Les Demoiselles D'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, nos va a permitir en este texto abordar cuestiones relacionadas con la influencia y con la función que otras culturas han ejercido en las transformaciones artísticas occidentales y sobre todo con la fascinación ejercida por “lo primitivo” y las denominadas “Artes Primitivas” en el imaginario de los artistas y sus efectos en el mundo del arte.
(In book: PROCESOS ARTÍSTICOS Y OBRA DE PICASSO. UNA VISIÓN DESDE LA PRÁCTICA ARTÍSTICA., Chapter: 6, Publisher: Fundación Picasso - Museo Casa Natal, Editors: Salvador Haro González, pp.93-108)

This paper proposes that Picasso's landmark 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, is full of images of books and pages, especially at the borders of the canvas. The curving shapes which are traditionally seen as "curtains" can alternatively be interpreted as the white pages and brown paper wrappers of open books, rotated 90 degrees. This "visual marginalia" supports the interpretation of Picasso's famous brothel scene as a semiotic construction, befitting the painting's early title (devised by Picasso's writer friends), "The Philosophical Brothel". The painting also contains iconographic representations of textuality. A slightly open book can be perceived in the middle of the painting, and along the bottom border, an open envelope and writing paper can be seen laid atop the tipped-up table, under the fruit. I claim that Picasso's images of texts derive from his acquaintance with the text-driven, monumental novel, Don Quixote. I give special attention to the narrative Author's Preface to the Spanish literary classic, in which the author describes assembling quotations from diverse sources to compose the first and last pages of his book. Picasso visually represents this allusion by depicting pages at the left and right "ends" of his canvas. Other texts and images are considered as sources for the bibliographic imagery, which generally reframes this canvas as a fictive tissue of quotations, akin to the overabundance of texts that Don Quixote is reading in Cervantes's novel. Picasso's painted image of a blank leaf of writing paper and its envelope, finally, encourages viewers to see the painting as a letter of communication, for which we ourselves must provide the writing that would represent our interpretations.

This article argues for deep formal, material, morphological, and philosophical connections between a series of experimental syphilis studies conducted on simian research subjects at the Institut Pasteur by Émile Roux and Élie Metchnikoff and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It positions three caricatures of the Institut Pasteur studies published in the illustrated anarchist weekly L’Assiette au beurre, which alternately depict Roux and Metchnikoff’s monkeys as prostitutes or as Moroccans enduring the brutality of colonial medicine, at the crux of this relationship. After fleshing out fin-de-siècle conceptions of anthropoid apes through close readings of Emmanuel Frémiet’s gorilla and orangutan sculptural groups, this study contends that the L’Assiette au beurre images’ pictorial blending of human and animal bodies illuminates shared logics of exploitation and professionalization structuring research in experimental medicine, colonial medicine, and dermatovenereology. The invocation of these shared logics by both L’Assiette au beurre and Picasso evince the ways medical discourses of raced, gendered, diseased, and animal bodies permeated spheres of knowledge and visual culture production.