The Neglected Fruit Cluster in Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" Author(s): Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr.

Source: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 13, No. 26 (1992), pp. 115-120 Published by: IRSA s.c. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1483434 . Accessed: 23/08/2011 21:28
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D. STEEFEL,JR. LAWRENCE

The Neglected FruitCluster in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The five female figures in PabloPicasso's Les Demoiselles [Fig. d'Avignonof 1907 (TheMuseumof ModernArt, New York) enframea still life on draperylyingatop an inclinedta1]literally The still life consists of a pear,an apple, ble in the foreground.1 a bunch of blue grapes, and a slice of pinkmelon, arrangedin a sexual groupingwhich until now has gone unnoticed as such. of the transgressive nature In his eloquent characterization of the paintingas a whole, RobertRosenblumrefersto the women's cacophonous anatomies composed of "jaggedplanes that lacerate torsos and limbs in violent, unpredictablepatterns." ... So contagious are the furiousenergies of these collisive, cutting angles that even the still life in the foregroundis charged with the same electric vitality that animates the figures. The scimitarlikewedge of melon, contrasted with the tumblinggrapes and pears [sic], seems to generate the ascending spirals of pink flesh; and, similarly,other inanimate forms,such as the curtainon the left, seem to echo the harshjunctures of the human anatomies.2 The relentless dynamism of the painting, or his vision of it, leads Rosenblumto misreadthe apple as a pear and to see the

still life as a tumbling arrayof motile elements ratherthan as a clustered phallic ensemble in essentially static repose. "Repose" may be too idyllic a word to describe anything in this savage painting, but if the still life is read as a formally stable configurationof penis, testicle(s), and pubic hairbacked by the slice of melon, the whole paintingstabilizes into a more iconic assemblage of demonic creatures than admitted by either Rosenblum or Leo Steinberg, the most famous "describer"of Les Demoiselles.3 While the composition still has many kinetic elements and is consistently dissonant with figure/fieldtensions and irrationalinterplays, our attention is drawn to and held bythe still life, which arrests the kindof proto-Cubist,continuously self-transforming behavior Rosenblum and Steinberg attribute to the work. The still life thus lends itself to a more shamanistic, exorcistic reading promoted by William Rubinin numerous articles in reaction to Steinberg's brilliant but giddy analysis.4 Steinberg discovers an astonishing spatial and configural labilityin Les Demoiselles. This he sees as the consequence of a complex formaland iconographicdevelopment generated by the theme of sexual encounter in a brothel. In a preliminary study for Les Demoiselles in the Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung 115

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Demoiselles d'Avignonn, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: museum. 1) Pablo Picasso, ((Loes 116

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2) Pablo Picasso, ((Medical Student, Sailor, and Five Nudes in a Bordello)), pencil and pastel study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Kupferstichkabinett der Oeffentlichen Kunstsammlung Basel. Photo: museum.

Basel [Fig. 2], a medical student carrying a book and a skull enters a brothel where a sailor is seated at a table before a plate of melon slices, a porrdn, or phallic-shaped leather flask, at his side; a white pitcher filled with flowers is depicted in the middle foreground.5 Through a series of migrations and metamorphoses, in the canvas the sailor's table ends up beneath the fruit still life and acts, according to Steinberg, as a dynamic

phallic intrusion into the female space. Steinberg perceives the painting as a whole as a pulsating sexual engine: Much of the disquiet in the left half of the picture represents Picasso's rage against the solid drop of the canvas. What he wants is a restless beat. The inflow of the curtain is steadied by its supporter. Her rigid profile abuts on 117

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3) Pablo Picasso, ((FiveStudents), watercolor study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art (A. E. Gallatin Coll.). Photo: museum.

a rampantgisante, who twins with a pillarnude, who in turn surmounts the entrant field of the table. Our vision heaves in and out. A variable pressure, likethe pitching of a boat in high seas, or a similitude of sexual energy." Elsewhere he writes in the same vein: 118

The Demoiselles d'Avignonseems to me to have one insistent theme to which everything in the picture lends force: the naked brothel interior,the male complicity in an orgy of female exposure, the direct axial address, the spasmodic action, the explosive release in a constricted space, and the reciprocityof engulfment and penetration. The picture

