Les demoiselles d avignon essay

Modern Art In The City Essay

New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism Author(s): Anna C. Chave Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 596-611 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3046058 Accessed: 26-09-2017 17:22 UTC

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New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism Anna C. Chave

What was "the amazing act upon which all the art of our century is built"? What is "the most innovative painting since Giotto," the " 'harbinger comet of the new century,' " the very "paradigm of all modern art," no less?' What is the modern art-historical equivalent of the Greatest Story Ever Told? What else but the monumental Demoiselles d'Avignon (Fig. 1) painted by Picasso in 1907? Six years ago, this single painting, "probably the first truly twentieth-century paint- ing," occasioned a major exhibition at the Musee Picasso in Paris commemorated by a ponderous two-volume cata- logue.2 The director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York swore he would kill himself if the plane transporting the work to that event were to crash.3 What can account for such

hyperbole, for such an unparalleled fixation on a particular picture?

"In mystical terms, with this painting we bid farewell to all the paintings of the past," pronounced Andre Breton of Les Demoiselles.4 More than any other work of art, Picasso's picture has been held to mark or even to have precipitated the demise of the old visual order and the advent of the new.

That art historians should have conscripted Les Demoiselles to serve in such a strategic capacity might seem odd, however, if we take into account that the cognoscenti resoundingly rejected the picture at the time it was painted, and that it remained all but invisible to the public for three decades thereafter, when it finally found an audience-though at first only in the United States.5 The painting "seemed to every- one something mad or monstrous," the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler recalled; "Derain told me that one day Picasso would be found hanging behind his big picture."6

Why have historians parlayed this once reviled and ig- nored image of five rather alien-looking prostitutes vying for a client into the decisive site of the downfall of the prevailing visual regime?7 Undeniably, Picasso violated pictorial conven- tion in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: by his deidealization of the human form, his disuse of illusionistic space, and his deploy- ment of a mixture of visual idioms. In the standard art- historical narratives, however, these violations on the artist's

part tend to get conflated with the putatively violent aspect of the women he depicted, who often come to assume a kind of autonomous agency. And whereas Picasso's contemporaries fingered him as the perpetrator who "attacked" his female figures, later accounts often cast the artist together with the viewing public as the prostitutes' victims.8 Leo Steinberg experienced the picture as a "tidal wave of female aggression ... an onslaught"; Robert Rosenblum perceived it as an "explosion" triggered by "five nudes [who] force their eroticized flesh upon us with a primal attack"; and Max Kozloff deemed it simply "a massacre."9

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is generally credited not only with a momentous act of destruction, but also with one of creation. Long designated the first Cubist painting-"the signal for the Cubist revolution" in its full-fledged disman- tling of representational conventionsI-0-the painting is now more loosely considered a curtain raiser or trigger to Cub- ism."1 Others had pulled crucial triggers before Picasso, however. When Baudelaire told Manet, "You are only the first in the decrepitude of your art," he referred to the scandalously frank picture of a courtesan, Olympia, rendered with startling flatness in 1865. For that matter, a compressed or otherwise compromised female form, often that of a

I thank Christine Poggi, Lisa Saltzman, and Lor- raine O'Grady for their comments on earlier ver- sions of this manuscript.

1. Bois, 1988, 172; Richardson, 475; a phrase of Max Jacob's employed by Arianna S. Huffington to describe Les Demoiselles (A. S. Huffington, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, New York, 1988, 93); and Steinberg, 20 (Steinberg says that the painting has come to be regarded in such terms, not that he himself sees it in that way). 2. E. F. Fry, Cubism, New York, 1966, 12; and Seckel.

3. This story is told by Bois, who helpfully sug- gested to William Rubin that he ride along with the painting, thereby sparing the necessity for the suicide (Bois, 1988, 172, n. 14). 4. Cited by Daix, 1993, 187. Breton became a champion of the painting in the 1920s: in 1923 he engineered its (initial) sale, to Jacques Doucet; and in 1925 he reproduced it in La Rdvolution surrialiste (ibid., 69, 252). 5. Les Demoiselles was first reproduced in theArchitec- tural Record of May 1910. Though it was visible in a studio photograph published by Andre Salmon in 1912, it was not properly reproduced in France until 1925 (see n. 4, above). The painting was first

exhibited by Salmon at the Salon d'Antin in 1916, but it met "with indifference." In 1939 Alfred Barr acquired it for the Museum of Modern Art, where it has remained ever since, the virtual centerpiece of the collection. It was not shown again in France until 1953, when it again "receive[d] very little attention" (Daix, 1993, 68-69). 6. Cited in Rubin, 1989, 348. Those openly critical of the picture included Georges Braque, Leo Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Felix Feneon (ibid., 348, 346), Ambroise Vollard (Daix, 1993, 79), and the collector Sergei Shchukin, who appeared at Gertrude Stein's home, "almost in tears," bemoan- ing the "loss for French art (G. Stein, Picasso [1938], New York, 1984, 18). Stein supported the picture (Daix, 1993, 79), as did Salmon and Ardengo Soffici (Rubin, 1989, 348).

