WHEN THE VIEWER’S GAZE IS RETURNED:
TEACHING PICASSO’S DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON
Katharine Conley
Dartmouth College
As a painting that features nude women who stare boldly back at the
viewer, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) can be a useful
point of departure for a conversation about ethical looking.1 As an introduction to a course I taught in 2004 on “Outsider Art or the Primitive
Within: Primitivism and Madness in the Modern Period,” and again in an
independent study in French I taught in 2005 in preparation for a seminar on “Modernism and Anthropology,” I spent a week devoted to the
Demoiselles and to recent critical responses to it. My focus at the time was
on the notion of primitivism, the style of modern Western painting from
the turn of the last century that was influenced by the influx of so-called
primitive works into Western cities as a result of colonialism. Picasso’s
painting has been called primitivist because of its simple lines and the
incorporation of African masks. I asked the students to think about the
category “primitive” in relation to the painting and also in relation to
themselves. What does this art historical term mean to them? The next
time I teach this course I will also ask the students to think more simply
about looking: what is it like to be looked at by the eyes in the painting
that seem to return our own inquisitive gazes? With the support of
excerpts from the ethical writings about the self and the other by the
French mid-twentieth-century philosophers Jean Paul Sartre, Emmanuel
Levinas, and Simone de Beauvoir, I will ask the students to tell me how
the models for looking at the painting resonate for them and the relevance of primitivism to each model. Finally we will discuss how considering the painting from an ethical standpoint enhances our understanding
of it.
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© 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
THE PAINTING
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon represents five nude women in a brothel.
The two women at the center appear to stare directly back at the viewer.
The head of the one on the far left resembles an Egyptian statue; the two
on the right, one of whom is seated, have masks for faces that resemble
African masks. Over the last century, understanding of this painting’s
forcefulness has changed orientation as its audience has broadened. Initially it would have been understood as a bold statement made to intellectual viewers who shared commonalities with Picasso himself—white
heterosexual European men of a certain social class, education, and with
a refined aesthetic appreciation. The use of space within the painting has
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identified it as a harbinger of cubism.2 The painting also consolidates the
presence within modernism of primitivism, through its bold simple lines
that break at once with realist traditions and with other turn-of-the-century styles.3
The five figures are painted with bold, stylized strokes in strong,
unrealistic colors. They seem to co-exist within different time periods
and geographies, a view that conforms to Picasso’s incorporation of what
at the time were considered primitive elements—faces inspired partly by
archaic Egyptian and Iberian statues and masks that look African. Only
two months after the publication of the surrealist “Manifesto” in October 1924, André Breton asserted that he saw in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
“the primary event of the beginning of the twentieth-century . . . . an
intense projection of that modern ideal we have only begun to understand in a fragmentary way. . . . With this painting we may say farewell to
all the paintings of the past.”4
Picasso breaks with the past partly through a disregard for a diachronic view of history. By blending European and African traditions,
the new and the ancient, he allows them to co-exist synchronically in one
space and in one non-chronologically connected time period, disturbing
our familiar Western sense of time and allying the painting with nonrational feeling. This disconnection with chronological time links the
painting to both meanings of the French adjective primitif, the form of
the word primitive Picasso would have used as a resident of France at the
time. Primitive or primitif can refer to the beginning of something (a
chronological relation) and also to the origin of something (a relation of
depth). The viewer of Picasso’s Demoiselles is conscious of seeing the work
in a present moment while simultaneously experiencing a non-chronological connection to a distant past evoked by masks that Picasso would
have understood as having changed little in style over the centuries. At
the same time, the viewer experiences this disturbance on an emotional
level that springs from inner, non-rational depths.5 Indeed, the oscillation
between the two meanings and the tension between their horizontal and
vertical axes—connecting past and present time, depth and surface—
exemplifies the work’s power to provoke disorientation. It is this oscillating power to trigger feeling that makes it a suitable object for a conversation about ethics because it presents figures that command response and
therefore facilitates a conversation about the interrelationship between
the self and others.
