The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is celebrating 100 years of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” painting. The MoMA says..
“The exhibition reunites Les Demoiselles with a group of preparatory studies for the overall composition and for the individual figures, and also includes selected works created immediately before and after the iconic painting that highlight its generative role in the artist’s oeuvre. Discoveries from recent conservation and archival materials tracing Les Demoiselles’s journey to MoMA are also on view in the gallery and in the mezzanine of The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building.”
ArtDaily also has more about the exhibition and the Picasso painting..
“In looking back over the past one hundred years, there has never been a work that so changed the course of modern or contemporary art ,” says John Elderfield, The Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. “It became apparent to artists who had at first scoffed at it that this painting had changed everything, including the future progress of Picasso’s art, which built on what the Demoiselles had achieved, and created what we now call Cubism.” Art Daily
The Times art critic Robert Hughes once said this about Les Demoiselles d’Avignon..
“With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing painting after three quarters of a century, a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off.” RH
Here’s an interpretation of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon that I mentioned earlier.
