Pablo Picasso - Nude with Raised Arms Orientation In 1907 Picasso created one of his most celebrated and innovative works now known as Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon. This very big painting of five female nudes was utterly unlike anything previously produced in Western art. Picasso recognised how radical it was and for several years he only showed it to a few close friends, most of whom were confused and shocked by what they saw. Nude with Raised Arms was painted the same year as Les Desmoiselles and they both share the same qualities of compressed and ambiguous space and the strong influence of African art. Though most Europeans were relatively ignorant of the exact of origins and uses of African sculpture, this only enhanced the aura of dark mystery and magical force that surrounded them. These african artefacts, in their tribal context, may have been used to transport someone to another state of consciousness. Picasso enjoyed the idea that they could also help his art to transcend tradition and enter a new dimension. "The masks weren't just like any other pieces of sculpture," he said later, "not at all. They were magic things…The Negro pieces were mediators…They were against everything - against unknown threatening spirits…I understood, I too am against everything." Picasso has taken a conventional subject in a traditional, erotic pose and subverted it to create a nude that is confrontational, aggressive and ugly. All soft and naturalistic qualities have been removed. Raised Image 1 Her face appears like a carved mask hanging above her body. The egg shaped head is dissected by eyebrows that form a single line. Below them are two lopsided and heavily outlined black almond-shaped eyes that stare out with a hypnotic intensity either side of an unnaturally long, straight nose that ends in a V-shaped wedge. Below this her mouth is a small skewed slit. Picasso was creating his own totemic woodcarvings at this time in response to the African art he was studying and collecting. This painting reflects his interest and appears more like carving. Instead of using subtle changes in colour to model the planes of the face, Picasso has painted crude hatched lines on her left cheek, in the socket above her left eye and along her right jawbone. Each area of shadow is given a different texture, squiggles, flicking strokes or diagonal lines. As well as painting these lines, he has scored them into the wet paint like chisel marks into wood. The paint around the eyes is very thick and her eyeballs are scored into it, giving them a three dimensional appearance. The hatching also creates disconcerting changes in spatial depth . The head is given a three dimensional quality which is contradicted by the body which appears flat. Here there is almost no hatching and the paint is applied so thinly that in places the texture of the canvas is visible. Meanwhile, the colour of her skin changes erratically from peachy pinks to terracottas and muddy ochres. The nude's pose is a further assault on the art world. Traditionally the subject of the female nude combined eroticism with contrived modesty and submission. So the woman would not meet the viewer's gaze and her pose although revealing, would not be explicit. In contrast, Picasso's nude stares out at the viewer without any recognisable human expression on her face. She stands facing us with her legs apart in a pose that is still sexually explicit despite the highly stylisation representation. Raised Image 2 Her body has also been distorted. The limbs have the appearance of folded card, flat and bent not curved and jointed. Her breasts have been simplified to a single arc, her pelvis is a V shape, while her limbs are defined by sharp black outlines that cut a series of rhythmic arabesques. These rhythms are echoed in the confusing series of dark angular shapes behind her that represent drapery.
Raised Image 3 The drapery lends the picture a very claustrophobic atmosphere. It appears like stiff crumpled paper rather than softly folding fabric and the paint surface has been scratched and scraped again. The earth colours of the nude's skin are repeated in the surrounding drapery, with the addition of a strip down the right hand edge of the canvas which is in a deep foliage green. The combined effect of these colours is to create a sense of the organic, adding to the 'primitive' feel of the picture. Picasso also uses the background to further distort spatial depth by using thick paint and rough texture for areas of negative space such as the gap between her raised arm and her head. This area of the composition which is supposed to represent nothing but air is instead given more solidity that the arm itself. This scarring and painted hatching lends the background a very sculptural quality even though we're unable to gain any accurate sense of depth. In this painting Picasso has taken art's most familiar, safe, traditional and formulaic subject matter and transformed it into something that would have been utterly incomprehensible and threatening. To the art-buying upper middle classes of Europe the explicit threat was two-fold. Firstly the woman embodied unfettered sexual desire and secondly, the painting style rejected every convention in art. For a cultured Frenchman in 1907 eagerly awaiting the next Puccini opera, the only thing recognisable in Nude with Raised Arms was the paint. |