Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM
seventeenth century, in the form of syphilis. 13 ) Absent from the picture these two
figures are fused into one—and this person is not hard to identify: it is Picasso
himself, a compound of fleshly feeling and controlling intelligence, recognizing
the power of female sexuality while also mastering it, forcing it to submit to his
art.
But if Picasso, having dropped his symbolic disguises, is now the person to
whom the Avignon filles direct their attention, the spectator’s position in relation
to his picture is determined by this fact. The place of the story told in the original
sketch, of men in a brothel, is now taken by the fact of our looking at the painting,
and in this event we are forced to confront the fact that we are looking through
Picasso’s eyes. We are offered a view of reality only as it has been shaped by
Picasso’s hand, to express his sense and thoughts of it. The language it is painted
in was in 1907 not a conventional or traditional one, not one viewers shared,
even other artists. Today, when that language is familiar to the amateur of
modern art, it still signals its original historical moment and so its inventor’s solitude
and his freedom. It is a picture of women, but we must see it as “a Picasso.”
Though the two men are no longer in the picture, two kinds of women make
themselves seen (or perhaps three). Besides the antique beauties of the center are
the masked figures to the left and right. They lack the round breasts and sexy
gestures of their companions. And above all those at the right wear masks made
to frighten, not please. They do not display themselves, but look out inscrutably
or hostilely, while their companion to the left, looking at them, stands like a
guardian of the scene.
While the faces of the central figures reflect Picasso’s interest in early Iberian
sculpture at the time he was working on the Demoiselles, the masks have more distant
origins. It seems that Picasso had finished a version of the painting when he
visited the ethnographic museum of the Trocadéro; he later spoke of the objects
he saw there as not
just like any other pieces of sculpture . . . They were magic things . . .
intercesseurs, mediators . . . against everything . . . They were weapons.
To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to
help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form,
we become independent . . . I understood why I was a painter. 14
No doubt there is an important personal aspect to the spirits Picasso wished to
master: his work records a lifetime of struggle with and against women. But this
13 See the discussion in William Rubin, “Picasso,” in W. Rubin (ed.), “Primitivism” in 20th Century
Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), p. 254.
14 From a conversation of 1937, reported in André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask (New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1976), pp. 11–13, cited in Rubin, Seckel, and Cousins, Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon, p. 219.
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