Another way in which Picasso evokes a sense of synchronic time
comes from the presence of the African masks in the painting. The
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masks would have been seen as primitive in 1907 because of their place
of origin, a continent that had been widely colonized by the French and
other European cultures by the turn of the last century and whose native
people were regarded as childlike in comparison to their colonizers. Furthermore, the African artisans who made the masks were understood to
adhere to a different notion of time than in industrialized nations.6 The
countries of origin of these presumed African faces were understood to
exist “in that early stage of culture through which Europe supposedly
had long ago passed, the stage of the ‘childhood’ of the European races, a
time before ‘history,” as Patricia Leighton explains in her study of the
Demoiselles.7 Picasso clearly engages with the dimension of time contained
within the word primitive through his references to archaic traditions surviving into the present and sharing in common with the modern a direct
simplicity capable of triggering the other sense of the word primitive
relating to depth, in this case the depth of emotions the painting stimulates.
With the term “affinities,” art historian William Rubin acknowledges
that Picasso reaches back in time and shares a commonality with the
tribal artists who made masks like the ones in the painting and the ones
that would eventually hang in his studio. But Rubin insists that Picasso
did not borrow from them and was not influenced by them. In Rubin’s
view, Picasso could share “a profound identity of spirit with . . . tribal
peoples” while simultaneously serving as an elite leader of the Western
vanguard.8 For Rubin this means that the connection is purely emotional
and non-rational, as though, when thinking about how to represent a
human face with a powerful dimension, Picasso and ancient artists or
artisans working today in Africa according to an uninterrupted tradition
of art making, would choose to do so in the same way.
One commonality to all views of the painting lies in its ability to
provoke emotion, beginning with shock. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon disturbs
partly through the difference of the figures from our understanding of
real bodies. Another aspect that could have been shocking to connoisseurs of art, would have been the unrealistic nature of the space in which
the women stand, even though it follows aspects of composition and
theme familiar from Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834), which also shows women on view for the sole pleasure of
male viewers. In Delacroix’s domestic environment the women are confined to their “apartment” by men, who, in every sense, possess and
dominate them economically and socially. The subservient social situation of the women in Picasso’s painting is parallel. What could shock a
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male viewer who understands the painting as an invitation to see something reserved for himself would be the disappearance of the domestic
environment presented in Delacroix’s work, which has dissolved into a
matrix of bright color and angular shapes where feeling dominates over a
rational, realistic depiction of space.
Recent criticism of the painting has incorporated feminist and postcolonial perspectives into appreciations that take social and historical
contexts into account. These perspectives may also contribute to the
painting’s suitability for a conversation about ethics in the contemporary
classroom since it extends our understanding of the emotions it evokes
to include responses based on gender, race, and class. Art historian Hal
Foster articulates well the relevance of the painting to our time through
its evocation of the dynamics of primitivism: “the primitive is a modern
problem, a crisis in cultural identity, which the west moves to resolve:
hence the modernist construction ‘primitivism,’ the fetishistic recognition-and-disavowal of the primitive difference.”9 Feminist interpreters of
the painting have pointed out how Les Demoiselles privileges male viewers,
white heterosexual male appreciators of art who by training could
respond to Picasso’s new use of space and shape, his expansion of experiments initiated by Paul Cézanne, his heralding of a non-realistic and profoundly psychological dimension to painting, and a view of female
sexuality as a force that attracts and repels almost equally, inspiring desire
and revulsion in equal measure (Rubin 254). Art historian Carol Duncan
explains how “the work forcefully asserts to both men and women the
privileged status of male viewers—they alone are intended to experience
the full impact of this most revelatory moment.”10 Anna Chave confirms
this idea but insists that the painting has power for other audiences, as
well: “to some of us, of course, such figures—however summarily, distortedly, or abstractly drawn—do not evince aliens, much less monsters:
to the contrary, they bear a passing resemblance to ourselves” (610). She
adds that “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon could never have enjoyed the phenomenal celebrity it has if it did not function in some way to confirm
prevailing social biases” (607). It is precisely this recent view of the painting as a point of departure for seeing, confirming, or challenging social
bias that makes it such a useful sounding board for a discussion of ethical
interrelationships.
Several biases have permeated critiques of the painting over time.
First among these stands the assumption that the painting was created
for a male audience, an assumption founded on gender and identified by
feminist critics. According to this view, the women are different from the
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viewer because of their sex and social class and also because, in contrast
to the viewer, they were probably diseased. For behind Rubin’s insistence
that the painting theatricalizes Eros and Thanatos, desire and fear, attraction and revulsion, lies the historical commonplace that women in brothels were unhealthy (Rubin 252-54). Rubin insists that Picasso had an
“exaggerated concern for and fascination with venereal disease” (254).
