With its first public appearance, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon caused a public uproar. Despite its avantagarde nature, the public reacted quite negativelly to the painting at first. Not because of what was painted, but how it was painted. People were not used to seeing something like that and so the painting was recieved as far from beautiful. From this point, the art basis splits into two directions.
The first directon being the corelation between art and society. In the case of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, it was society that reacted to art, however in other cases, it is art that reacts to society as well. In this thesis, the connection between art and society is expanded on and shown through examples.
The second direction focuses more on society rather than art. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon were not seen as beautiful. From this, it is possible to draw a direct line to todays time, where there are many qualities, that are not deemes as beautiful either. These qualities are rarely showcased publicly and discussing them is even less frequent. Body image, religion, sexual identity, race, dissability, all of those are qualities that, on a broader scale, under certain conditions (read: are not a privileged white male) experience marginalisation, discrimination, scorn and expulsion from society. These groups of people are discussed in this thesis and later on connected back to art, reestablishing the connection between society and art.
For the purpose of indepth understanding and connecting the chosen themes with the art basis, this thesis uses the method of art interpretaion as a means of experiential understanding of the painting. With a thorough, art theory based analysis, it represents the foundation on which the actual interpretation, with the social themes woven into it, stands. In this way, I increase my understanding of the painting, as well as connecting all before mentioned aspects and joining them into a cohesive synthesis.
|
