The pairing of Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," (1907) and Matisse's "Bathers With A Turtle" (1908) most vividly illustrates the differences in how the artists depict women. In the exhibition catalog, the painter and art historian, John Golding, calls "Demoiselles" "one of those rare individual works of art that changed its very course." Art historians have called "Bathers with a Turtle" Matisse's response to "Demoiselles." The "Demoiselles" shocks, and, juxtaposed with such boldness, Matisse's "Bathers" is overshadowed.
"Demoiselles" breaks with traditional composition, perspective, and Western images of beauty. The painting depicts five standing nude women surrounded by drapery and geometric figures and pieces of fruit at the bottom center of the canvas. Rejecting three-point perspective that creates the illusion of painting as a window on the world, Picasso uses a combination of geometric forms and angular features to show women projecting from the canvas toward the viewer. Three of the five women, who are said to be prostitutes in a brothel in Avignon, Spain, stare directly at the viewer, while the other two look sideways. Two of the women's faces resemble African masks.
In 1935, Picasso is quoted as saying: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon." In "Demoiselles," Picasso rejects the Western canon of beauty--cherubic porcelain-skinned women with generous curves--and paints women with androgynous features. Picasso horrified his contemporaries, particularly Matisse, with this painting that mocks the traditional passive female nude. The demoiselles may be playing one of the most humiliating female roles-- the prostitute--but they gaze directly at the viewer. They dare the viewer to objectify them.
| "Bathers With A Turtle," rivals "Demoiselles" in size, but despite the boldness of color, the painting seems lifeless next to it. While the demoiselles seem to jump off the canvas toward the viewer, Matisse flattens out the three-point perspective without trying to invert it like Picasso. Instead, the viewer enters the bathers' world, watching the women stand timidly, peering at the turtle. |  |
| Perhaps taking a cue from "Demoiselles," Matisse does not objectify the women in a typical manner. The three women are engaged in examining the turtle and their nudity is a response to the act of bathing rather than for | Matisse, Bathers with a Turtle, 1908. (courtesy MoMA) |
Brothel broads vs. bathers