Another bias noticeable in critiques of the painting involves the question
of influence—Rubin categorically insists Picasso was not influenced by
the African masks he discovered in the old Trocadéro Museum in Paris in
the year he completed the painting. He bases his extensive argument
partly on Picasso’s own description of the visit using words such as
“shock,” “revelation,” “charge,” and “force” but with no mention of art
or influence (in Rubin 255). Rather, for Picasso, the masks he eventually
collected in his studio were for him like sentient beings, “witnesses”
rather than influences.11 Rubin identifies by name and region the masks
that could have served as models for the masked faces in the painting and
argues that those masks were not yet available in Paris at the time, and
that Picasso only collected masks like the ones in the painting after he had
completed the Demoiselles (296).
For the cultured viewer with knowledge of Western art, the painting’s force could also reside in Picasso’s use of mask-like faces inspired by
ancient sculptures from remote archeological digs in Iberia, Egypt, and
sub-Saharan Africa. Under Napoleon, France occupied much of Spain,
Egypt, and several territories in North and sub-Saharan Africa. Shock for
an art expert could have come from Picasso’s turning to colonized lands
for source material for this new painting. The assertion that Picasso was
not influenced by African objects or artistic style has been identified as
coming out of a strong bias against African art as inferior to European
art by critics taking a postcolonial perspective like Michelle Wallace, who
claims that “black artists and intellectuals widely assume that a white
world is simply unable to admit that art from Africa and elsewhere in the
Third World had a direct and profound influence on Western art because
of an absolutely uncontrollable racism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism.”12 Simon Gikandi similarly argues vigorously against the idea put
forward by Rubin that Picasso merely shared affinities with African makers of masks and was not influenced by them.13 In Gikandi’s view, the
“struggle for a pure Picasso, one uncontaminated by Africa, is ultimately
a struggle to secure the aesthetic ideology of high modernism, especially
the privileging of form as the mark of its breakthrough” (467).
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This bias against African art and the recent critique of it are both
rooted in the long-held view that tribal art has remained unchanged for
centuries, that craftspeople reproduce objects for ceremonial rituals without regard for their artistic value and without putting any kind of personal imprint or signature onto such works. Such an approach to artmaking differs so profoundly from the Western ideal of the artist-genius
that has been in place since Renaissance art superseded more anonymous
medieval European art forms like the gothic cathedral that art historians
schooled to distinguish and appreciate one artist’s originality in relation
to others would have difficulty acknowledging the contribution an anonymous mask-maker might make to a work that became a monument of
twentieth-century art, as Breton predicted in 1924.
The masks that Picasso first encountered at the Trocadéro and later
collected would have been considered scientific more than artistic at the
turn of the last century—the Trocadéro was a science museum, not an art
museum, housing objects of interest to anthropologists more than to art
historians. Such objects would have been available to him cheaply in flea
markets instead of art galleries, with cost serving as an additional marker
of inferior value. Anthropologist Sally Price has begun to shift such a
point of view about the originality and uniformity of African art, arguing
how styles have changed over time and how distinct artists have recognizable styles, insisting that for “contemporary historians of art as well as
anthropologists, then, there is growing recognition of the need for subtlety and caution in describing the delicate interaction between individual
creativity and the dictates of tradition” (58). Her claims are now well supported by recent museum exhibitions that are redefining African art by
breaking it down into regions, cultures, styles, periods, and artists.14
Studies such as those by Duncan, Chave, Wallace, and Gikandi have
shifted the focus of criticism from the painting’s style and its purely aesthetic impact within the history of Western art to the painting’s broader
implications. It now may be understood as a work that stands as a pivot
for social bias and, as a result, as a way of unlocking bias by making it visible. It is now a painting that speaks to women of the possibility of looking any viewer in the eye, regardless of social class or norms of modesty.
It is also now a painting that demonstrates the ways in which the West’s
encounter with Africa shaped Western modernism—not just what is
called primitivism but high modernism itself—through the seamless way
European and African shapes and traditions are married in the painting.
