or Feminist harpoons into its side, but the old whale still swims powerfully along. The painting is in a class with Hamlet and Ulysses, works about which so much has been written that one wonders if anything is left to say. The Demoiselles can be understood as an allegory of venereal disease, a violent expression of castration anxiety, a monument to misogyny, a primitivist assault on the canons of European art, a revolutionary experiment in form and representation, and much, much else, but none of these interpretations (all of which may be accurate) can explain the power that fascinates me when I expose myself to the gaze of those staring eyes.
I want to try a different tactic: to approach the painting not through some consciously applied, pre-existing ideology or art historical narrative but through its effect on the viewer. I will attempt to understand its power by understanding what it makes me think and feel as I stand before it. I am convinced that the eyes are the key, that for this painting that stares at us, the best response is to gaze back more intensely, to look longer and think deeper, to ask ourselves the same two basic questions we should ask in front of any painting: What do we see? What does it mean?
Five female nudes are arranged in Mannerist space. It is important that we don’t consider this space ‘Cubist’; when Picasso painted this work in the spring and summer of 1907, the first Cubist paintings were about a year in the future (and they were painted by Braque). This is the compacted space of Italian Mannerism, the space of Pontormo and Bronzino, imported into Picasso’s work via the paintings of the last great Mannerist, El Greco. Mannerist space is unrealistic, visionary space; it is a shallow, concentrated alternative to the illusionistic vistas and distant horizons of Renaissance perspective. Rather than continue the Renaissance’s masterful imitations (and/or idealizations) of visible reality, Mannerists constructed spaces that existed only in the artist’s mind, imaginary places that reflected a mind in spiritual ecstasy, erotic transport, or–as in Demoiselles–sexual nightmare.
Art historians like to say that this painting is set in a brothel, as if there is some place in the real world that looks like this, an actual brothel in Avignon or Barcelona that one might visit and instantly recognize. This is, of course, ludicrous. This Avignon brothel, this Bordello Picasso, is a whorehouse of the mind. Like the mind, it is obscure; and who knows what terrors lurk behind its curtains? It is a place where desire meets fear and fantasy becomes nightmare. And looming forward out of this place, crowding together like thoughts in an obsessive mind, are these five strange and mysterious women, five variations on a dissonant theme. Although at first they appear to form a frieze of figures flattened into a single plane, closer examination shows that the women are arranged along an oval that recedes into space from lower left to upper right. They are a ring of women, Picasso’s fractured, distorted reply to the ecstatically dancing circle of women at the center of Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre. But there’s precious little bonheur in Picasso’s vie, just this group of bizarre, staring nudes. We might ask, paraphrasing Gauguin (who lurks somewhere in the background of this brothel): Where do they come from? What are they? Where are they going?
The flattened circle of women begins on the left with a figure who combines the profile pose of ancient Egyptian art with a carved, wooden face derived from tribal masks Picasso saw at the Paris Ethnographical Museum. This synthesis of tribal head and hieratic, pharaonic body links tribal ritual to absolute, god-like power and thus carries the suggestion of magical power, a primitive force that civilized man has forgotten and lost. Furthermore, since this figure faces all the others, holds up the curtain and appears to step forward, leading us into the composition, this suggestion of magic is generalized across the entire canvas; the painting becomes a ritual space. We also notice the heavy blue contour on this woman’s forward leg and the visible revision and extension of her foot. The painting is not completely finished here, and Picasso left it that way, leaving us with the sense of a work-in-progress. This feeling is deepened by the figure’s other leg, hidden behind a drapery that looks as hard and flat as a block of stone and gives the woman the appearance of a sculpted form not yet completely emerged from the rock, like Michelangelo’s Slaves. As she steps into the painting, she moves out of rock and into form. This canvas is a place of transformation and creation, a site for the magic of art.
