Where Art Meets Real Life

One sultry evening in the south of Spain, a very good Spanish friend invited me out for a few drinks. He took me to a place near the local airport called Vaj69. The name seemed to have sexual connotations, and yet, from the outside, it appeared to be a respectable hotel of no ill repute.

We parked the car in the sparsely populated carpark and made our way to the entrance. The man inside the ticket booth was as well-dressed as you might expect from a high-class venue. He softly informed us that we could pay five euros and go in, or ten euros and enter and enjoy a free drink at the bar. We opted for the latter, which as it turned out, was a very wise move.

Upon entering the reception area we could immediately see groups of scantily clad females. The ones closest to us were trying to engage with us with a come-on smile and the odd finger pull. We politely smiled back and edged past and headed towards the bar.

At the bar, we exchanged our entrance ticket for a small beer. We later discovered that the same small beer paid for at the bar would cost double the extra five euros we paid for the entrance fee. As for shorts, whisky, vodka and gin, they were scandalously priced at some forty euros a glass. You could have bought a bottle of whisky for ten euros at the local supermarket.

Some of the girls hung around the bar area like bar flies, trying to persuade the clients to buy them a very expensive drink. No doubt they were on a commission for any drinks bought for them by any unwitting client enamoured enough with their sexy flirting.

We later found out that the hotel was fully occupied by working girls from all over Europe and beyond. This was one hotel which did not have to spend a single cent on advertising or marketing. It was full all year round.

My friend and I went over to a softly lit booth, where we could sit and watch the show in comfort, over a few cooling sips of beer. As I looked around, I caught sight of a reproduction of Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon hanging on a wall. I remembered this work of art from my days studying Art and Design History at university.

The painting was of five prostitutes in a brothel somewhere. And here I was, in a glorified brothel with a very similar cast of ladies of the night. The poses the real girls struck were almost identical to those in the picture. What's more, there was an element of multi-racial origins amongst the women we surveyed.

In the painting, there is an Asian woman, two women clearly of Iberian descent and two from the African continent. Personally, I was not attracted in the least to any one of them, not in the painting nor actually living and breathing in the bar.

From the neck down, the women were attractive enough. However, the physiognomy was somewhat brutally sculptured, in the art as in life itself. As for going to a room with one of them for sex, I didn't feel the slightest inclination. And yet.....

There was something about the women, painted and real. There was an irresistible force, some sort of animal magnetism, which was almost impossible to avert your eyes from. And if, perchance, any of the women in the bar caught you looking at them, they took that as a sign that you were interested enough to want to do business with them.

One of the Iberian women walked right out of the painting and sauntered over and asked my friend...

"Do you want to come with me, to my room?"

"How much?" he replied.

"Sixty euros for half an hour," she said softly.

"Well I suffer from premature ejaculation, how much for a minute?" he joked.

I said to him "Shit, I'm in the wrong business. I get begrudgingly paid five euros for an hour of hard physical labour in the construction industry."

The woman took our responses as a "No" to her question and seemed offended. She simply turned to stroll back to her little coterie of fellow prostitutes on the other side of the bar.

Hot on the heels of the Iberian woman two Russian women came over. One of them looked at me and said "Oh, is that not a god I see before my very eyes? Hello darling, if you come with both of us we will give you a really good time. Only 150 euros for both of us. What do you think?"

I politely declined, and not just because I only had twenty euros in my pocket. I simply really wasn't interested at all.

In a heartbeat, she suddenly re-appraised me saying, "Well darling, you are as ugly as sin itself anyway, I just felt sorry for you." And with that, they both shrugged their shoulders and disappeared into the relative darkness of a corner of the room.

I turned my attention back to the Picasso on the wall. And now I understood a little more of what those ladies had to deal with. Yes, they were no oil paintings in the beauty stakes. But their personal circumstances, left them no option but to expose themselves, emotionally as well as physically.

I thought about how prostitutes take great physical risks, being physically intimate with strange men, any of whom might attack them or kill them even. Or, maybe even infect them with some Sexually Transmitted Disease or other. Also, emotionally, they had to deal with rejection, public shaming and a potential lack of success at plying their trade.

And suddenly, I realised that Picasso was on to something in elevating those types of women to a position of heroism. He put them on a pedestal, and made them look monumentally statuesque. And he stripped the women bare and forced them to confront a highly judgemental viewing public.

And above all of this, they maintain their inner dignity and sense of self-worth. The figures in the painting are challenging us to look at them for as long as we like. And when we do that, and we do judge them, at the same time, Picasso knew that we are judging ourselves as a society and a race of human beings, as well.

In this way, like any painting which purports to be 'Art', Demoiselles D'Avignon' does comprehensively make a comment on the human condition in real life. For this alone, Picasso's masterpiece deserves its place at the apex of art history. Even more so when you consider that out of the wretchedness of real life, Picasso had created a thing of real beauty.

Yet another lady of the night approached my friend and me, just as we were draining the last few drops of beer in our glasses. This one truly was from some other world in Eastern Europe. In the best journalistic tradition, we politely made our excuses and left. It had been an entertaining and more than sobering education.