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Miriam Aniel
Professor Noam Elcott
Literature and Methods of Art History
4.30.15

Hide and Seek:

Representation of the Female Form in Pablo Picasso’s Seated Woman

In the year following Picasso’s creation of Demoiselles de Avignon (1907), the artist

created Seated Woman, a slightly smaller-than-life rendering of a female figure at rest. 1908

was a productive year for Picasso; many of the paintings he produced at that time similarly

contained representations of the female form. Each painting offered different treatments of

female physicality, resulting in an incredibly diverse selection of work. The year following

Demoiselles de Avignon—here referred to as Demoiselles—can perhaps be viewed as a

processing period for the artist. Although the painting was not displayed publically for

some time, the representational choices that Picasso made in its creation greatly influenced

modernist tendencies as a whole, as well as Picasso’s own artistic trajectory. An analysis of

Seated Woman offers a meditation on the ways in which Picasso’s representation of the

female form developed at this crucial period. Its simplicity of form and content appears to

be unique amongst the artist’s 1908 works; paintings like Dryad1, with its Braque-esque

forms, evoke a level of dynamism that Seated Woman does not. Importantly, Seated Woman

is endowed with the presence of female genitalia, a trait that is missing from both

Demoiselles and the artist’s paintings of the female form in 1908. This essay will mobilize

essays by Zainab Bahrani, Anne Chave and Wilhelm Worringer towards an understanding

of the significance of the genitalia’s inclusion. My analysis will ultimately examine Seated

1 Fig. 1
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Woman’s role as the antidote to the emotional wreckage that Demoiselles caused, and will

offer a conclusion on the painting’s effect on early Cubist female representation.

Seated Woman2 depicts a large, frontal figure that fills the majority of the frame. The

figure appears to sit, though the painting’s depth-of-field is limited by lack of linear

distinction between background and foreground; a sole, slightly curved line extends

between the figure’s left and right foot, indicating slight spatial recession. The figure’s right

leg is extended, with her foot continuing beyond the frame; the tightly cropped nature of

the composition also results in the figure’s head extending slightly beyond the viewer’s

sightline. The uses of color and line in the painting clearly articulate a series of forms and

shapes that compose the figure’s body. The entire composition is rendered in various earth

colors; a painted black line forms the contours of the body and serves to separate the

oranges, browns, and yellows from the deep red and brown hues of the background. Black

lines create geometric forms throughout the composition that, by reading the separate

shapes relationally, the viewer can understand to be the figure’s body parts. Each linearly

crafted segment of the body is further distinguished from the next by the heavy and clear

strokes of unblended color that lie within its borders. An off-scene light source appears to

illuminate the front of the figure, providing slight variations in tone value on her legs and

arms, faintly suggesting the presence of volume in the pictorial plane. However, as the eye

travels around the composition, the jarring angularity of the body’s forms disrupts our

understanding of the form’s human qualities. The fluidity of a traditional Western nude is

not present; the viewer understands the shape in the top right corner to be a shoulder

purely because of its relationship to what borders it, but as an individual form one sees

2 Fig. 2
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only the suggestion of a rectangle. The figure is at once a body and a series of shapes, a

composition that can only be understood as representational when understood as the sum

of its parts.

The most significant visual ‘part’ of Seated Woman for my analysis of the figure and

composition as a whole is located directly at the center of work: in the space where the

contours of the hips and thighs converge, Picasso offers the female genitalia. The vulva is

depicted as a thin black line on a small field of applied white paint. The presence of this

vulva is striking; as Zainab Bahrani discusses in The Hellenization of Ishtar: Nudity,

Fetishism, and the Production of Cultural Differentiation in Ancient Art, the Hellenistic

female nude, represented historically without the articulation of the vulva, was constructed

as the ideal female form in Western art—a position from which it has not budged3. The

presence of the vulva on a female form cannot be taken for granted in Seated Woman,

especially in light of Picasso’s artistic production immediately preceding it. In Demoiselles

de Avignon4, the groundbreaking work Picasso completed in 1907—only a year before

Seated Woman—each of the hyper-sexualized demoiselles is depicted without a vulva.

Bahrani writes,

"The covering up or removal of the vulva in an image intending to convey female

sexuality must say something about the sexual ideal proposed by that image and the
voyeuristic desires of the culture producing it. It reflects a desire to distance the
viewer from any danger inherent in the female body. It can give the viewer a
forbidden sight, but shield him from danger at the same time”5.