The next two women look like sisters, Spanish sisters. Their elongated, scroll-like ears and wide, staring eyes are derived from the head of an ancient Iberian statue, one of two such heads stolen from the Louvre and sold to Picasso in what might have been a theft-to-order engineered by the artist. ‘Liberated’ from the Louvre, these artifacts of Picasso’s homeland are returned to Spanish art on his canvas. The women’s powerful, hypnotic gazes are also drawn from a Spanish source, one much more intimately connected to the artist. This is the mirada fuerte, the Andalusian "strong gaze" that John Richardson considers so important in understanding Picasso’s life and art that he discusses it in the introduction to his projected four-volume biography of the artist. Richardson quotes scholar David Gilmore: "In Andalusia the eye is akin to a sexual organ...looking too intently at a woman is akin to ocular rape."2 The mirada fuerte is a genuine ‘male gaze’ (a cultural reality, not an ideological fantasy) full of primal power and sexual threat. It is a type of gaze Picasso possessed and used to advantage. It stares intensely at us from his self-portraits, and it gives the best photographs of the artist their haunting power. Why, then, did the woman-loving/woman-hating Picasso give his own strong gaze to these female creations? The mirada fuerte endows them with a powerful strangeness far beyond that of their long ears and big, sideways noses. They become, in a way, hermaphroditic: females with male sexual power. There is evidence suggesting that in the months before he painted Demoiselles, Picasso became fascinated with the idea of a masculine or hermaphroditic woman. His monumental portrait of that monumental lesbian Gertrude Stein; the large, chunky nudes he painted in late 1906; a sheet of drawings dated 1907 (reproduced by Richardson) that apparently shows an otherwise female figure clutching her penis–all are images of women more powerful and more sexually ambiguous than any seen previously in Picasso’s art. These mirada fuerte sisters–the right one wearing a decidedly phallic shadow on the drapery over her thigh–are a culmination of the artist’s experiments in ambisexuality. Big, scary women with the sexual power of men, they are a misogynist’s nightmare–and a masochist’s dream.
Another kind of hermaphroditism–an art historical kind–is encoded in the pose of the sister on the left: the arm bent back behind the head derives ultimately from an ancient Greek female Dying Niobid by way of Michelangelo’s male Dying Slave. Her sister’s pose may have an equally distinguished (if less sexually complex) pedigree; it was possibly inspired by one of the goddesses in Rubens’s Judgment of Paris in the London National Gallery. (In fact, John Russell thinks the entire composition is related to this Rubens. It’s possible. With Picasso, all things are possible.) Regardless of their exact inspirations (the encyclopedia of Picasso’s sources must run to multiple volumes by now), these classic, academic poses seem more than a little out of place here in the Worst Little Whorehouse in Europe. At first, the familiarity of the poses and the women’s attractive–albeit schematic–bodies might come as a comfort in this place of radical unfamiliarity. But we soon realize that the poses are too familiar; they are tired cliches, verging on art student pastiche. The two women are saved from pastiche only by their unassimilable strangeness and newness: those minimal, machined bodies drawn with the utmost economy of line; those piercing mirada fuerte eyes; those weird Iberian heads that are just traditional enough to attract and just bizarre enough to repel.
When the curtain parts, we leave European tradition far behind and see a woman whose breasts are two rectangular blocks lying flatly upon the picture plane and whose face is a fierce tribal mask. While Picasso loots the Louvre (both figuratively and literally) to create the Iberian women, for this much more disturbing face he goes across town and plunders the Trocadero, a museum of more recent imperial loot. As opposed to the rather inexpressive tribal mask worn by the woman on the left, this face is expressive to the point of Expressionism: strokes of red and green are violently slashed on in an aggressive variation on the Fauvist juxtaposition of complementary colors. The same color play that blew the critics’ eyes out two years earlier in Matisse’s and Derain’s evocations of sun-drenched beauty is here used to simulate the scarification of a dark, savage ritual. We are continents and centuries away from the exquisite good taste of Henri Matisse. The red and green stripes emphasize that huge ski-jump snout of a nose and draw our attention to the face’s most disturbing feature: the black, blank eye. In this painting punctuated by staring eyes, an unexpectedly empty socket looks our way. We are stared at by–and stare into–a void, unseeing and unseeable blackness. A couple of things are going on here. First, this may be how the masks that inspired Picasso looked on display at the Trocadero: hanging on a wall or in a vitrine, the eye sockets empty and shadowed. This is the view of the object that first impressed him, and he might wish to preserve that original image and its power. Second, and more importantly, the empty socket implies hideous violence, an eye plucked out, a punishment for seeing forbidden things, the wound Oedipus inflicted on himself in atonement for his sexual transgressions. This black void is an image of an assault on the eye, just as the entire painting is an assault on the viewer’s eyes. Les Demoiselles is a dangerous vision of a dangerous place.
