But the two works also highlight a different attitude to women. Picasso’s historically troubled relationship with the opposite sex has become difficult to separate from his paintings’ afterlife. Known for a string of fraught romances, Picasso reportedly told the painter Françoise Gilot that all women are either “goddesses or doormats” and “machines for suffering”. To some critics, the violence of the fragmented bodies feels personal rather than aesthetic.
“The subject [a group of nude women in a brothel] was already provocative, but Picasso removed any softness,” says Snrech. In the newer version, while abstracted, their bodies are less disjointed – the result is more powerful than aggressive.
Taylor’s central figure stands with her arms partially behind her back. The short asymmetrical bob she wears shares a likeness with Josephine Baker, a US-French dancer and singer, known as the first black woman to become a world-famous superstar. By doing this, the artist “brings in questions of identity, race, and representation”, Snrech says.
Taylor’s title, From Congo to the Capital and Black Again (2007), references Matisse’s Congolese figure that sparked Picasso’s interest in African art, noting its movement from Africa to Paris. It also refers to the way Taylor himself made the painting “black again” by incorporating black people. Yet a white male disembodied arm with a gold watch also hovers in the far-left corner, groping one of the subjects. This could be a nod to the two men – a sailor and a medical student – Picasso initially thought about including in the painting. “He’s not just referencing Picasso, he’s questioning and reinterpreting him,” Snrech adds.
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Despite Braque’s initial comment about Les Demoiselles, he himself adopted a more angular approach to his paintings soon afterwards. And by the 1920s, what initially caused disgust in Picasso’s paintings was what saw it recast as a masterpiece. The writer and poet André Breton hailed the painting as revolutionary, convincing the French fashion designer and art collector Jacques Doucet to buy it. And in 1939, New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired it as a canonical piece. It still resides there today.
More than a century on, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon remains so contentious that artists are still grappling with the themes within it. Proof, surely, of how one painting can be both widely despised and loved at the same time – and can define a dramatic turning point in art history.
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