7. That this way of narrating the story of modern art has entailed an overestimation of Picasso at the expense of other modernist pioneers, including some active in centers other than Paris, could easily be, though it will not be, a subtheme of the present essay.

8. The word is Salmon's, cited in McCully, 57. 9. Steinberg, 22; R. Rosenblum, "The 'Demoiselles d'Avignon' Revisited," Artnews, LXXII, no. 4, Apr.

1973, 45; and Kozloff, 35. Kozloff does not clarify whom he regards as the sociopath(s), whether Picasso (whose "antipathy to his disfigured sub- jects" is mentioned) or the prostitutes (those "aveng- ing furies of a new order"), or who would be the victims (Kozloff, 38, 37).

10. Salmon's phrase, cited in McCully, 140. 11. The earliest dissenter from the position (pro- mulgated by such authorities as Kahnweiler and Barr) that Les Demoiselles was the first Cubist picture was John Golding, who still regarded the picture as "a natural starting-point for the history of Cubism" (J. Golding, "The 'Demoiselles d'Avignon,' " Burl- ington Magazine, c, 1958, 162-63). Rubin much later took up this point, arguing that the picture "pointed mostly in directions opposite to Cubism's character and structure-although it cleared the path for its development." Further, "none of the earliest references to the Demoiselles characterizes it as Cubist; nor did Kahnweiler so qualify it in 'Der Kubismus' [of 1916].... By 1920, he had appar- ently changed his mind" (Rubin, 1983, 628, 644). Richardson persists in the view that the picture "established a new pictorial syntax" (Richardson, 475).

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1 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (photo: Museum of Modern Art)

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598 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 4

prostitute or femme fatale, would come to serve almost as an avatar of modernism.'2 Feminist critics have lately diagnosed this fact, that the avant-garde's testing of cultural limits so often played itself out on the female body, as symptomatic of a visual regime where "Woman" serves as "the very ground of representation, both object and support of a desire which, intimately bound up with power and creativity, is the moving force of culture and history."'3

The Greatest Story Ever Told was perforce a narrative of exclusion, then: a story told by a heterosexual white male of European descent for an audience answering to the same description; and the stories told ever since about that Greatest Story have mostly been no less narratives told by straight white males for a like public. Virtually every critic who has addressed Les Demoiselles has not only assumed what is indisputable-that the picture's intended viewer is male and heterosexual-but has also elected to consider only the experience of that viewer, as if no one else ever looked at the painting. (Through Les Demoiselles, Picasso "tells us what our desires are," one critic declared, peremptorily.)14 No doubt Picasso's chosen subject dictates this scenario, since today, just as in 1907, prostitution marks an indelible social bound- ary between the sexes: between men, who can routinely contract for the sexual services of women, and women, who

have never had a comparable opportunity.'5 Among my objectives in the present text, then, is to

examine where Les Demoiselles d'Avignon positions some of its unanticipated viewers; to explore the painting from, as it were, unauthorized perspectives. What follows is a study in reception, present and past, in short, but one that takes its focus through the critical lenses of gender and race. (Exam- ining the painting's reception history from a given, raking angle, not in a full, even light, will bring some neglected aspects of that history into relief while, admittedly, flattening or obscuring other elements that would figure prominently in a more general or comprehensive kind of reception study.)16 Poststructuralist and reception theories have shown that all publicly circulated images accrue meanings beyond their makers' intent and control, or that the meanings of works of art are more contingent than immanent, for in the act of interpreting art works critics shape their significance by shaping how and what the public sees. As for the terms in

which Les Demoiselles has been read, they have often been incipiently sexist, heterosexist, racist, and neocolonialist: so I will argue. (I should perhaps add plainly that neither Picasso's own intentions for the picture nor his susceptibility to the biases enumerated above are the principal subjects of investigation here.)

To begin with, the place that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon conspicuously marks out for a client-viewer is hopelessly unsuited to me-a heterosexual, feminist, female viewer.17

But I can find some basis to identify with its protagonists. Although my privileged background has insulated me from the desperate straits that have long driven women to toil in the sex industry, like other independent women I nonethe- less have an inkling of what it means to be treated as a prostitute. When I traverse the city streets alone I am subject to pestering by strange men who lewdly congratulate me on aspects of my anatomy while ordering me to smile. If I am not mistaken for a prostitute, given my reserved dress and behavior, I remain prey to that pervasive suspicion that a trace of whore lurks in every woman-just as an "honest" woman supposedly lurks in every whore.

