Les Demoiselles D Avignon Essay

Both the authors of “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism” by Anna Chave and “Dada and Surrealism: Poetics of Everyday Life” by Michael Gardiner address the issues or detriments within their chosen topic, Chave’s being Picasso’s famous painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Gardiner’s being the broader subject of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. “New Encounters” specifically analyses the problematic portrayal of the female body and black culture largely within this one painting in a way that questions the overwhelming praise and status typically associated with it. Conversely, “Poetics of Everyday Life” reviews the ways in which Dada and Surrealism had been unsuccessful in engaging in effective political change on the scale of everyday life despite their overall social and cultural impact on future movements. …show more content…
These readings are an analysis beyond the aesthetics and common commentary and more focused on the ideologies and goals of the artists and the movement. They both also take an interest in the ways in which Picasso’s painting and the Dada and Surrealist movements engage in issues of a shift in power. It is described that Picasso’s portrayal of feminine figures which is said to include dark-skinned individuals regardless of gender, as negative is rooted in a fear of these figures gaining agency and achieving a sort of power. However with different intentions, similarly related, the painters Gardiner writes about are largely looking to remove the capitalist powers and leadership and replace it with state of anarchy