When art historians speak of this work as the ‘first modern painting’ or the ‘first Cubist painting,’ they are speaking primarily of its right side–the last to be painted–and especially of the lower woman, squatting with her legs wide, her head twisted back in a broken-neck pose and resting on a hand that resembles a cross-section of a shovel. Here is our first glimpse in Picasso’s art of what will become the flat spaces and radically new forms of Cubism. The blue and white, El Greco-influenced drapery that looks as sharp and solid as a sheet of metal must lie in the same plane as the standing woman, but it seems to collide with, and define the contour of, the seated woman’s head–a foreground/ background ambiguity that will be one of Cubism’s defining characteristics. Likewise, Picasso’s restructuring of the woman’s body so that her face and back are in the same plane prefigures a typical strategy of the coming movement. But despite its central place in art history narratives, this figure is not powerful because it predicts the future of art. Rather, I suspect, vice versa: Picasso eventually continued along this path because the figure was so powerful. And its greatest power is in that shockingly contorted face. Mismatched, misaligned eyes aim their mirada fuerte gaze at us from a face that is easily the most terrifying of the five. This face is a synthesis of the painting’s Iberian and tribal styles, and because it’s painted in fleshtones it reads as more of a face than a mask, more a thing of flesh and blood than an object carved out of wood. We see it as a human face bizarrely and sadistically altered: pulled, slashed, squeezed, flattened. It is a face like ours, but brutalized, primitivized, and made shockingly new.
The circle of women is closed by the foreground tabletop, tilting impossibly upward with its still life of fruit. In an early preparatory sketch for this work, the foreground is occupied by a large pitcher or vase of flowers, and farther back, in the middle ground, we see several melon slices on a tabletop. By the time he paints the final canvas, however, Picasso has greatly focused and minimized the composition. The central table has vanished (along with the two men included in the sketch) and the pitcher has been swept aside to make room for this simple arrangement of fruit, a still life that only seems arbitrary until we rotate it 90o clockwise and note its resemblance to a penis, a scrotum and a bush of curly pubic hair. This is the only purely male element left in the painting, and it has been violently hacked off with that sharp blade of a melon. The threatening promise of those mirada fuerte eyes has been made good. Some male visitor has come under their spell and been sexually assaulted, unmanned, castrated. But let’s resist this obvious interpretation and consider the image for a moment; let’s think about this blood-smeared, unfruitful fruit. Is it a trophy of the vicious rites these not-so-belles dames sans merci perform on their male customers in the red space behind the curtain? Or is it an offering slashed off by a self-mutilating devotee–like a priest of ancient Cybele–and placed on the altar to propitiate these ravenous bitch-goddesses? Both are possible. But the still life’s importance to the painting is as an image of sexual violence, of trauma, of wounding. Prominently placed in the foreground, it is an advertisement for the painting’s power to attack and destroy. And it is also–and always–a still life of fruit, a food to be consumed in this place. Picasso’s visual pun encodes an implication of vampirism and cannibalism: these women feed on the sex organs of their victims. And if we recall that Picasso’s first large work, painted under the influence of his academic painter father, was a blandly pious and traditional religious scene depicting a young girl at her first Communion, we can see that a much more blasphemous Communion occurs in the Demoiselles’ ritual space and that the still life that constantly transforms itself from fruit to genitalia and back again enacts an extremely unholy Transubstantiation.
