The Shock Of The New

In the history of art, there are very few artists who have had quite the same effect of shocking the world with such a bold statement of intent, as Pablo Ruiz Picasso.

The seminal Demoiselles D'Avignon, created in 1907, marked the beginning of what is known as his African Period. It is also often referred to in discussions about Proto Cubism, since it is seen as a significant first step towards the final exultant flourish of Cubism itself in 1911.

Taking a wider view of the history of late nineteenth-century French art, the painting can be seen to hark back to various movements such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism. If one wanted, one could go back even further, deep into the history of art. There were many antecedents with artists such as El Greco.

And when we see the unravelling of art history after Demoiselles D'Avignon, with strikingly, important movements like Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, right up to modern-day movements, like Contemporary Art, we can see Demoiselles D'Avignon as something of a staging post along the route, to an exciting and brave, new world of art.

There are a number of features of Demoiselles D'Avignon which collectively created something of an outcry. Amongst the most striking was the use of a very limited palette of colour, as well as the geometrization of the forms. However, what was seen as even more scandalous, was the subject matter, a group of common prostitutes in a brothel.

In 1854, Gustav Courbet had taken subject matter down a level with his portrayal of the common man, bridging the gap between Romanticism and Impressionism, in his work La Rencontre (The Meeting). Picasso, took things down to an altogether lower level with his portrayal of prostitutes, bridging the gap between Impressionism and modern art.

In one fell swoop, Picasso had ripped the art rule book apart, depicting the lowest of the low, in place of the highest of the high, or the heroic. That is to say, instead of very wealthy, important people, the artist now saw fit to paint people whose station in life, in some people's eyes, could not get any lower.

When Picasso first showed Demoiselles D'Avignon, in a private viewing in his studio, in 1907, it was met with a universal reaction of shock and revulsion. Henri Matisse, a contemporary of Picasso, angrily dismissed the painting as a hoax. It was not publicly shown until nine years later, in 1916.

And, seen in the context of classical art, it was certainly seen as having a dig at all that had gone before in terms of what sort of paintings constituted art. It had the effect of blowing away all of the old, narrow, traditional precepts of art, in terms of subject matter and treatment.

Looking back from the privileged viewpoint of the 21st century, for some, the painting is seen as something of a joke, at the expense of the history and the world of all art. It has been said by people such as John Lennon, that Picasso had been laughing at the world for decades. And even the recently deceased, leading art historian, Richard Kendal, once claimed

"I get Picasso, he was having a laugh."

Looking once more at the actual painting itself, it does have a certain confrontational brutality, an ugliness, almost. It is most surely, very far from the classical beauty of something like the Nude Maja by Goya from 1797 to 1800.

And it is that so-called ugliness of Demoiselles D'Avignon, that contributed so much to the effect of shock and outcry. In this respect, it is not unlike the Sex Pistols, when they first came on the scene with their particular rendition of what they called music. And yet, just like the seventies world of music, the art world of 1907 France, shuffled its feet a step to the left, to accommodate a new definition of, if not beauty, what exactly constituted art.

In 1967 the Beatles released Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. And the reaction amongst the cognoscenti of the music world, was that the Beatles had taken us from a world of black and white, to a world of full techni colour deluxe.

Creatively, the album opened up an entirely new world of perspectives and possibilities, as to what exactly constituted good music. It was like suddenly discovering that the house had all manner of other rooms, to which we could open the doors and explore. And that is exactly what Pablo Ruiz Picasso did in 1907, he opened the floodgates to a plethora of art movements and re-defined what is art, forever.