As it happens, the streets in my own longtime neighbor- hood on Manhattan's Lower East Side encompass a major prostitute "stroll." The streetwalkers I encounter there are a lower class of prostitute, more drug-addicted and ill than the type of woman Picasso portrayed, but I occasionally see them assume the poses of the two demoiselles at the center of the painting, their arms crooked over their heads in an age-old formula for seductive femininity. On the Lower East Side, as in Picasso's picture, however, the woodenness of the women's stances and their faces' masklike stolidity suggest that they know they are party to a tiresome artifice. Like virtually all women, I have engaged in such half-hearted acts of simula- tion, engaged in such a "masquerade,"'8 and this helps me to view the demoiselles empathetically: they seem to me at once to demonstrate and to withdraw from patriarchal stereotypes of femininity, as if in an act of noncooperative cooperation. These women-who are Picasso's fictions no doubt, but

fictions founded on his observations of actual, disgruntled women and prostitutes-these women can be had, of course, but on another level they are not for the having, and that puts the client-viewer in a position of nerve-wracking uncer-

12. "From the mid-nineteenth century to the begin- ning of the twentieth, modernism obsessionally and anxiously displays its innovative desire by fragment- ing and disfiguring the female sexual body, epito- mized in male fantasy by the prostitute," observes Bernheimer, 266. Baudelaire's remark is cited in ibid., 292, n. 51. 13. T. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington, Ind., 1984, 13. Also, "mascu- line sexuality and in particular its commercial exchange dominate the works seen as the 'found- ing mounuments of modern art,' " notes Janet Wolff (who credits Griselda Pollock for this insight); it follows that "the definition of the modern, and the nature of modernism, derived from the experi- ence of men and hence excluded women" (J. Wolff,Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Cul- ture, Berkeley, 1990, 57, 58). 14. R. Johnson, "The 'Demoiselles d'Avignon' and Dionysian Destruction," Arts, Oct. 1980, 94; my emphasis.

15. First to remark on the dynamic of exclusion at work in Les Demoiselles was C. Duncan, "The MoMA's

Hot Mamas," Art Journal, XLVIII, no. 2, Summer 1989, 175-76. 16. A more traditional study of the reception of Les Demoiselles is promised by a new publication-- William Rubin, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Studies in Modern Art, no. 3, New York, 1994-which was as yet unavailable when the present essay went to press.

17. Though I do not address the position of the lesbian viewer in this paper, it is an issue worth pursuing, particularly considering that aristocratic, lesbian patrons frequented brothels to an extent in turn-of-the-century Paris, and that prostitutes at the better establishments were trained and ex-

pected to serve this clientele. See Corbin, 125. 18. That womanliness and masquerade are in a sense one and the same was initially suggested by the psychoanalystJoan Riviere (J. Riviere, "Woman- liness as a Masquerade" (1929), in Formations of Fantasy, ed. V. Burgin, J. Donald, and C. Kaplan,

London, 1986, 35-44; see also S. Heath, "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," in ibid., 45-61). 19. Luce Irigaray, cited in Heath (as in n. 18), 54. 20. Whether Picasso's intention in giving carica- tured African masks to these prostitutes was con- sciously denigratory or not is a moot point. Leighten, who was the first to focus on the issue of colonialism in relation to Les Demoiselles, has argued strenuously, but I believe unconvincingly, that his gesture was one of fervent solidarity with anticolo- nial thinking (P. Leighten, "The White Peril and L'Art nWgre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonial- ism," Art Bulletin, LXXII, no. 4, 1990, 609-30).

21. H. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambiva- lence of Colonial Discourse," October, no. 28, Spring 1984, 126-27. Mimicry can go two ways, of course, but for a white person to imitate a person of color, to perform in effect as a minstrel, is at once to acknowledge and to disavow "difference at the level of the body." From that perspective, minstrelsy emerges as a form of fetishism, an attempt "to restore the wholeness and unity threatened by the

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NEW ENCOUNTERS WITH LES DEMOISELLES DAVIGNON 599

tainty; of not knowing what lies behind the mask. For women, meanwhile, the price of this strategy is a profound sense of alienation, insofar as "the masquerade ... is what women do ... in order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of giving up [their own]."'19

A different kind of masquerade, an act not only of mimicry but also of minstrelsy, is figured by the two boisterous women on the right-hand side of the picture, where Picasso carica- tured sacred African masks and employed them in a brazenly disrespectful way.20 Mimicry is an act of appropriation and "one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge," observes Homi Bhabha, adding, "mimicry is at once resemblance and menace."21 These demoiselles offend me, then-and yet, I confess, they attract me too: not because their outrageous headgear pokes fun at Africans but because it makes fun of the prostitutes' clients, despoiling their sexual appetites. In the boldly squatting figure at the lower right-with her backside turned as if she were "mooning" the johns, while her mask is swiveled forward to terrify them-and in the energy of the woman barging through the curtains above her, I see bodies that educe comparatively natural and confident postures. And I identify with these disruptive figures who impetuously signal their clientele to get lost, while damning the consequences.

In other critics' accounts, the demoiselles in Africanesque masks have never figured in any way as sympathetic, but only as repellent-indeed, as by far the most repellent of all five women, who are generally viewed as disease-ridden harpies. The demoiselles appear not hideous or sickly to me, how- ever, but plain and strong. Their exaggerated, stylized features render them somewhat comical-a bit like the

simple figures in the "Little Jimmy" cartoons that Picasso loved at the time he painted this picture-but no more ugly than the artist himself appeared in self-portraits of this period, similarly stylized images that critics do not call grotesque.22 True, the demoiselles are thick-limbed, angu- lar, and broad-featured, a physiologic type associated with laborers' stock, but Picasso also had a stocky body and critics hardly find it gross.