THENEGLECTED FRUIT IN PICASSO'SLESDEMOISELLES CLUSTER D'AVIGNON is both enveloping and transfixed; it sorties and overwhelms and impales itself. And it ought to be seen as it was painted--hung low in a narrow room, so that it spills over into it, tupped by the entrant wedge of the table. In one sense, the whole picture is a sexual metaphor, and Picasso will have used all his art to articulate a sexual meaning.7 Inthis reading,engulfment predominates overtransfixture,especially as regards the still life, with the fruit playing a minor role, subordinate to that of the table, as an insistent phallic penetrator of the female space. The picture impales itself on a sharp point. Itis speared below by a docked tablecloth, an acute corner overlaid by a fruit cluster on a white cloth. The table links two discontinuous systems; space this side of the picture couples with the depicted scene. Anybody can see that the ladies are having company. We are implied as the visiting clientele, seated within arm's reach of the fruit-accommodated and reacted to. It's like the difference between eavesdroppingon a grouptoo busy to notice or walkingin likethe man they've been waiting for. Ourpresence roundsout the party and the tipped tabletop plays fulcrum to a seesaw: the picture rises before us because we hold our end down.8 The nudes, however, seem less provocative in Steinberg's interpretation if the still life is seen specifically as a human member.Ifproperlyreadas a cluster sitting on a table, with the table deemphasized as it ought to be, the fruit may well appear ominous or possibly propitiatory,but at all events it is an insistent partof the paintingand not simplythe fulcrumof a seesaw upon which we as viewers are placed, "holdingour end down." Steinberg does comment elsewhere on the fruitbut essentially only to arguethat it is appetitive and in no way ominous. Noting that Picasso mistrusted those who fear appetite or see food as a possible sign of sin, Steinberg says it would not be likethe artist "to deploy grapes, apples and melons as symbols of pernicious indulgence."9 In the penultimate watercolor study for Les Demoiselles (PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art) [Fig. 3], "the inward thrust of the table is both picked up and restored to the picture plane by the toss of a horned melon slice."lo He goes on to praise Picasso for suppressing the explicitly phallicporrdn in favor of the "aggressive toss of the horny melon in the definitive version [as] a subtler device."11YetSteinberg seems peculiarlyblindto the possible readingof the fruit cluster as a male sexual organ, which, in his own context of erotic transformations, would be the ultimate conflation of the human elements and still life arrangements in the earlier stages of the work. The medical student, the sailor,the flowers, the porrdn, and the fruit all disappear as traces of an earliersexual iconographyinto the final still life,which extends the phallicfantasies of the entrant table and its "tupping" penetration of the work.12 The interpretationof the fruit cluster largely depends on how the work as a whole is seen, though that in turn can be strongly influenced by how one views the cluster. ForRosenblum and Steinberg it is essentially invisible,or visible only as a pleasantly pastoral passage in contrast to the savagery of the women, or as a mollifyingsign of domesticity. Morelikely,if the cluster is judged to be more tranquilthan alarming,it could be seen as a propitiatory metamorphosis of a dismemberment into a fruitful element. Best of all, it could speak to the hallucinatory mood of the total image as a dangerous metaphor for male mutilation by Amazonianfemales. Rubin,reacting to Steinberg's provocative vision, has tended to see Les Demoiselles as a more stringently traumatic image of eros/thanatos, and he emphasizes the mesmerizing, even terrifying aspect of the masks.13 Rubinfeels that the work is an ambivalent, cultic, transgressive confrontation, as if the artist were exorcising or projecting a trauma, "something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous such as Kurtzdiscovered in the heart of darkness."14 If Les Demoiselles is viewed as primarilyconfrontational, and this was surely its first impact upon Picasso's contemporaries, the fruit cluster is also confrontational. In any case, future discussions of Les Demoiselles will no longer be able to ignore its function as a phallic symbol. Postscript Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., known as "Peter," died of cancer on March3, 1992, at the age of 65. Hewas Steinberg Professor Emeritusof Art Historyat Washington Universityin St. Louis, Missouri, where he taught from 1967. In addition to his work on Picasso, he was the author of articles on Marcel Duchamp and Nicholas Poussin. He was also a gifted painter.

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LAWRENCED. STEEFEL,JR. This article is dedicated to Professor FredLichtof Boston University. 1 Fora color reproductionof Fig. 1, see R. Rosenblum, Cubism and TwentiethCenturyArt, New York,1960, p. 11. 2 lbidem, 12. p. 3 See L. Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel, Part 1," Art
News LXXI, no. 5 (September, 1972), pp. 20-29, and "Part 2," Art