Anna Chave, in New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the

Origins of Cubism, expands on this tension between the ‘forbidden sights’ and ‘danger’ that

3 Bahrani, Zainab. "The Hellenization of Ishtar: Nudity, Fetishism, and the Production of
Cultural Differentiation in Ancient Art." Oxford Art Joural 19, no. 2 (1996). Pg 4.
4 Fig. 3
5 Bahrani, 6.
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the female body can offer when visually represented. In her treatment of Demoiselles de

Avignon, Chave claims that the female body often serves as the substrate upon which the

avant-garde tests its understanding of cultural limits, an act which is “symptomatic of a

visual regime where ‘Woman’ serves as "the very ground of representation, both object and

support of a desire which, intimately bound up with power and creativity, is the moving

force of culture and history".6" In Demoiselles de Avignon, Chave argues, Picasso used the

bodies of female prostitutes, emblematic of debased desire, to create an apotropaic defense

against (white) male fear of being usurped by the Other—namely that which is contained in

the feminine (or African) body. Instead of hiding all that poses a threat from within the

female body, Picasso chose to shockingly “expose female interiority” in order to neutralize

its threat entirely7. By attempting to make the unknown knowable, accessible, and

ultimately consumable, Chave argues, Picasso sought to ameliorate fear.

Why, then, did Picasso not depict a vulva on any of his five, hyper-sexualized

women? If, according to Bahrani, hiding the vulva from the viewer served to protect the

viewer from any danger inherent in the female body, Picasso inadvertently reversed the

apotropaic function of his demoiselles; by keeping the vulva away from view, the artist

gave his prostitutes the ultimate power of mystery and denial that prevented the full

exorcism of male fear. The viewer, ultimately, is denied full access despite his voyeuristic

‘presence’ in the brothel.

I discuss Demoiselles at length in order to establish the tools with which a viewer

can understand the significance of the inclusion of the vulva in Seated Woman. It is here

6 Chave, Anna. "New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the
Origins of Cubism." The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (1994): 596-611. Pg 598.
7 Chave, 609.
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that a discussion of Wilhelm Worringer’s work is finally most appropriate. In Abstraction

and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, Worringer argues that each viewer

of art brings a fundamental tendency towards empathetic reactions to every viewing

experience. Each image, in turn, has the power to either fulfill that empathetic reaction or

deny it, offering instead the self-alienating experience of abstraction8. According to the

brief analysis presented above, Demoiselles offers opportunities for both empathy and

abstraction, yet never allows its viewer to become fully immersed in either. This tension

between self-enjoyment and self-alienation can result in a highly emotive viewing

experience, as Chave and many others have established. In Seated Woman, however, this

tension between empathetic and abstract experience is stripped of its emotional power

precisely because the vulva is included in the composition. After the intensity and rupture of

Demoiselles, Picasso presents in Seated Woman the very cause of Demoiselles’ violence and

anxiety, right in the middle of the painting; however, it is stripped of its power. The virile

energy of Picasso’s demoiselles is nowhere to be found. As the woman sits hunched over

herself, her body appears to dissolve into the mechanical; shapes rest upon shapes, lines

meet and extend, and feet begin to look like trapezoids. Her eyes, now mere lines, are

closed to viewers’ gaze as she melancholically rests.

The visual depiction of the vulva, like all other parts of the figure’s body, fluctuates

between representationality and geometricity. The viewer is yet again caught in the binary

between empathy and abstraction; the figure is at times clearly a woman, genitalia and all,

but the viewer can’t help but feel distanced from the collection of shapes on the relatively

8Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3-

48. Translated by Michael Bullock. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997. 1908.
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flattened pictorial plane. Indeed, for 1908’s viewing public, Seated Woman was as formally

abstract as it got—one can be relatively assured that self-alienation, rather than empathy,

would have been the reaction of a majority of viewers. However, the female subject’s

rejection of the viewer in Seated Woman does not hold the stakes that such rejection held in

Demoiselles. With the inclusion of the vulva, the game is up and the trick is over; Picasso has

revealed a depiction of the most desired, elusive and powerful part of the female body as

power-less, mechanical and irrelevant. Seated Woman firmly guides Modernism away from

the anxiety-ridden Desmoiselles and towards a Cubism characterized by sterility, formal

quality, and a tension between empathy and abstraction that holds very different stakes.
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Works Cited:

Bahrani, Zainab. "The Hellenization of Ishtar: Nudity, Fetishism, and the Production of
Cultural Differentiation in Ancient Art." Oxford Art Joural 19, no. 2 (1996): 3-16.

Chave, Anna. "New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the
Origins of Cubism." The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4 (1994): 596-611. Pg 598.

Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 3-

48. Translated by Michael Bullock. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997. 1908.

Appendix:

Fig 1. Pablo Picasso, Dryad, 1908. Oil on canvas, 185 x 108

cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
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Fig. 2. Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, 1908. Oil on

canvas, 150 x 99 cm, The State Hermitage Museum,
St Petersburg.

Fig 3. Pablo Picasso, Demoiselles de Avignon,

1907. Oil on canvas, 243.9 cm × 233.7 cm,
Museum of Modern Art.