Word: avignon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Picasso begins Les Demoiselles d'Avignon...
There seems little doubt that the greatest of Picasso's work came in the 30 years between Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937). But of course he didn't decline into triviality. Consistently through the war years and the '50s, and even now and then in the '60s and '70s, he would produce paintings and prints of considerable power. Sometimes they would be folded into series of variations on the old masters and 19th century painters he needed to measure himself against, such as Velazquez and Goya, or Poussin, Delacroix, Manet and Courbet. In his last years particularly...
Heller read an excerpt describing a mission he flew to Avignon, France, during which his plane came under heavy fire and a crew member was wounded badly...
Richardson's account of the origin and initial responses to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a masterful combination of narrative and art criticism. He traces Picasso's inspiration back to an 1863 essay by Charles Baudelaire in which the French poet declared, somewhat arbitrarily, that carriages in the Bois de Boulogne and brothels were the two acceptable subjects for the "painter of modern life." The five female figures nakedly displaying themselves in Les Demoiselles are fairly obviously in a brothel, but Picasso, characteristically, was not content simply to do something that others had done before...
...Dartboard hope never to see the day when a bunch of bloated yet somehow enlightened people sit around a bar, drinking Coors' Artic Ice and spouting about Shakespeare: "Yes, that scene with Henry in the camp was certainly important, but I found the battle of Avignon a bit anticlimatic afterwards...