Then there are the women themselves, who, according to Rubin,
have inspired “fear and loathing” as well as desire. For art historian Leo
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Steinberg, the painting is about sex, pure and simple, so that the feeling it
evokes is unadulteratedly sexual.15 More recently, as we have seen, the
emotions have leaned towards recognition, reclamation, affirmation of
the previously denied African influence and previously excluded subjectivities of non-Western women and men. This painting changed twentieth-century notions of beauty partly because of the way Picasso focuses
self-consciously on the gaze, on looking. It is hard to believe he did not
seek to provoke a degree of self-consciousness in the viewer, that he did
not create these faces to reflect their power, that he did not wish his
viewer to experience some of the feelings he himself had experienced as a
child growing up superstitious in southern Spain in relation to what were
known to him as imágenes. His women, as Natasha Staller has fascinatingly
argued, are like the imágenes of his youth, reproductions of the Virgin
Mary that were understood to hold within them aspects of the Virgin’s
own power, to function as sentient objects able to serve as her emissaries.16 Having been raised with material representations of women whom
he believed had the power to communicate, it is not surprising he created
updated versions of them as a an adult, representations capable of
expressing and communicating similar powers. Such powers, Picasso
would have identified as primitive.
In recent debates the term primitive remains powerful, as emotionally fraught as its inherently oscillating meaning suggests.17 Even the
emotion about unfair hierarchies at the root of social and racial bias
linked to the word and expressed by critics like Marianne Torgovnick in
her study Gone Primitive reflect its power.18 It is through emotions such as
these that ethical readings of the paintings may take root, particularly in
light of what three philosophers, also living in France at the same time as
Picasso, write about looking, about the gaze and the ways in which looking implicates the self in relation to another.
FRENCH ETHICAL MODELS
FOR
LOOKING
Several ethical models circulated in France during the first half of
the twentieth century, a time that could be characterized as the height of
the Modernist era and as the temporal context for the Demoiselles. JeanPaul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Simone de Beauvoir were probably
familiar with the work by the 1940s, and Sartre and Beauvoir had certainly met Picasso.19 The painting was known more by reputation than by
sight before the Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1939.20 It had
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been privately owned and displayed only briefly before it was shipped to
New York.21 Few published reviews existed of it and it was not made visible in public until 1925, when Breton reproduced it in his journal, La
Révolution surréaliste. By the 1920s and certainly by the 1940s, primitivism
had become a recognizable sub-category of modernism. Each model for
looking and having one’s gaze returned by these three philosophers may
serve as a useful point of departure for a conversation about the ethical
impact of the painting and the relation of that impact to primitivism.
Together these ethical perspectives lead back through emotion to art historical responses to the painting founded on aesthetics and evolving
social ideas about gender, class, and race.
Norman Bryson usefully summarizes Sartre’s model for the subject’s
encounter with another subject from Being and Nothingness (1943) in visual
terms:
Sartre’s conception of the gaze of the other is clearest in his
story or scenario of the watcher in the park. Sartre’s narrative
involves two stages. In its first movement, Sartre enters a park
and discovers that he is alone: everything in the park is there
for him to regard from an unchallenged center of the visual
field. . . . But in Sartre’s second movement, this reign of plenitude and luminous peace is brought abruptly to an end: into the
park and into the watcher’s solitary domain there enters
another. . . . The watcher is in turn watched: observed of all
observers, the viewer becomes spectacle to another’s sight.22
Literally Sartre writes: “[T]he man is there, twenty paces from me . . .
hence the disintegration of my universe is contained within the limits of
this same universe. . . . it appears that the world has a kind of drain hole
in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through
this hole” (255-56).
Sartre’s model rings with emotional shock and resonates with the
first responses to the painting. It accounts for the probable standard
response of the white male viewer from 1907, when France was at the
height of its imperial power, and also with the male viewer of the 1940s
who, like the viewer from a previous generation, would expect to be in a
position of mastery and plenitude in a brothel, and also with regard to
women in general, and certainly with regard to women of color or, for
that matter, any colonial subject. However, the unabashed expressions on
the faces of Picasso’s women deny such a “reign” of mastery over them,
not unlike the intruder into Sartre’s watcher’s park. These women hold
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themselves like fellow subjects and challenge the viewer’s masterful subject-position, the position of the colonialist representative. This could
help explain the source of the shock, horror, even repulsion registered by
critics over the years, the Demoiselles’s complete resistance to, and refusal
of, mastery where mastery should have been readily available. The historical coincidence of the anxiety caused by the women in the painting for
male critics with the beginning of de-colonization in the 1940s, not to
mention the achievement of the vote for women in France at the end of
World War II, may not be insignificant.
