Picasso’s interest in the erotic as well as his contrasting depictions of women is evident throughout the artist’s body of work. His tenuous relationships with the women in his life — his mother, wives, mistresses, little sister, and daughter — are often cited as the root of his varying depictions of women. Though he often included biographical imagery or context in his artwork — and did so in the primary compositions of Demoiselles d’Avignon — he refused to divulge enough information to allow for an autobiographical interpretation of the famed painting.  This has left historians and critics, as well as Picasso’s own peers, to dissect the various compositions and changes in search of an explanation for both the crude style and aggressive subject matter.

            In the years before Picasso began preliminary work on Demoiselles d’Avignon, he created two series in which he utilized his motif of prostitutes. His first, done in the first half of 1901, represented the women, dressed in fine stylish clothes, as successful courtesans. Though depicted as a prosperous profession well incorporated into contemporary society, the women’s austere faces reflect the hostility and ruthlessness with which they must live. This quality is bolstered by Picasso’s aggressive and expressive brushwork, trading naturalism for the artist’s unhindered and visceral response to the subject matter. This representation of prostitution, and the psychological implications of the prostitutes themselves, is an obvious precedent to the aggressive and unapologetic nature of the five whores of his 1907 masterpiece.

During the second half of 1901, and at the same time as the beginning of his blue period, Picasso’s subject matter shifted from the hardened and hostile courtesan to the pitiful disease-addled prostitute-victims.  These women, despicable in their misery, were renderings of the actual women Picasso observed at St. Lazare Prison Hospital for Venereal Disease as well as, it has been argued, the prostitutes he visited as a young teenager and, perhaps, even allegorical representations of the venereal disease he alluded to possibly contracting from them.  

Post written by Catherine Estrada