There cannot be many paintings whose anniversary would occasion an analysis in a journal of socialist theoryβan honour usually reserved for revolutions and other great events in the history of the class struggleβnevertheless Les Demoiselles certainly repays serious consideration.
Aside from its individual stature as one of the outstanding paintings of the 20th century, there is its enormous importance as a turning point in the history of art and, indeed, wider cultural history, and also its powerful resonance today. It is eight feet tall, seven feet eight inches wide, and has hung since in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting depicts five nude women, clearly prostitutes in a brothel. Of the three women on the left, the leftmost is shown side on, apparently drawing back a curtain to reveal the others, and the second and third are shown frontally, staring straight out of the canvass.
The bodies of all the women are rendered by means of flat, angular planes of colour with little shading or modelling. Jutting out at the centre of the bottom of the painting is a bowl of fruitβa melon, grapes, pear and apple.
So much for the basic facts. At least the faces of the Madonnas, the tunics of the angels and the breasts of the Venuses looked like observable faces, tunics and breasts.
Les Demoiselles opens the floodgates, first to cubism and then in rapid succession to futurism, synthetic cubism, expressionism, vorticism, abstraction, suprematism, dadaism and more besides.