The encounter of the subject with an other person in the work of
Levinas tends to be less drastic than in Sartre’s because for Levinas the
Other is characterized by a face much more than by the more abstract
challenge to dominance evoked by Sartre. Levinas writes in “The Trace
of the Other” (1963; my translation): “Sartre says, strikingly, although he
stops his analysis too soon, that the Other [Autrui] is a pure hole in the
world. He proceeds from the absolutely Absent. But his relation to this
Absent one from whom he comes, does not indicate, show, or reveal this
Absent one; and yet the Absent one has significance through the face.”23
So Levinas humanizes the Other, seeing it in much gentler terms than
Sartre does and even feminizing it. The face, for Levinas, is the trace of
the Infinite nature of the absolutely Other. “The situation where an event
happens to a subject who cannot fully apprehend it, who can do nothing
about it, but who must face it, in some way,” he writes in Time and the
Other (1946-47; my translation), “is the relation with the other, another,
the face to face with the other, the encounter with a face that, at the same
time reveals and hides the other.”24 He then feminizes the face without
individualizing it:
This mystery of the feminine—of one who is essentially
other—does not refer to a romantic notion of the mysterious
woman, unknown or not known well. . . . It is an evanescence,
an escape before light. The feminine’s manner of existing is to
hide herself. . . . So while he who exists fulfills himself in subjectivity and in consciousness, otherness/alterity is most fully
fufilled in the feminine. . . . I see no other possibility than to call
it simply a mystery. (78-81)
Levinas’s emphasis on mystery has partly to do with his desire to
resist the notion that through desire we incorporate the other into ourselves, that we possess the other, even if he argues that inter-subjective
space is asymmetrical. Levinas nonetheless insists that his face, his Other
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is not an actual woman, but “the event of alterity,” which eros helps us to
understand because it is “an absolutely original relation” which cannot be
translated in terms of human power (80). His desire to ascribe a mysterious feminine face to an individual’s sense of his relation to others in the
world accords well with the Demoiselles. As the critic John Golding
declared in 1988: “It is now more than forty years since I first wrote at
some length on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with the growing awareness that
there could never be a definitive interpretation of this most remarkable
of paintings.”25 At the conclusion to the postscript to his ground-breaking essay from 1972, “The Philosophical Brothel,” Steinberg comes back
to the painting itself: “To me it seems that most source-hunting forays
serve to remove our gaze from the picture itself. . . . I looked long at the
Demoiselles, and the longer I stayed, the more intense the sensation of surveying uncharted ground” (73). One could well argue that it is the
women’s unknowable, impenetrable quality that makes them so compelling, that this is what constitutes their feminine alterity in a Levinasian
sense, particularly for a male viewer but even for a woman who sees these
women as different from herself, or for any viewer coming back to the
painting after a certain interval and, like Golding, rediscovering its essential mystery by seeing it anew.
It is to just such abstractions of otherness and femininity that feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir objects in her Second Sex from
1949.26 “I suppose that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware
of her own consciousness, or ego,” she writes in a footnote. “But it is
striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view, disregarding the
reciprocity of subject and object. When he writes that woman is mystery,
he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is
intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.”27
Instead, Beauvoir proposes the idea of mitsein, of being with another person, over the idea of dasein or being there, which, she suggests subtends
Levinas’s views.28 Reciprocity is the ethical quality privileged by Beauvoir:
The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is
impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is
the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another. (xxiii)
Women must claim what Michel Foucault would later call the subject
position for themselves in society, according to Beauvoir, to conceptual-
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ize themselves as fully human beings, to participate fully in the human
mitsein.
So, in Beauvoir’s terms the women in Picasso’s painting could be
understood as demanding full attention for themselves according to a
series of categories of otherness. They challenge the viewer to be with
them as fully human—beings who are also women, women of color, and
women imbued with non-Western, non-rational spirituality. And they
inspire such a response, according to Beauvoir’s model, partly because
they are already with one another—already a collective, a group, thus naturally inviting a Beauvoirian “seeing with” perspective. Beauvoir would
invite us to see them not as strange, but as more like us, according to a
much more symmetrical relation than the one imagined by Levinas or
Sartre, a point of view that echoes Anna Chave’s recognition of herself in
the painting.