To my eye, the unmasked faces of the three figures on the left side of the picture suggest not syphilitic monsters but the glazed-over visages of hard-worn pros. The two women at the

picture's center appear to direct ajaundiced gaze toward the unending parade of men before them. The woman farthest to the left, the most covered and stiffly restrained of the figures, seems especially businesslike; she evokes a madam holding open the drapery for the patrons' sake while keep- ing a steady eye on her charges. (I note that her two hands and one of her feet are visible, moreover, whereas, among the other four women, only a single hand and no feet were depicted: thus Picasso symbolically disabled those figures.) Together, the demoiselles might recall the prostitutes and madams in Brassai's later photographs-unashamed, com- petent, solid, and tough-looking women trapped in miser- able circumstances.23

If being the same sex as the demoiselles, the second sex, puts me at a disadvantage in front of this picture, it entails some advantage too-a moral advantage over the men who are supposed to be standing where I stand, men who would readily exploit fellow human beings in this vile way.24 Instead of letting me bathe in a sense of innocence, however, the picture brings me also a guilty thrill at gaining this close-up view of a tawdry ritual that men ordinarily perform well removed from the curious and censorious gaze of women such as myself. That sense of my anomalousness at the scene of this impending transaction underlines the separation between the demoiselles and myself, driving home the fact that prostitutes were and are far more vulnerable than I. Yet the demoiselles are not, after all, the streetwalkers who are

most often the targets of psychopathic Jack the Rippers and Joel Rifkinds; they reside in a brothel under state-regulated conditions,25 and they appear to me quite unafraid. The terror in this situation has appertained instead, for reasons I shall explore, to the male viewing public.

By no means would I wish to argue that there has been a uniform and univocal response to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon amongst its male audience. Yet I can state that something like a prototypical male response to the picture has emerged, particularly in treatments of it over the last two decades-a response centering on the awfulness and fearsomeness of the depicted prostitutes. Given that prostitution originated and exists precisely to fulfill male desires, how are we to account for the unmitigated dearth of pleasure expressed by male

sight of difference, yet because it enters into the game of mimicry it is condemned to keep alive the possibility that there may be 'no presence or iden tity behind the mask' " (T. Modleski, "Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film," in L. S. Kauffman, ed., American Feminist Thought at Century's End: A Reader, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, 76). 22. See, e.g., Picasso's Self-Portrait of 1907, in the National Gallery, Prague, reproduced in Pablo Pic- asso, ed. W. Rubin, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980, 92. On Picasso's liberal use of cartoons and caricature, see A. Gopnik, "High and Low: Caricature, Primitivism, and the Cubist Por- trait," Art Journal, XLIII, no. 4, Winter 1983, 371- 76.

23. Art historians have tended to concern them-

selves, at most, with the abstract figure of the prostitute as metaphor, rather than with the reali- ties of such women's experience. In the absence of studies describing the texture of French prosti- tutes' lives at the turn of the century, we might refer

to feminist historian Ruth Rosen's work on prosti- tutes in the U.S. Rosen observes that poor andun- skilled women at this time often faced unenviable

decisions: between entering loveless marriages merely to gain economic protection, working for starvation wages, or selling their bodies as "sport- ing women," so that entering brothels was not invariably their worst option. Further, she identifies a prostitutes' "subculture with its own values, class structure, political economy, folk culture, and so- cial relations," including a sometimes beneficent form of "sisterhood" (a picture one might have inferred from E. J. Bellocq's affecting portraits of the brothel inmates in Storyville, La.). Typically, prostitutes did not disparage themselves or their trade, but "maintained an attitude of defensive superiority toward 'respectable' members of the rest of the society," including their clients, whom they generally regarded as suckers. "Even the language of the trade, 'turning a trick', reflected the hoax that the prostitute was perpetrating on the customer" (R. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prosti-

tution in America, 1900-1918, Baltimore, 1982, xiv, xvii, 102, 91). French slang for a john was "michet," which translates roughly as "sucker" or "dude" (Corbin, 83). 24. Though of course not all men patronize prosti- tutes, Les Demoiselles effectively implicates all straight men as possible customers, thus placing those men who deplore prostitution in a specially disconcert- ing position. It bears adding that the patronizing of prostitutes is probably more stigmatized in the U.S. than in Europe, a discrepancy explained in part by a loose (and now eroded) tradition that European men are sexually initiated by prostitutes, while North American men are expected to lose their virginity to female intimates, if not to their wives. American men who do not avail themselves of

prostitutes' services may find themselves in a more awkward position before Picasso's painting than their European counterparts, then-though I note that embarrassment has not been among the feel- ings reported by male critics. 25. See Corbin, passim.