With this image in mind, let’s consider the cruelty of the work. There is a popular tendency to read Picasso’s transformations of women as evidence of misogyny: he was cruel to many of the women in his life (quite true), therefore he twisted and mutilated women in his art. Such a crude reading of art from life ignores the fact that metamorphosis can also signal love and desire in Picasso’s work (as in many of his images of Marie-Therese Walter), and even in a painting as cruel as the Demoiselles the misogyny argument is undercut by Picasso’s treatment of men. Yes, women are distorted, twisted and scarified in this painting, but men are reduced to a cock and balls served up on a table. Men, Picasso tells us, are dicks–and limp, severed ones at that. And women are fearsome bitches with the power to destroy. Those are the terms of Picasso’s sex war. This painting is more misanthropic than misogynistic, and more than either, it is a violent assault on the image of the human in art. It is an attack on the idealized nude that revolutionized European art during the Renaissance but then degenerated over the centuries into empty academic cliche and sentimentality. And even more than this, Demoiselles is an attack on the humanistic ideology embodied in all those generations of ideal nudes. This furiously unsentimental painting is a Big Bertha aimed at Humanism. In a world after Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche and Sade, the elevated image of man as the ‘measure of all things’ seems impossibly naive. All the former idealizations are burning away, and we are left with man as a part of nature, not its master, man as a being compelled by natural drives and instincts, forces beyond his control. The great nudes of the Renaissance, like their anemic descendants in academic art, are a pack of lies. They conceal what is most basic and troubling in us: the amoral drives that compel our cruelty and aggression. By contrast, Picasso’s masks and distortions don’t conceal–they reveal. They lay bare the primitive faces and forces hidden behind the mask of the traditional nude. To accomplish this unmasking, the artist must travel back beyond the Humanistic Renaissance to ancient Spain and Egypt, and ultimately he must leave Western tradition altogether and look to the cultures of central Africa and Oceania for direct, primitive images of human savagery. In this painting, Picasso is savaging the ideal. That’s why the Iberian sisters, striking poses hallowed by art history, are menaced by masked, primitive apparitions. It is also why, in the painting’s pièce de résistance, the sisters’ pompous poses are deflated by the woman who squats in front of them with her thighs opened wide, displaying her genitalia to the grand tradition of European art (and perhaps pissing on it). This is an early example of the profane, aggressive, iconoclastic spirit of Modernism voiced a quarter-century later by Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer:
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...3
But the painting’s power and cruelty are hardly limited to its savage mockery of tradition. In our haste to slip this work into an art historical folder and file it safely away, we must not forget the power of those eyes. They defeat us, just as nature’s (and humanity’s) savagery defeats the pretensions of Humanism. No interpretation can contain these eyes; they burn their way through any screen we try to place over them. Standing at MOMA, feeling these gazes, I finally come to the realization that we cannot contain this painting’s power because it contains us. I can think of no other painting in all of art that reaches out so aggressively to include the viewer in its composition. When we stand in front of the Demoiselles, we are part of it–and not just any part. We are the focus of the eyes and the painting; we are the reason these women look; we are the absent center without which the composition does not hold. Demoiselles does more than imply a viewer. This painting sees and defines us; it positions, describes and even genders us. The viewer becomes a male client at the world’s most terrifying brothel. That is what the painting makes us; that is who we are when we stand before it.
Looking at this canvas for any length of time is a profoundly unsettling experience (particularly, one would imagine, for a female viewer), because it constitutes an assault upon our sense of self. This may be the painting’s real power to wound, the trauma symbolized by the genital still life. Everything we think we are is violently displaced, and through the mirada fuerte power of those eyes we become the client. We are forced, aggressively forced, to enter the painting, to become a part of this threatening, angst-ridden interior–a place like Picasso’s mind: as fascinating as the Iberian sisters, as horrible as those heads on the right. Les Demoiselles doesn’t reach out to embrace us; it claws and destroys and vampiristically makes us its own. While Matisse dreamed of an art that would soothe viewers like a comfortable armchair, Picasso holed himself up in the Bateau Lavoir and built this terrible electric chair. Deadly and destructive, it shocks us into truth.
Or does it? The concluding note of the last paragraph immediately rings hollow. The ‘truth,’ the ‘reality,’ into which Demoiselles enfolds us is a sadistic, Picassoan reality. It is an obvious construction (not even completely finished) of paint and canvas, the work of a single hand, the fantasy of a single mind. Can we really call this ‘truth’? The fact that such an obvious construction can disrupt our sense of self should cause us to reflect upon the nature of that self. We should consider all the other apparent realities and truths (social, political, economic) that have made us who we are. We should think about how they, too, are constructions, as flimsy as Picasso’s canvas, as slapdash as some of his passages of paint. This construction that constructs us should cause us to reflect upon all the other constructions that do the same. When we walk away from this painting after experiencing it deeply, our work is only beginning.
And so I refuse to bring this essay to a close. Closure would not be true to an artwork that refuses to end, is unfinished, is radically open. Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is so open that it has the power to open us, to force us to see the powers that impose themselves upon us and place us in subjection, crowding out our free will. The only authentic, honest way to end a discussion of Demoiselles is to end in mid-sentence, still looking at the painting. We must end without closure, keeping everything open, respecting the work’s endlessness. So let us look again at
NOTES
1. Russell, Meanings of Modern Art, 97.
2. qtd. in Richardson, Life of Picasso: Early Years, 10.
3. Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 2.