From the brothel to the Museum

In front of the Demoiselles in the Musuem of Modern Art New York

A lecture on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon before New York Art Trip 2011 (March 17-20)

“Picasso understood instinctively that the Western tradition had been losing contact with that primordial, talismanic aim of image-making… Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and the many hundreds of drawings and paintings associated with a quantity of preparatory works unique not only in Picasso’s career, but without parallel, for a single picture, in the entire history of art.” (William Rubin).

It took mankind more than 40 thousand years to finally master and understand perspective, thanks to Brunelleschi’s mirror experiment in front of Florence’s cathedral. Art became the faithful representation of the “have seen”. Then, 5 hundred years later, an artist by the name of Picasso who knew exactly what Cézanne did and who was extremely conscious of his time, blew in only one year and with one work, the use of perspective in art. He changed the course of painting. Not only he removed the third dimension in the canvas to insert a fourth one (time), but he also changed the way to approach art!

Prof. Yves M. Larocque, art history professor at the Ottawa School of art and Director of icscis/walkthearts will present a lecture about the amazing creative process behind Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the most remarkable painting of the 20th Century.

Thursday February 24th, 2011 (from 19:00 – 21:00)

Ottawa School of Art (room 406)

35 George Street

Free entrance and open to everyone