CASE STUDY
AND
CONCLUSION
What I propose to do the next time I teach the Demoiselles will be to
present a case study to the students, in either English or French, comprised of the short quotations from Sartre, Levinas, and Beauvoir cited
here, followed by a series of quotations by critics of the painting from
1912 to the present, with the goal of launching a discussion of how we
look and why—what perspectives from outside of the painting lie
embedded in our own social context and cultural knowledge and inform
our reaction to it? What range of perspectives are relevant—knowledge
of art history, social history, the legacies of colonialism, as well as direct
responses to the painting itself ? Another aspect of the discussion will
concentrate on how we see the Demoiselles today—to what extent do
these women still seem strange to us and to what extent do they now
seem familiar in our increasingly pluricultural and global world? What
does it mean that this circle of women may never yield fully the secrets
behind their gaze, that they will never accept complete mastery through
our attempts to understand or explain them? What do they tell us about
ourselves?
One virtue of these ethical models for looking comes from the ways
in which together they confirm the responses of art historians over the
years, from Rubin’s firmly modernist perspective to Duncan and Chave’s
feminist one and Wallace and Gikandi’s postcolonial one. They are based
on interaction between the self and another founded on looking that
leads to interrelationship. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a work that demands
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and commands attention and triggers a self-conscious reaction that
makes it possible to concentrate on the self and the self ’s response to
challenge in a way that other experiences do not. The variability of the
response and the painting’s ultimate refusal to yield to a final and complete analysis winds back to its association with the concept of the “primitive” which, by its very definition, evades mastery and clarity through its
double vectors in time and experience—a horizontal vector leading back
to prehistoric times, and a vertical one leading directly down into the
deepest wells of the human psyche and the unconscious drives hidden
below the surface at the present moment of viewing. It evokes being
through the palpable, powerful presence of the women staring back at us
and it evokes being with through their challenge to us not to look away. It
is a painting that challenges us to think about who we are in the world—
as men or women, Western or non-Western, of a cultivated or uneducated class, as viewers conscious of color, sex, and class in a changing
world—and in the present moment.
Whether or not we recognize the references to Cézanne, archaic
Iberia, Egypt, and Africa, we respond to something elemental and fundamental in the emotion, color, composition, and shapes in the painting
that together shed light on why the term “primitive” might have been
used to describe it, as a word that defies stable definition. Mostly the
painting sheds light on modernism as a way of seeing that teases out
powerful emotion linked to simple lines and shapes that draw as much
from psychological reality as from everyday, realistic aspects and that
draws on visual traditions that extend far beyond Western Europe. Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon is a painting of its time, from an historical moment
that coincides with the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis and its eventual
influence on art, a view of human beings concentrated on the whole person as a complicated individual composed of both thoughts and emotions, rational and non-rational drives and experiences. It is a work that
engages fully with its viewers in ways that ethical readings can inform.
NOTES
1
I thank Ron Green and Aine Donovan of the Dartmouth Ethics Institute for
their support for this project and Kathy Hart and Jim Jordan for their readings
of it.
2 Anna Chave provides a useful summary of the debates generated by the
question of whether or not the Demoiselles initiated cubism. It is now widely
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accepted that the painting precedes yet anticipates cubism. Anna Chave, “New
Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of
Cubism,” Art Bulletin 74.4 (December 1988) 596-611.
3
The most complete documentation of the influences on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and of its development as a painting was published in the two-volume catalogue to the exhibition of 1988 that started at the Musée Picasso in Paris,
edited by Hélène Seckel (Paris: Réunion des musée nationaux, 1988), and, in
the United States, by William Rubin, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1994). See also Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical
Brothel,” reissued in 1988 in October 44 (1988): 7-74; Colin Rhodes, Primitivism
and Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994) 8, and Leighton; and Hal
Foster, “’Primitive’ Scenes,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (Autumn 1993): 69-102.
4
Letter to Jacques Doucet who was deciding whether to purchase the painting, reproduced in the two-volume catalogue published by the Picasso
Museum in Paris, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, volume 2 (Paris: Editions de la
Réunion des musées nationaux, 1988) 590. The letter is dated 12 December
1924. My translation.
5
Sigmund Freud also links these two aspects of the notion of the primitive to
an individual’s psychology in Totem and Taboo, published in 1913, comparing
“primitive peoples” both to “prehistoric man” and to modern “neurotics,”
prone to ambivalence. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950) 3, 75-77, 88.
6
See Johannes Fabian who argues: “[O]ne assigns to the conquered populations a different time” in Time and the Other, (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) 30,
27.
7 Patricia Leighton, “Colonialism, l’art nègre, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ed. Christopher Green (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 77-103.
8
William Rubin, “Picasso,” “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art, vol 1, ed. William
Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984) 263.
9
Hal Foster in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, and Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA:
Bay Press, 1985) 204. See also anthropologist Sally Price’s comparable commentary Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989) 48..
10
Carol Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” Art Journal 48.2 (Summer 1989):
175-76.
11
Picasso stated in an interview: “For me the [tribal] masks were . . . magical
objects . . . intercessors . . . against everything—against unknown, threatening
spirits. . . . [T]he African sculptures that hang around almost everywhere in my
studios are more witnesses than models” (in Rubin 260). This quotation comes
from an interview of Picasso by Florent Fels published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques 42 (August 4, 1923), 2, cited in Rubin 336n. 64 and
65.
12
Michelle Wallace, “Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the
Visual in Afro-American Culture,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1990) 48.
13
Simon Gikandi “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/Modernity 10.3 (2003): 455-480.
Katharine Conley: When the Viewer’s Gaze is Returned
101
14
See, for example, Constantine Petridis, Art and Power in the Central African
Savannah (Brussels and Cleveland: Mercatorfonds and The Cleveland Art
Museum, 2008), Kristina Van Dyke, African Art from the Menil Collection (Houston and New Haven: The Menil Foundation and Yale University Press, 2008),
and Iris Hahner, Maria Kcskési, and László Vajda, African Masks, The BarbierMueller Collection (Munich: Prestel, 2007). In a recent book, Price critiques the
new museum of arts from Africa and other countries formerly categorized as
primitive in Paris, known simply for its location on the Quai Branly, since
“primitive art” and “first arts” were names that were ultimately rejected. See
Paris Primitive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
15
Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (1988): 64.
16
Staller contextualizes Picasso’s work with his early childhood Málaga, Spain,
which was marked by natural disasters that “intersected with a longstanding,
and still potent, tradition of superstitions.” These disasters and a belief in
nature’s malevolence were countered within this deeply Catholic culture with
symbolic religious images—imágenes—which included representations of the
Virgin thought capable preventing droughts, plagues, even earthquakes. See
Nathasha Staller, A Sum of Deconstructions (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001) 11, 13,
16)
17
Freud would have identified this particular superstitious power as linked to
animism, which he also identifies as magic: “The technique of animism, magic,
reveals in the clearest and most unmistakable way an intention to impose the
laws governing mental life upon real things.” Totem and Taboo, 114.
18 Torgovnick states forcefully: “the problematics of the term primitive itself. . .
. [taken by] the West as norm and define[d by] the rest as inferior, different,
deviant, subordinate, and subordinable.” See Gone Primitive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 20, 21.
19
Sartre and Beauvoir are known to have met Picasso in the 1940s. Their
names also all figure in the diaries of the surrealist poet Robert Desnos starting
in the 1940s, in the context of the weekly dinners to which he invited everyone
he knew. See my Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life
(Nebraska UP, 2003) 89.
20
See Rubin, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; Yve-Alain Bois, “Painting as Trauma,”
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ed. Christopher Green (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 31-33; and Etienne-Alain Hubert, “Was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Exhibited in 1918?” in Rubin, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 206-212.
21
Chave confirms that “for several decades after Picassso completed Les Demoiselles, it remained unseen and unmentioned” (600).
22
Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” Vision and Visuality,
ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press-Dia Art Foundation, 1988), 87-108.
Sartre had already set up the opposition of being and nothingness in his novel
La Nausée from 1938: “this nothingness, it hadn’t come before existence, it was
an existence like any other” (my translation). Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris:
Gallimard, 1938), 190. Bryson draws from the passage in Being and Nothingness,
trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), on pages 156-57.
23
Emmanuel Levinas, “La Trace de l’autre,” Tjidschrift roor Filosofie 25.3 (Sept.
1963): 618.
102
Teaching Ethics, Fall 2008
24
See Emmanuel Levinas, Le Temps et l’autre (Paris: PUF-Quadrige, 1979) 67,
my translation. This work was first delivered as a series of talks at the Collège
Philosophique in 1946-47 and published in 1948.
25
John Golding, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ed. Christopher Green
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 15.
26
For an excellent summary of feminist ethics since Beauvoir, see Marian
Eide’s Introduction to Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 1-29.
27
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1952) xix.
28
See de Beauvoir, xxiii. Levinas also explored reciprocity to a great extent,
writing, for example, in “The Pact”: “my responsibility includes the responsibility taken up by other men. I always have, myself, one responsibility more
than than anyone else, since I am responsible, in addition, for his responsibility.” In The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (London: Blackwell, 1989), 226.