News LXXI,no. 6 (October, 1972), pp. 38-47. to 'Iconic' in Picasso: The 4 See, e.g., W. Rubin,"FromNarrative BuriedAllegory in Breadand Fruitdishon a Tableand the Role of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," The Art Bulletin (December, 1983), pp. 615-48. Rubindoes not discuss the still life in an interpretativeway either in this essay or in his laterones, but his iconic, exorcistic understanding of the paintingdoes morethan other approaches to directour attention to the fruit cluster. In Rubin'sview, the stage masks on the right-handfigures serve as fixating elements of a confrontationalorder, which is consistent with myview of the still life as an arrestingforce within the work. 5 Fora color reproductionof Fig. 2, see "Primitivism" in 20th CenturyArt,ed. W.Rubin,1,250. Forthe medical student with a skull, see Steinberg, "ThePhilosophicalBrothel,Part2," p. 39. As a memento mori the skull, which soon disappears from the studies for Les Demoiselles, establishes a death theme which Rubinsees as crucial to the final content of the work; see "FromNarrativeto 'Iconic' in Picasso," pp. 628, 630, 632. 6 Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel, Part 1,"p. 25. 7 lbidem, "Part2," p. 46. 8 lbidem, "Part1,"p. 22. 9 lbidem, "Part2," p. 38. 10 lbidem, "Part1,"p. 23. Fora color reproductionof Fig. 3, see in 20th CenturyArt, I, 252. Rubin,ed., "Primitivism" 11 Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel, Part 1," p. 29, n. 23. Formoreon the porr6nas the sailor's male attributeinthe Basel watercolor drawing[Fig. 2], and on its previous use by Picasso, see ibidem, pp. 25-26. 12 Steinberg repeats this strange blindness on Picasso's part to the obvious iconographic connection between the earlierfigures and their later inanimateprojection.This is especially notable in the case of a critic whose work is to a great extent sexually oriented; see, e.g., L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christin Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, New York, 1985. When I asked Steinberg about this at a luncheon in St. Louistwo years ago, he had no idea what Iwas talking about. When I raised the question of the still life with Rosenblum,his answer was that when Les Demoiselles was being "resurrected," everyone was too concerned about otherthings forthe still life to enter the picture.

to 'Iconic' in Picasso," pp. 628 ff. 13 See Rubin,"FromNarrative Rubincontinues: Steinberglaidto restthe popularbeliefthat Picasso's conversionof the Demoiselles was motivatedprimarily interest by a proto-Cubist in abstraction. The image's pictorialmetamorphosis,he demonstrated, was consistently motivatedby a desire for an increasingly of what hadbeen Picasso's expresand intense projection profound sive concerns rightfromthe first sketches: his complex and conmanycontradictoryfeelings about women. Steinbergmarshalled vincing arguments to confirm the changes in the painting as Heviewed the "Afrifunctionsof "thetraumaof sexual encounter." can" figures on the rightof the Demoiselles, however,exclusively as embodiments of "sheer sexual energy, as the image of a life force."This is consistent with his view of the pictureas a whole as an image of "orgiasticimmersion" and "Dionysian release."Inthis too respect, I am obliged to consider Steinberg's characterization narrow,as I believe the two "African" figures (and, to a lesser exdemoiselle on the left) were as tent, the Gauguinesque,"Oceanic" much, if not more,inspired bythe fearof death as by the life force.... The thanatophobicdimension of the Demoiselles needs elucidation, I believe, not only because it confirmsthe last state of the paintingas a deepening ratherthan an abandonmentof the picture'soriginal but because it clarifiesthe valueof the iconprogram, ic (as againstthe narrative) mode inachievingthis end-and throws fresh light on the conundrumof "African" influence. P. Leighten,"TheWhite Periland I'artnbgre:Picasso, Primitivism, and Anti-Colonialism," The Art Bulletin (December, 1990), pp. 609-30, provides a powerful account of popularnotions of Africaas "the heart of darkness" in the early twentieth century, a context of shamanism, mutilation, and human sacrifice which, for all its ethnocentric sensationalism, surely increased Picasso's interest in the terrifyingfetishistic content of I'artn'gre as an expression of African tribal experience. For Leighten, who never actually describes Les Demoiselles, the paintingis more iconic than narrative,a destructive image disruptiveof traditionalharmoniesand conformableto an ethos of mutilation and sacrifice--interpretations which certainly sustain the argument that the fruit cluster may be a sacrificial offering surrounded by the grotesque women. 14 Rubin, p. 632. According to Rubin, Picasso purportedlytold AndreMalraux thatLesDemoiselles was his "firstexorcism-painting." "For me," the artist claimed, "the [primitive]masks were not just
sculptures.... They were magical, objects ... intercessors ... against

unknown, threatening spirits.... They were weapons-to keep people frombeing ruledby spirits, to help free themselves.... Ifwe give a form to these spirits we become free."See also Leighten,pp. 625, 627.

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