StageView: Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Picasso

The details are salacious enough to keep a tabloid editor happy for months.  A small band of bohemian artists and writers meet regularly in Montmartre cafes and studios where they liberally imbibe opium and wine and enthusiastically share women and ideas.  Among the women is Alice Géry, who at age 21 in the spring of 1905, becomes involved with the artist whose name defines the group, la bande à Picasso. Since adolescence Géry has also been the mistress of an insurance actuary named Maurice Princet, a man with keen interest in art and a comprehensive understanding of the new ideas in mathematics. Through Géry, Princet gains entrance to la bande à Picasso.  Perched at the corner of bistro tables, notebook in hand,  he delivers informal lectures to la bande on the theories of new geometry and the fourth dimension as outlined by Poincaré in his masterful work La Science et l’hypothèse (1902).  The lectures have an impact Princet could not have imagined. In later years, he would become known as the mathématician du Cubisme; during his association with la bande à Picasso, he provides a measure of inspiration and intellectual underpinning for an artistic revolution.

Picasso worked on the revolutionary work Les Demoiselles de Avignon in two campaigns.  His initial concept came in 1906 at the end of the Rose Period when he embarked on an investigation of new forms.  “Paintings are but research and experiment,” he said years later. “I never do a painting as a work of art.  All of them are researches.”  In part, Picasso took up his search for a new form as a response to advances in the work of friend and rival Henri Matisse.  At the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, Matisse exhibited La Bonheur de Vivre, which was quickly heralded, as Miller writes, “as the most advanced painting of its time: the very epitome of everything that was current and adventurous in art . . .”   Picasso could not allow Matisse’s supremacy to go unchallenged.

In the process of creating Les Demoiselles, Picasso absorbed and blended a variety of influences.  The theme—women in a bordello—was a response to similar treatments in paintings by Cézanne, El Greco, Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.  Specifically, Ingres’ Le Bain Turc and El Greco’s Apocalyptic Vision impacted Picasso’s initial composition for the work.  However, Picasso’s interest was not in representational or naturalistic work; he was striving for something conceptual and abstract.  For this reason, Cezanne became more influential. Cezanne had developed a technique known as passage. This technique created “spatial ambiguity” on the canvas by merging foreground and background, thereby creating several perspective points that change depending on the angle of viewing.  Picasso built on this idea after discovering that his way forward required a look back.

The painter Andre Derain was a friend of Picasso’s.  Like Matisse, Derain took inspiration from so-called “primitive” African art to move beyond the fauvist work that defined his career and success, and introducing, with Matisse, astounding new work at the Salon des Independents in 1906.  Encouraged by his fellow artists, Picasso attended two exhibitions that impressed him deeply.  The first, in the spring of 1906, was an exhibit at the Louvre featuring impressive examples of Iberian sculpture from Osuna in southern Spain.  The second was of African art at the Musée Ethnologie du Trocadéro, which Picasso visited in June 1907.   The experience, especially of the latter, was transformative.  “I understood why I was a painter,” Picasso said.

Miller suggests that contained within Picasso’s transformation was a conviction that African art pointed the way to progress on Les Demoiselles. At this time he was at an impasse and had stopped working on the canvas.  The degree of abstraction in the African masks and Iberian statues prompted him to pursue “geometry as the language of the new art” (Miller). He was ready for his second campaign on the painting.

Through Princet’s informal lectures, Picasso absorbed concepts that would inform the final shape of Les Demoiselles.  Viewing the painting, the images of the five demoiselles become increasingly abstract as the eye travels left to right. The squatting demoiselle at the far right is the most abstract with her back to the viewer, but her masklike head, composed of geometric shapes, impossibly faces out from the canvas.  She dramatically depicts Picasso’s radical new approach, the visual concept of “spatial simultaneity.”

Miller defines spatial simultaneity in art as “different points of view presented all at once instead of as a succession of perspectives.” Other artists, such as Claude Monet with his series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, had depicted multiple perspectives using separate canvases.  Cezanne represented on one canvas the total views of a scene stored in his memory over a long period of time.  Picasso goes further; for him, an object on the canvas is the sum of entirely different viewpoints.  At once, he presents an image as seen from different perspectives and at different times.  It is as if he his representing a three dimensional object as viewed from a fourth dimension, that fourth dimension being time. The doorway to cubism and all that followed opened.

-Joseph Whelan, Publications Director at Syracuse Stage

"The Desmoiselles simultaneously invoked and demolished the canon celebrated in the great museums where Picasso had trained his eye, the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris." - Christopher Green on Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon