Les Demoiselles D'Avignon - Ethnographical and Iberian Influences

Ethnographical and Iberian Influences

The stylistic sources for the heads of the women have been much discussed, in particular the influence of African tribal masks, art of Oceania, and pre-Roman Iberian sculptures. The rounded contours of the features of the three women to the left can be related to Iberian sculpture, but not obviously the fragmented planes of the two on the right, which indeed seem influenced by African masks. Picasso emphatically denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art? Never heard of it!" (L'art nègre? Connais pas!), asserting instead that the primitivism in his work during, before and after the painting of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, from spring 1906 through the spring of 1907 was primarily influenced by Iberian sculpture. Some Iberian reliefs from Osuna, then only recently excavated, were on display in the Louvre from 1904. Archaic Greek sculpture has also been claimed as an influence.

The influence of Iberian sculpture became an issue in 1939, when Alfred Barr claimed that the primitivism of the Demoiselles derived from the art of Côte d'Ivoire and the French Congo. Picasso insisted that the editor of his "catalogue raissonne", Christian Zervos, publish a disclaimer: the 'Demoiselles,' he said, owed nothing to African art, everything to the reliefs from Osuna that he had seen in the Louvre a year or so before. Nonetheless, he is known to have seen African tribal masks while working on the painting, during a visit to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero with Andre Malraux in June 1907, about which he later said "When I went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed, I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren't like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things." Maurice de Vlaminck is often credited with introducing Picasso to African sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.

Picasso biographer John Richardson recounts in A Life Of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907–1916, art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's recollection of his first visit to Picasso's studio in July 1907. Kahnweiler remembers seeing dusty stacks of canvases in Picasso's studio and African sculptures of majestic severity. Richardson comments: so much for Picasso's story that he was not yet aware of Tribal art. A photograph of Picasso in his studio surrounded by African sculptures c.1908, is found on page 27 of that same volume.