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600 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 4

viewers of the painting?26 So gripped by anxiety has the (prototypical) male viewer been that he has failed to antici- pate any gratification the demoiselles' nude bodies might augur. As Charles Bernheimer portrays him, this viewer quails before the spectacle of women who embody "his worst fears of their atavistic primitivism, animalistic destructive- ness, and cold, impersonal eroticism."27 Such feelings of "deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body" are often attributed equally to the picture's author. And William Rubin comments that such attitudes are "commonplace in male psychology" in any case, so that Picasso's great achievement in Les Demoiselles was to make this syndrome emerge as "a new insight-all the more universal for being so common- place."28

That contempt for women is integral to normal male psychology was suggested, predictably, by Freud; noting the prevalence of men's "desire to depreciate" women, he observed that "the curb put upon love by civilization involves a universal [read: male] tendency to debase sexual objects."'29 In this light, we might note the critics' penchant for describ- ing the women Picasso depicted not simply as prostitutes, but as whores, sluts, harlots, strumpets, trollops, and doxies (to take Steinberg's lexicon) or as "a species of bitch goddess" whose bodies "may not even deserve the name human" (as Kozloff calls them).30 That the psychological mainspring of the response to Les Demoiselles has been more contempt and fear than desire surely stems in no small part from the fact that viewers find themselves exposed not to just any brothel, moreover, but to a "brothel reverting to jungle"; one inhabited by more or less exotic-looking women.31

Inasmuch as they figure the exotic, the demoiselles' bodies are doubly branded as sexual, for historically, the exotic-or, more specifically, the African and the so-called Oriental woman-has often been conflated with the erotic in the

European imagination.32 The prostitute functions too, of course, as evidence of an excess of sexuality. And by the turn of the century, as Western women generally chafed at the bit for more freedom of movement, the "conjunction" of women and the city epitomized by the prostitute "suggest[ed] the potential of an intolerable and dangerous sexuality, a sexual- ity which is out of bounds precisely as a result of the woman's revised relation to space, her new ability to 'wander' (and hence to 'err')."33 Fear of the prostitute spilled over into anxiety about the sexual continence of all women, anxiety

about distinguishing decent women from indecent ones, and concern that the former may yet vanish.34

In the view of some astute observers of modern life,

including most notably Walter Benjamin, the prostitute would emerge as a key figure of urban modernity. With the flourishing of capitalism came the ascent of the commodity, and in the prostitute's collapsing of the distinction between the merchandise and the merchant we find (as Benjamin said) the very apotheosis of the commodity.35 The prostitute could be identified with and blamed for not only the encroaching commodification, the growing coldness or super- ficiality of social relations, but also the very "decline of love" itself.36 Where images of nude women once stood as tokens of plenitude and joy, pictures of nude prostitutes would stand instead as the specters of a society that no longer makes room for joy or love unless they can be bought and sold. From one feminist perspective, then, these figures raise the question: "Does pleasure, for masculine sexuality, consist in anything other than the appropriation of nature, in the desire to make it (re)produce, and in exchanges of its/these products with other members of society? An essentially economic pleasure.""37

In her connection to a peculiarly modern and virulent form of social plague, then, the prostitute made a specially fitting emblem of modernity-which should help explain why Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has been singled out as the very "paradigm of all modern art." But such accounts of the prostitute's moment do not explain why this specific painting attained a unique prominence surpassing that of, say, Olym- pia. After all, since it debuted in the Salon and passed after Manet's death into the collection of the state, Olympia could and did serve as a continuing reference point for critics and other artists, whereas for several decades after Picasso com-

pleted Les Demoiselles, it remained largely unseen and unmen- tioned.

What made Picasso's painting initially seem less suited for public display than for the studio was that, in deploying disparate visual idioms to render different physiognomic types, he left the work in a disjunctive state, such that historians debated for some time whether it was actually finished. If the disintegration of the great traditions of painting could already be detected in Olympia, the evidence of that decrepitude was plainly that much further advanced in Les Demoiselles. And insofar as it calls the very notion of a

26. Bernheimer's careful analysis of the ambivalent position of the male viewer of Degas's monotypes of brothel scenes (works Picasso deeply admired) pro- vides one answer. Bernheimer concedes that these

pictures "appear to address the male viewer's social privilege, to construe him as a voyeur, and to cater to his misogyny," but he argues that "they under- take this construction duplicitously," granting the spectator a privileged view of the sexually available female body while deprivileging that view by pre- senting not nubile temptresses but conspicuously "alienated products of a consumer culture" that thwart the spectator's desire. Deflecting attention from a persistent biographical question, whether Degas himself was a misogynist, Bernheimer ob- serves that "misogyny, cruelty, disdain--attitudes often attributed to Degas, as if his art were a space of self-representation-can more accurately be in- terpreted as functions of the capitalist ideology that defines and confines woman's value in representa-

tional practice" (Bernheimer, 185, 189). Pace Bern- heimer, Degas's (and Picasso's) art is also a space of self-representation. To my mind, the sense of malaise permeating their prostitute images evinces less concern for the women's plight than anxiety- about the artists' own, as well as, by extension, for the fate of other male subjects like themselves. 27. Ibid., 269-70. 28. Rubin, 1983, 629. Picasso's "Andalusian mi- sogyny" is mentioned by Richardson, 68; his "obses- sive fear of the destructive power of women" is described by Daix, 1988, 136. 29. Cited in S. Kofman, The Enigma of Women: Woman in Freud's Writings, trans. C. Porter, Ithaca, N.Y., 1985, 81.

