Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon

     This critique is analyzing a visual work of art, which is a painting titled Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. The work was created by Pablo Picasso, who is from Spain. It was painted in 1939. There are five women included in the painting. The artist put in grape, water melon, and apples. The five women are nude figures. The artist uses different tints of pale orange and blue. Three women are looking straight ahead. One woman is looking the right side, and another woman is looking the left side. They did not wear a smile. Picasso uses line to divide his painting into random geometric and angular areas. He uses line to draw in his figures. Picasso uses a heavy black outline to define important areas. The mural is divided into organic and geometric shapes. Picasso gives some three-dimensionality to his figures through simple shades and values of the color gray. The mural appears Balanced because the images and shapes span the entire surface. The use of values of gray and the uniquely drawn figures give this piece a sense of visual harmony. The mural definitely appears to be unified. The composition of the painting shows a lot of unity because of the repeated use of the colors. The dominant analogous color scheme of red, yellow and orange ties the painting together. Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon has become the single most discussed image in modern art. Its simplified forms and restricted color were adopted by many cubists, as they reduced their palettes in order to concentrate on spatial exploration. A result of personal conflicts on the part of the artist, combined with his ambition to be recognized as the leader of the avant-garde, the painting deliberately breaks with the traditions of western illusionist art. The painter denies both classical proportions and the organic integrity and continuity of the human body. Avignon in the title refers to a street in Barcelona’s red-light district. Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon is aggressive and harsh, like the world of the prostitutes who inhabit it. Forms are simplified and angular, and colors are restricted to blues, pinks, and terracotta. Picasso breaks his subjects into angular wedges which convey a sense of three-dimensionality. We do not know whether the forms protrude out or recess in. In rejecting a single viewpoint, Picasso presents “reality” not as a mirror image of what we see in the world, but as images that have been reinterpreted within the terms of new principles. Understanding thus depends on knowing rather than seeing.