Wu Jing
As a model of genius in the 20th century, Pablo Picasso inspired entire generations of artists. Today, he has long been synonymous with modern art. Whenever unborn genius and intellectual atmosphere of freedom, rebellion and innovation appear in the same time and space, the key conditions for the production of great masterpieces are already in place - the amazing work "Avignon Girl" (1907), which has a profound influence on modern art, was born in this magical time and space. What is even more significant is that "The Girl of Avignon" and Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905) were born almost at the same time, and these two independent parallel events seem to be unrelated, but in fact, the arduous exploration of the cognitive revolution of human beings on the ancient issue of observing the world, in different ways in art and science. Yes, Picasso's "The Girl of Avignon", with its astonishing geometric painting language, achieved the artistic expression of the human time and space revolution in the early 20th century, and its influence on modern art is still endless.
Portrait of Picasso (1904)
The soil in which genius is born
Following the Renaissance, Europe at the turn of the 20th century once again ushered in a golden age of genius. In the astonishing early 20th century, countless new ideas, new ideas surged and stirred, and nothing seemed impossible – as the French poet André Salmon said: "Everything is possible, everything is achievable, in every way, wherever". In the scientific field, the discovery of X-rays has confused the distinction between two and three dimensions, and mathematicians have thought about some kind of new geometry (later called "non-Euclidean geometry") that can be described in dimensions greater than three. People are particularly fascinated by the idea of four-dimensional space and its movement in space or time. At the same time, new technological developments—such as the invention of airplanes, wireless telegraphs, and automobiles—are changing everyone's concept of space and time.
In the field of art, a counter-movement of figuration and perspective, which has occupied the center of the stage since the Renaissance, emerged, which is very strongly reflected in Cézanne's Post-Impressionist paintings. At the same time, after the art of photography (which had a huge impact on traditional painting), an era of cinema was coming (its influence on modern art was even more profound). As pioneers of filmmaking, The multi-frame techniques of Muebrich and Marley, in addition to describing different perspective points on series screens, also made it possible to describe changes over time on series or single screens... All this is widely discussed in newspapers, magazines and cafés (French newspapers have rhetoric almost every day: to see the "invisible", "conquer space", etc.), and also in the beautiful and understandable philosophical works of erudites such as Bergson and Henri Poincaré, represented by Time and Free Will (1889), which pioneered Western irrationalist philosophy, and exemplified by Science and Hypotheses, which profoundly influenced both Picasso and Einstein. （1901）。
Picasso's biographer Richardson once quoted a comment from Marr, one of the artist's most sympathetic lovers, and although she was speaking of Picasso's post-Cubist period, her brilliant commentary was best applied to the period when he discovered Cubism. "There are five factors," Says Mal, "that determine his way of life and his style: the woman he is in love with, the poet or poet who acts as a catalyst, the place where he lives, a circle of friends who offers envy and understanding (which he never felt is enough), and the dog that is inseparable from him." "Amazingly, all five of these factors came together in May 1904. Three years later, in the midsummer, Picasso completed The Avignon Girl, an epoch-making masterpiece that introduced art into the 20th century.
Einstein Picasso: The Breathtaking Beauty of Space, Time and The Moving Beauty
Back in the magical year of 1904 (as Einstein's miracle was in 1905), Picasso moved to 13 Rue Lavignan, an extremely simple house in the Montmartre, affectionately known as the "laundry". More importantly, the development of all these areas and their significance, the debate at its core about "reproduction" and "abstraction", spread within the circle of close friends known as the "Picasso Gang". It was one of the countless groups in great cities like Paris and Vienna at the turn of the 20th century (they formed an important soil for the birth of genius), and the group met in Picasso's studio, where a sign read "Poets' Gathering" hung on its door. The group consisted of poets and fantasists like Alfred Jarry who devoted themselves to mystical and avant-garde literature, who published allegories about non-Euclidean geometry, the fourth dimension, and time travel.
Innovation, creativity and creativity are everywhere, and the desire for change is everywhere. Alongside the development of science, mathematics and technology, it is the discovery of conceptual qualities of African art. All of these ideas helped liberate Picasso from his earlier modes of thought and made him realize the deeper meaning of geometry as the language of art nouveau. Everyone involved in Cubism considers it to be an advanced intellectual adventure whose specific goal is to reduce form to geometry. Picasso's exploration of space in his groundbreaking "The Girl of Avignon" actually applies the concept of four-dimensional space described to him by Plantes, a financier who is interested in higher mathematics and a member of Picasso's gang. In the spring of 1907, Picasso visited the "laundry" during the critical period when Picasso painstakingly painted The Maiden of Avignon. Picasso listened to him talk about non-Euclidean geometry and fourth-dimensional space, most of which Prans had picked up from Poincaré's widely read Book of Science and Hypotheses.
Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypotheses
In contrast, Bergson described time and simultaneity in poetic language, while Yari spoke of time and simultaneity in a whimsical and inflammatory way; through The Introduction of Plans (during this crucial period), Poincaré gave Picasso the truth about simultaneity and non-Euclidean geometry. It is a striking coincidence that at the same time Einstein and two friends founded the "Olympia Academy of Sciences" (also an amateur discussion group), and their list of books was also prominently listed in Poincaré's Science and Hypotheses, and at the same time, non-Euclidean geometry became the theoretical precursors of the birth of special relativity. It was this idea that triggered the time-space revolution of mankind in the 20th century. Picasso and Einstein, both ended up together.
The birth of a masterpiece
If the public only talks about four-dimensional space as a kind of popular fashion, Picasso seriously ponders the relationship between painting and four-dimensional space-time. According to friends around him, Picasso at that time often talked about the fourth dimension, always carried Poincaré's mathematical books, and "pondered" geometry almost every day, just like thinking about the lover of his dreams. In his discussion group, a few small talks, mixed with scientific sandwiches and artistic slang, may become the sowing of epiphany, the conception of inspiration. The young Picasso's extremely active thoughts finally took shape, and it was "The Maiden of Avignon", as the author himself confessed: "[It] is my first painting to exorcise evil spirits". This painting, intended to dispel the nightmare of venereal diseases, gradually evolved into an artistic expression of the scientific revolution of the 20th century in the process of creation.
Picasso's The Avignon Girl (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York)
The masterpiece, now in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, is more than 2 meters long and wide, and the half-naked girl on the far left has an Egyptian-Gauguin face, and her seemingly detached arm is pulling open one side of the curtain; then two more attractive girls, looking like ancient Iberians, Oceanian, and the second girl on the left is standing in an incredible position (note the position of her left foot, just below her right knee - she should fall) The girl standing on the far right was pulling a curtain to either side with her hands, and her expression was eerie; the greatest highlight was the crouching girl—her back was facing the picture, while her head was rotated 180 degrees as if it were resting on a ring, her eyes were distinctly different and not in a straight line, her nose was almost like a piece of wedge-shaped brie cheese, and her face was horribly ugly compared to several other girls. All of the above is enough to make the jaw dropped by the first person who sees the painting.
In fact, before this masterpiece was born, Picasso drew countless sketches. He conducted a painstaking quest to constantly approach the truth of science: how to represent the fourth dimension, that is, the high dimension? His thoughts did not happen overnight, but gradually became clear with the sketches. First, project the three-dimensional canvas into two dimensions (the canvas). The viewer can imagine in turn that a house looks only high and wide from the front, that is, two dimensions. If the observer turns to the side and changes the perspective, it becomes three-dimensional. Second, transform (overlap) the high-dimensional transformation into three dimensions, or vice versa, apply the above two-dimensional transformation into three-dimensional magic, and if the three-dimensional object is transformed into a perspective, it can get four dimensions. The girl's breasts are two-dimensionalized in three-dimensional geometry, and the invisible high dimensions that he strives to explore are achieved through transformation, that is, distortion, such as the girl's arms.
And in all these painting magic, the head of the crouching maiden is the most advanced and magical place in her geometric composition and experimental techniques, and this part undergoes the most comprehensive transformation in Picasso's sketches—Picasso's Cubism is not just geometric, but a representation of space and time with a deeper meaning. "Only when the speed of human movement is close to the speed of light will the framework we call the present begin to spread, like an amoeba, crossing the boundary of ordinary time, penetrating into the past, into the future." The American writer L. Shlain said this in his widely influential work Art and Physics. Beginning with the eighth sketchbook, Picasso used geometric forms more and more frequently, and he finally grasped the depth of Planes's lectures on geometry. The Cubist painter "expressed in an unconstrained series of planes the complex idea that once the traditional causal connection is removed, space and time become inseparable." In their view, the world does not need to be treated in a fish-like manner. ”
Schlein - Art and Physics: The Art and Physics of Space-Time and Light
Thus, Einstein's formula for special relativity is explicit, and Picasso's The Avignon Maiden is a metaphor, and both of them express the same revolutionary idea: that all frames of reference are opposite to each other. Just as relativity overthrew the absolute conditions of space and time, thereby pulling Newton's view of the mechanical cosmology off the altar, so Picasso and Braque's Cubism took down the throne the law of artistic perspective invented by Brunelleschi. Picasso's great breakthrough was to realize a connection between science, mathematics, technology and art, and to inject a new concept of time into the language of painting, thus transcending Impressionist art in one fell swoop, which was embodied in Monet's paintings that statically represented haystacks or rouen cathedrals. The Avignon Girl's treatment of time is much more complex—we can think of the painting as a series of five moving pictures moving towards more and more geometric figures, while the crouching maiden can be seen as a series of snapshots overprinted on top of each other.