30. Steinberg, passim; and Kozloff, 35-36. 31. Steinberg, 24. 32. "The seduction and conquest of the African woman became a metaphor for the conquest of

Africa itself.... to both were attributed the same, irresistible, deadly charm" (Nicolas Monti, cited in Doane, 213). Regarding the hypersexualization of the black female body, see also S. L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in H. L. Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Diference, Chicago, 1986. Gil- man stresses the fascination of Europeans with the pronounced buttocks of some women of Africandes- cent, a point that bears on the lavish display of buttocks by the woman in the African mask at the lower right of Les Demoiselles. 33. Doane, 263.

34. See H. Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, New Haven, 1991.

35. See Clayson's discussion of Benjamin, Baude- laire, and Simmel on the subject of prostitution in ibid., 7-9.

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NEW ENCOUNTERS WITH LES DEMOISELLES DAVIGNON 601

unified style, and so the possibility of finish, into question, the painting's ruptured aspect made it serve the purpose of signifying a moment of rupture particularly well. The evolu- tion of Cubism was impelled by a realization of "the conven- tional rather than the imitative nature of representation," as Christine Poggi succinctly phrases it; and a corollary of that realization was "that style can be a kind of mask, to be worn at will," so that "there was no reason to observe the law of

unity": an insight clearly at work in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 38 On another plane, what separates Les Demoiselles from

Olympia are matters of class and race. Critics saw both Picasso's and Manet's prostitutes as working-class women owing to their compact muscularity and the perceived coarseness of their features.39 The superior station of Ma- net's prostitute is evident, however, from her sumptuous accessories and surroundings; it emerges, too, from the fact that she is quite alone but for the black maid whose servitude establishes the existence of an underclass compared with which the courtesan enjoys an elevated social standing. By contrast, Picasso's subjects are humble brothel denizens, women who would have been on call, if not always on their feet, from noon until three o'clock in the morning, available to any passerby with a modicum of disposable income (on a busy day they might have serviced from sixteen to twenty-five men each, while the courtesan limited her sessions to

prearranged and costly assignations).40 Far from having dark-skinned servants to wait upon them, the demoiselles are themselves arguably in a position of some servitude to the woman at the left; and the Africanesque masks worn by two of them symbolically elide the distinction, and so the expected discrepancy in social status, between a white woman and a woman of color. Whereas Manet's picture presumed the viewer an haut bourgeois, Picasso's demoted him socially, implying that he procured his sexual goods at the equivalent of, say, K-Mart and not Saks Fifth Avenue; and there were larger signs of social slippage in the implication that the prospective public for a major art work would be not the elite but the hoi polloi.

Among other, more evident changes, a certain downward mobility might be detected in Picasso's images of women in the period immediately preceding Les Demoiselles. In 1906, the artist passed from the wan, Italianate nudes of his Rose period to some bloated, marmoreal, but still classicized figures. In Two Nudes of that year (Fig. 2), the figures face one

another, replicate one another, so that almost the entirety of a nude female form is made available to the gaze. The figures' groins are discreetly angled out of view, however, and as with most of Picasso's painted female nudes up to this point, their legs are close together, sealing off their crotches. At the same time, the women peel apart a curtain behind them, opening a space in the pinkish brown field that might be said to function abstractly as a displaced vagina or transposed female sexual space.41 In a way, the picture thus subtly demonstrates what Picasso illustrated more literally in a drawing of around 1901 (Fig. 3): the conventional identity of the body of a woman with the body of the paper or canvas-that space pliantly available to the probing of the painter's phallic pen or brush.

Conventionally, both the act of painting and that of viewing have been described as phallic acts, acts of penetra- tion performed on that passive receptacle, the blank field of the canvas.42 "I paint with my prick," Renoir supposedly boasted. "A painter has also to paint 'with [his] balls,' " bragged Picasso to his mistress, the painter Frangoise Gilot. "I guess that even if a painter fucks a picture to a real climax once a year, it is quite a record," Mark Rothko later estimated. And the critic Jean Clair once pithily proclaimed, "The gaze is the erection of the eye."'43 Such metaphors and the general conceit of penetration as a trope for knowing implicitly exclude the female artist and viewer, of course. But in a less obvious way, these metaphors also exclude the artist and the viewer of color, for dark-skinned peoples of both genders have long been grouped with the feminine as objects for penetration, objects not knowing but subject to being discovered and known. James Olney refers to the colonialist "perception of the [African] countryside as an immense vagina," while Christopher Miller calls the African continent a "blank slate" endlessly inscribed with colonialist desires and fears.44 These various images converge, for example, in Kandinsky's suggestive recollection of how he mastered his craft:

I learned to battle with the canvas, to come to know it as a

being resisting my wish (= dream), and to bend it forcibly to this wish. At first it stands there like a pure chaste virgin

with clear eye and heavenly joy. .... And then comes the willful brush which first here, then there, gradually con- quers it with all the energy peculiar to it, like a European

36. An insight credited to Benjamin by C. Buci- Glucksmann, 224.

37. L. Irigaray, "Women on the Market," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter, Ithaca, N.Y., 1985, 184; author's emphasis. Besides confusing that once basic distinction between the seller and

the sold, the prostitute also disturbed the opposi- tion between work and sex which forms the basis for

the concept of sublimation. The very possibility of the development of civilization is predicated-so Freud taught-on the systematic instilling of habits of sublimation. From this vantage point, the prosti- tute marks nothing less than the decline of civiliza- tion. See Doane, 260-1, 264, on which I rely for this observation.

