Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Five nude women — their bodies fractured into angular, masklike planes — confront the viewer in a shallow, indeterminate space. The three figures on the left have faces distorted by Iberian sculptural influence, while the two on the right — which Picasso repainted after visiting the ethnographic collections at the Trocadéro — have faces derived from African Fang masks. The work is visibly unfinished, as Picasso left it in his studio for years, showing it only to trusted visitors.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the most important painting of the twentieth century — the single work that most completely breaks with the pictorial conventions of the Western tradition and opens the path to Cubism and abstraction. Its demolition of unified perspective, coherent light source, and consistent representation allowed Picasso and Braque to invent a new visual language. Matisse, Braque, and Derain were all shocked by it, recognizing that it destroyed the assumptions on which their own work rested.
Picasso created the work after intensive study of African and Iberian tribal art in the ethnographic museums of Paris, during a period when France's colonial empire was at its height and African artifacts were being collected and displayed with ethnographic rather than aesthetic interest. His recontextualization of these forms as sources of artistic energy rather than anthropological specimens was simultaneously radical and complicated.
The invention of photography freed painting from its documentary obligation to represent the world accurately, liberating artists to pursue subjective perception instead. The portable paint tube, introduced in 1841, enabled plein air landscape painting by allowing artists to bring their materials outdoors for the first time.