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Journalism of Courage
When Matisse saw Picasso8217;s just-completed, 8-ft-square painting Les Demoiselles d8217;Avignon in the Spaniard8217;s studio in a ramshackle Paris building nicknamed 8216;The Laundry Boat8217;, he was shocked at how raw, cacophonic and nasty it looked. Another modernist, Andre Derain, figured that Picasso had gone so far off the deep end that he8217;d soon commit suicide. Even Picasso8217;s loyal patron Gertrude Stein deemed the picture a 8220;veritable cataclysm.8221; And you know what? It8217;s still pretty ugly.
Even with generations of artists trying mightily to out-rad it, a permanent place on the walls of the august Museum of Modern Art in New York and an entire century for art lovers to digest it 8212; Demoiselles was finished exactly 100 years ago 8212; the painting refuses to go down smoothly. That8217;s only one reason, though, why Demoiselles is the most important work of art of the last 100 years.
That last one is the deal breaker as far as any conventional esthetics goes. Everything in the painting is broken and then squished, like a face pressed against a window. During the next several years, Picasso took cubism further, breaking up his figures and still lives into little pieces, twisting them back to front and top to bottom, and reassembling them every which way. Without cubism, there would have been no 1920 Dada photomontages or 1930 surrealist fantasies. Without those, there8217;d be no dizzying James Bond title sequences or Matrix movies.
-Peter Plagens Newsweek