38. Poggi, 45, 32. 39. On the complexities of Olympia's social stand- ing, see T. J. Clark, "Olympia's Choice," in The

Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, New York, 1985, 79-146.

40. Corbin, 127, 81. Picasso's picture reveals little of the appointments of the brothel that the demoi- selles occupy, but the assembling in a salon of "two lines [of prostitutes] in a previously arranged or- der" was typical of a higher rank of maison de tolirance (a term for government-regulated broth- els), as opposed to the lowest class of establishment, where the client's "choice was made in the adjoin- ing bar where each woman would solicit the clien- tsin turn." Protocol dictated that the lined-up women could not solicit the client by "a verbal invitation, but they all tried to tempt the visitor with winks, smiles, movements of the tongue, or exciting postures" (ibid., 83). 41. I owe this observation to a former graduate student at Harvard, the critic David Pagel. 42. See S. Gubar, " 'The Blank Page' and the Issues

of Female Creativity," in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. E. Showalter, New York, 1985, 292-313, which cites Sandra McPherson: "The female genital, like the blank page anticipating the poem, is an absence, a not me, which I occupy" (ibid., 292). See also B. Johnson, "Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?" in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. R. Feldstein and J. Roof, Ithaca, N.Y., 1989, 255-68. 43. S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, New Haven, 1979, 6 (this statement is evidently apocryphal); Rubin, 1989, 54, n. 1; J. E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago, 1993, 360; and A. Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, Minneapolis, 1991, 229. 44. Cited in Miller, 245; ibid., 248. Declared a 19th-century French author, "the Black seems to me the female race" (ibid., 244).

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602 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 4

2 Picasso, Two Nudes, 1906, oil on canvas. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Gift of G. David Thompson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (photo: Museum of Modern Art)

colonist, who pushes into the wild virgin nature, hitherto untouched, using axe, spade, hammer, and saw to shape it to his wishes.45

Deferring the matter of race for the moment, I wish to pursue another question at this juncture-one that may facilitate a much-needed feminist analysis of Cubism more generally-and that is what the phenomenon of the vaunted new "Cubist space" signified in gendered terms. To this end, I must underline the phallicism endemic to the dialectics of penetration routinely deployed in descriptions of pictorial space and the operations of spectatorship. The type of space that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon inaugurated or, rather, prognos- ticated is a shallow space where voids seal over, becoming solid, while solids flatten and fragment. In Cubist space, movement transpires mostly laterally, through the mecha- nisms of passage, over borders broken down (perhaps under the pressure-to judge by the evidence of the stranger- looking demoiselles-of foreign influence). How are we to understand this sealing-off of that deep pictorial space which had for so long been identified with the feminine sexual

body? And how are we to understand the disintegration of those penetrant masses which are readily identified with a masculine sexual presence?46 ("The radical quality of Les Demoiselles lies, above all, in its threat to the integrity of mass as distinct from space," Rosenblum declared; and other critics have used comparable phrases.)47

One could argue that the space in full-fledged, analytic Cubist paintings is penetrable to a slight degree, but only at the viewer's peril owing to the pictures' shattered aspect; or one could say that a painting such as "MaJolie" (Woman with a Zither or Guitar) of 1911-12 (Fig. 4) is effectively impen- etrable and that, in either case, this sealing-over of the pictorial space has a subtly emasculating or dephallicizing effect on the male viewer. If his penetrant member no longer functions as a passkey to the world of knowledge, with its keyholes newly obstructed, he must prepare to apprehend pictures-and perhaps not pictures alone-in another way.

Some Cubist paintings do allude, obliquely and teasingly, to the canvas as a female sexual space. But they do so with a new focus on female self-penetration, which renders the male organ extraneous. In Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) of 1910 (Fig. 5), the nude woman's torso visually echoes the body of an instrument that is (also) at once volume and void, while her hand's placement at the rim of the sound hole

3 Picasso, Environnement vaginal, ca. 1901, drawing. Private collection

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NEW ENCOUNTERS WITH LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON 603

4 Picasso, "MaJolie" (Woman with a Zither or Guitar), 1911-12, oil on canvas. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (photo: Museum of Modern Art)

5 Picasso, Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier), 1910, oil on canvas. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest (photo: Museum of Modern Art)

carries a mild autoerotic suggestion. In Majolie, by contrast, the woman's body melds with the body of the instrument, while both are shattered to the point that the viewer cannot distinguish mass from void. If the canvas remains in any sense a female space, it is no longer a fully available or penetrable one.48 Rosalind Krauss thus pinpoints Girl with a Mandolin as the moment when Picasso "watched depth and touch-what we would call the carnal dimensions-disap- pear, quite literally from sight."49

