Books at the Borders of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Abstract

This paper proposes that Picasso’s landmark 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is full of images of books and pages, especially at the borders of the canvas. The curving shapes which are traditionally seen as “curtains” can alternatively be interpreted as the white pages and  brown  paper  wrappers  of  open  books,  rotated  90  degrees.  This  “visual  marginalia”  supports  the  interpretation  of  Picasso’s  famous  brothel  scene  as  a  semiotic  construction,  befitting  the  painting’s  early  title  (devised  by  Picasso’s  writer  friends),  “The  Philosophical  Brothel”.  The  painting  also  contains  iconographic  representations  of  textuality.  A  slightly  open book can be perceived in the middle of the painting, and along the bottom border, an open envelope and writing paper can be seen laid atop the tipped-up table, under the fruit. I  claim  that  Picasso’s  images  of  texts  derive  from  his  acquaintance  with  the  text-driven,  monumental novel, Don Quixote. I give special attention to the narrative Author’s Preface to  the  Spanish  literary  classic,  in  which  the  author  describes  assembling  quotations  from  diverse  sources  to  compose  the  first  and  last  pages  of  his  book.  Picasso  visually  represents  this allusion by depicting pages at the left and right “ends” of his canvas. Other texts and images are considered as sources for the bibliographic imagery, which generally reframes this canvas as a fictive tissue of quotations, akin to the overabundance of texts that Don Quixote is reading in Cervantes’s novel. Picasso’s painted image of a blank leaf of writing paper and its  envelope,  finally,  encourages  viewers  to  see  the  painting  as  a  letter  of  communication,  for which we ourselves must provide the writing that would represent our interpretations.