My Best Friends Diary

Painting Title: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907

With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing painting after three quarters of a century, a refutationof the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fasion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. None signalled a faster change in the history of art. Yet it was anchored in tradition, and its attack on the eye would never have been so startling if its format had not been that of the classical nude; the three figures at the left are a distant but unmistakable echo of that favourite image of the late Renaissance, the Three Graces. Picasso began it in the year Cezanne died, 1906, and its nearest ancestor seems to have been Cezanne's monumental composition of the bathers displaying their blockish, angular bodies beneath arching trees. Its other line of descent in Picasso's Spanish heritage. The bodies of the two caryatid-like standing nudes, and to a lesser degree their neaighbour on the right, twist like El Greco's figures. And the angular, harshly lit blue space between them closely resembles the drapery in El Greco's Dumbarton Oaks Visitation.

Painting Title: Self Portrait 1907

Self Portrait from 1907 by Pablo Picasso was painted around the same time as his famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painting. The portrait is mask-like and possibly influenced by African art, which the artist had a fascination with.