Picasso's move to seal off the canvas from the penetrating

movement of the viewer could be construed as an attempt to protect that viewer from what he had come to perceive as the horrors of the space the canvas once opened up. In 1912, as he began the process of building up forms materially on top of the canvas-in a further move away from opening up spaces behind the picture's surface-he crowed to Braque, "I am in the process of conceiving a guitar and I use a little dust against our horrible canvas."50 Why the canvas had become horrible in Picasso's sight is the question-though a further question is whether it was more a matter of an artist

45. Wassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences" (1913), in Robert L. Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art, Engle- wood Cliffs, N.J., 1964, 35. 46. Rubin addressed this problem tellingly (though, to my mind, unhelpfully) by distinguishing Picas- so's contribution to Cubist practice from Braque's as follows: Braque provided the "passive, feminine side of the formal equation ( ... a vision of Tellus Mater notably open-laned, inviting entry)," while "the vigorous Picasso thrusts his hard, sculptural morphology" into that "syntactical-spatial struc- ture" (W. Rubin, "Pablo and Georges and Leo and Bill," Art in America, LXVII, Mar.-Apr. 1978, 136). 47. Rosenblum, 1960, 25; my emphasis. 48. Painting in Cubism's wake, Rothko observed in 1956, "There is something about our times that does not allow us as artists to represent woman. Matisse still felt about the woman as one does about

a chattel. He used her, he fucked her. He painted

her as he lived with her. Today woman has her independence: man looks at her as his equal and something indefinable stands between them. Not as yet to my mind has anyone discovered what this something is. Whatever it is, it blocks the painter from seeing her the way former generations did. Because as an artist today I cannot see her, I paint the abstract image of woman until something hap- pens to show me the way toward a direct represen- tation-a new attitude perhaps toward her" (Bres- lin [as in n. 43], 360-61). 49. R. Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Zelevansky, 271 (my thanks to Christine Poggi for reminding me of this passage). It bears noting that Picasso experienced a kind of crisis in realizing this picture: so many sessions did he demand from the model, whose presence he found "somewhat embar- rassing," that she lost patience and declined to return, leaving the artist with what he regarded at

the time as an unfinished work (R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, rev. ed., New York, 1973, 169). 50. Cited in Poggi, 5. The holes in the canvas opened by illusionistic or perspectival space had become "of ill repute during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, implying deception about the nature of the medium," Poggi notes, while pursuing the case of a much discussed collage of 1913, Still Life: Au Bon Marchi, in which Picasso employed the phrase "un trou ici" in such a way that it apparently alludes to the genitals of a partially visible female figure. "In Picasso's collage, the newspaper text asserts the presence of a Trou without, however, creating the illusion of one. The hole remains an effect of writing pasted, with Picasso's characteristic wit, to a slight projection in the wall-like ground, for in a sense, it is a wall that is depicted here" (ibid., 152).

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604 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1994 VOLUME LXXVI NUMBER 4

contriving to be rid of pictorial holes that had become repugnant to him, or whether those holes had, in a sense, already sealed themselves off insofar as artists had been progressively disusing the potentially deep space of the canvas since the latter part of the nineteenth century.5'

The phenomenon of the gradual and inexorable flatten- ing of pictorial space in the evolution of modernist art has been variously explained. Long established was Clement Greenberg's formalist delineation of an ongoing consolida- tion of the means unique to each art medium, such that painting (for one) would increasingly reveal its fundamental two-dimensionality. More recently, T. J. Clark has compel- lingly argued that the shallowing of the picture space may be associated with a shallowing or depleting of the full texture of human experience under capitalism. But neither rationale quite accounts for the utter loathing of holes expressed by numerous modernists.52 I would argue that that element of horror might best be understood in relation to deep-seated and pervasive fears of the feminine body,53 or (in Freud's formulation) of the "dark continent" more broadly. That horror corresponds, in other words, to what some feminists have diagnosed as a crisis of masculinity brewing in the West by and after the turn of the century, as women and peoples of color increasingly made felt not merely their presence, but also their discontent with their inferiorized and subjugated status. The white male's privileged position was thus threat- ened by increasing claims for political and social autonomy on the part of European women, and by an influx of intriguing artifacts (such as African masks) that testified to the existence of impressive though alien visions and values in colonized societies at once derided and admired as "primi- tive."9

To return to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, then: the picture evidences not a full-fledged, almost fully flattened Cubist space, but "depth under stress," as Steinberg aptly put it. "This is an interior space in compression like the inside of pleated bellows, like the feel of an inhabited pocket, a contracting sheath heated by the massed human presence," Steinberg continued, framing the experience of viewing the

work almost luridly as an act of coitus. The "very subject [of Les Demoiselles] is a connection-a passage from out here inward into the body of the representation," he averred; "Our vision heaves in and out" in "a similitude of sexual