Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [94]
The faces were not the only stunningly different element of the painting. Picasso had abandoned perspective altogether, flattening the images and showing the women in contorted poses. One, squatting at the far right, lets the viewer see her back, front, and sides at the same time. These are not the soft, fleshy nudes of earlier painters; they are all jagged edges and triangles, lines and plane surfaces. The only other recognizable object in the painting is a haphazard collection of fruit at the bottom, as if Picasso were thumbing his nose at all the formal still lifes and lovingly painted bowls of fruit of previous artists. Much later, Picasso was to remark, “When the cubist painter thought, ‘I’m going to paint a fruit bowl,’ he set to work knowing that a fruit bowl in art and a fruit bowl in life had nothing in common.’” 34
As a work by a serious artist, the painting was a departure of shattering proportions. It was as if Picasso had taken the pistol Jarry 35 had given him and fired it at all previous art. He had committed what anarchists called the “propaganda of the deed” — he had put the ideology into action. Though the figures are static, the overall impact was violent.
No one except Fernande had seen the painting while it was in progress. Now, Picasso allowed those closest to him, those he most respected, to view it. No one understood it. Max Jacob thought that the best thing a friend could do was to remain silent. André Derain worried that “one day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas.” 36 Apollinaire, Picasso’s herald and promoter, muttered, “Révolution,” but could not bring himself to express anything at all about this painting in print. Later, writing about the theft of the two statuettes, Apollinaire said that he had tried to persuade Picasso “to give the statues back to the Louvre, but he was absorbed in his esthetic studies, and indeed from them Cubism was born. He told me that he had damaged the statues in an attempt to discover certain secrets of the classic yet barbaric art to which they belonged.” 37 But it was not cubism that the statuettes inspired: it was this strange painting, which as yet had no name, so friends dubbed it The Philosophical Brothel. Not till later would it be given the title by which it is known today: Les demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon).
Some viewers were more outspoken. Matisse interpreted it as an attack on modern art, a mockery, and vowed revenge. 38 Leo Stein laughed when he saw it, thinking the painting a joke, but came closest of anyone to understanding it when he said, “You’ve been trying to paint the fourth dimension. How amusing!” 39 It was indeed a new dimension that Picasso had discovered, blazing a trail that other painters would follow. Just as non-Euclidean geometry posited a realm unfamiliar to those who saw only with their eyes, and quantum physicists dealt with things that could not be seen, so did Picasso, who once said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” 40
At first, few were able to see his accomplishment clearly. The dealer Vollard, who had so recently bought up virtually every canvas Picasso had to offer, now pronounced a virtual death sentence on the young Spaniard, saying he had no future as a painter. 41 However, at the very moment Vollard was leaving Picasso’s studio, in walked Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German who had become a banker in London before deciding that his true calling in life was to own an art gallery in Paris. That day at the Bateau-Lavoir, he purchased most of the studies that Picasso had done for the startling new work — a windfall for Picasso because he usually let visitors carry such things away for nothing — and asked to purchase the painting as well. But Picasso must have realized from the reaction of others that it was not yet