In addition, when we carefully ponder this work, it is not difficult to find that all the foreground, mid-shot, and background tend to be dimmed, and the sense of depth seems to disappear completely. After Picasso's Cubism, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian completely abandoned perspective, and the picture became almost flat—painting entered a new visual phase with the aim of not expressing depth. Schlein believes that painting "flat paintings" is the most enduring feature of 20th-century Western painting, and that flattened spaces are exactly what you see when you look forward or backward from a train traveling at the speed of relativity. At the same time, Picasso used more colors of white, black, brown and gray, which are exactly the colors that can be seen by the viewer under the movement of the speed of light.
We can imagine that if the light-speed train happened to pass through Picasso's Via Avignon, what we saw might be his "Avignon Girl".
A turning point in art history
Just as Einstein's special and general theories of relativity made a major turning point in modern science, Picasso's The Avignon Maiden marked a modern turning point in the history of human art. Opening the thick picture of Western art history, what image should a girl be? Or the sacred and beautiful Venus of Botticelli in the 15th century, or the Mona Lisa with a mysterious smile painted by da Vinci in the 16th century, or the flirtatious swing girl portrayed by Fragonard in the 18th century... Over the centuries, countless painters have used their superb painting skills to create star-studded images of young girls, but these images definitely do not include Picasso's "Avignon Girl", which was born in the early 20th century and is still incomprehensible to many people.
The five young girls on the canvas who do not seem to be even normal human bodies, broken, ugly, and stimulating images, are completely different from the sweetness or sacredness of the previous artistic aesthetic. No painting has ever been as disturbing as "The Girl of Avignon," which looks so ugly, like a mirror broken by the devil, reflecting a brash appearance. When Picasso created this painting, he excitedly said: "Let the style become extinct!" But he hardly dared to show it to people, because even his closest friends around him expressed anger or incomprehension. It is said that the Fauvist painter Matisse was enraged, and he threatened to settle accounts with Picasso and ask him for forgiveness. However, Matisse's anger is likely to be that he realized that Picasso had overtaken him. Geniuses must endure the loneliness of being far ahead of their time, and Picasso in 1907 is like Einstein in 1905.
Whether it is line, color or form, the formal language of "Avignon Girl" has completely changed the principles of traditional European painting. Picasso worked hard to create it, but after it was completed, there was little praise (only Braque realized the power and innovation of the painting), only a lot of ridicule. Facing Picasso is the dilemma that "The Girl of Avignon" cannot be sold at all. It was not until 1916 that it was publicly exhibited in an insignificant salon, and the response was mediocre. In the 1920s, it was sold to a private collector; it reappeared in 1938, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York placed it in its permanent collection. At this time, people with hindsight discovered that many of the possibilities of modern art had long been included in this masterpiece. Today, "The Avignon Girl" has long been the treasure of MoMA and has become synonymous with modern art. It is no exaggeration to say that the Avignon Girl has a place in modern art as da Vinci's Mona Lisa is to traditional art.
As we all know, in traditional painting, the female figure has always existed as a definition of "being watched", as a pastime and entertainment for men. In "The Avignon Girls", the girls (actually prostitutes) call on the outside audience to enter this world of indulgence in an exaggerated and indulgent gesture, and the grapes in the foreground of the picture also have sexually suggestive meanings in Western painting. However, the eerie image of the young girl in the painting does not have any of the flattery and humility of a prostitute, and it breaks the carnal beauty tendency of traditional body painting in one fell swoop, challenging the male-dominated world with its flatness (together with de-genderization). At the same time, its internal aesthetic meaning represents Picasso's cry and declaration of rebellion against the rational world. In the era of the rapid development of human society, the peace and stability that people had hoped for did not come, and the fear of war, the alienation of the soul, loneliness, fear and other negative emotions surrounded people, so Picasso counterattacked this era with a strong and stimulating image.
Picasso's first self-portrait (15 years old) and last self-portrait (91 years old)
All of the above represents Picasso's complete break with tradition with his work "The Girl of Avignon". He eventually led the whole of European painting and even modern art in a whole new direction, and in his efforts to try to integrate art and science, Picasso created the conditions for all the rational art of the 20th century – providing an infinite source of inspiration for the later schools of painting such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Expressionism, etc., and even ballet, stage design, modern literature and music. As Dagen, editor of the Traun-Flamank correspondence, writes: "For the artist, there is no doubt that the revolution of science and aesthetics, the modernization of technology and the modernization of painting are inseparable.". Einstein's special theory of relativity and Picasso's The Avignon Maiden, with its tsunami-like genius, forever changed the way humans viewed the world,especially time and space.
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Liu Wei