Nothing like it

PABLO PICASSO’s great “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” is 100 years old this spring. Starting Wednesday, New York’s Museum of Modern Art will show it after a painstaking cleaning, along with nine rarely seen pre-studies.

I remember my first thought on seeing it for the first time. “Ugly!” The painting exploded in my eyes like some kind of pink, blue and beige bomb. I was shocked by its teeth-shattering primitiveness and downright brutality.

That was in the late 1940s, and I was on a school field trip. I had been primed by my teacher, so I knew that this huge work was the thing to see, the work that had given birth to Cubism and all the subsequent “isms” of contemporary art.

“Les Demoiselles,” begun in early 1907, is the artist’s interpretation of five voluptuous hotties from a notorious Barcelona brothel on Avignon Street. The three girls on the left were patterned after 4th century BC Iberian sculptures from Andalusia, the faces of which show a pre-Roman somber realism. The two girls on the right have African masks as faces. Picasso had seen and highly admired such masks at the Trocadero in Paris, a museum dedicated to “primitive art.”

My teacher said: “Nothing in the entire history of art is like it. It is the single most influential work of art ever created.”

Now, so many years later, after thousands of hours of art history and thousands of hours of looking at art, I believe my teacher hit the nail on the head. I cannot recall in any other sea change of artistic styles another single work having such influence. The early Renaissance did not flower after Giotto’s Arena Chapel frescoes, with their weighty, down-to-earth people. Nor did the High Renaissance burst forth from a single perspective painting. Back in the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great’s sculptor Lysippos is said to have changed the course of art with his soft and sinuous bronze statues, but, sadly, there’s nothing left known to be by Lysippos’ hand, only Roman copies.

Will it ever happen again? Can a single work of art overturn and mock all that went before and bring about an indelible change in styles?

Hardly. I quote the world’s finest living artist, the German Anselm Kiefer, in a recent interview for the Art Newspaper: “There is a wealth of different artists now and it is almost impossible to make something new, it seems as though everything has already been done

Picasso wasn’t all that confident about what he had done. He kept it fairly well hidden until 1916, long after he and Georges Braque had invented Cubism. A perhaps fanciful tale has it that during a days-long drunken party in Picasso’s studio, the master showed his friends “Les Demoiselles,” and Braque, who was swigging some brain-deadly absinthe, cried out, “After this, we’ll all have to drink petrol!”

When Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s canny patron, saw the thing, she exclaimed, “It’s a veritable cataclysm.”

Picasso dubbed it his first “exorcism painting.” Meaning exactly what, I have no idea. Some art historians have it that Picasso might have thought that African masks served as protectors from evil spirits, and specifically life-threatening sexual diseases that were the talk -- and scourge -- of Paris at the time. Early sketches for the work show two men, a sailor and a medical student, one of them with a skull memento mori.

Who knows? I have gazed at “Les Demoiselles” at least a hundred times since my first visit, and every time it rattles my brain and eyes. I have come to believe that it is a calculated challenge. It’s a brothel scene, sure, but it also sums up what Picasso as an artist had done just before and what he wanted art to be thereafter. For the three Iberian babes are of his 1904 period -- the past -- and the two garish Africans, with their tortured masks and twisted bodies, seen fragmented and from all angles, are the future. It is a deliberate throw of the gauntlet, a “screw you” to the entire history of art.

And “screw you” it is. Every aspect of the painting is at war with every preceding work of art. A more complete denunciation of accepted humanity, accepted beauty and every artistic style that preceded the work cannot be imagined. The thing is disturbing, loathsome in some respects, abhorrent, repellent and at the same time magnetic, unforgettable and lyrical.

You can see it again and again and still be struck dumb by its audacity, its freshness and its courage -- and especially by the way it seems to be the summation of the organized, state-sanctioned cruelty, the angst and hysteria of the modern age.

I love it and hate it and defy anyone to feel differently about this hideously magnificent creation.