Reexamining Modern Art

摘要

In 1905, Pablo Picasso was beginning his ascent to the pinnacle of the art world. One of thousands of struggling artists living and working in the bohemi-an Montmartre district of Paris, the 24-year-old Picasso would emerge from obscurity two years later with his groundbreaking canvas, "Le Demoiselles d'Avignon." Robert Rosenblum, a leading scholar of modern art, has called this painting "a detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of 20th-century art." The massive work, nearly eight feet square, shook the very foundation of the art world. By incorporating all three dimensions onto a flat canvas as jagged, faceted planes, Picasso shattered nearly every known artistic convention, pushing the limits of painting to the breaking point while creating Cubism. With one painting, the centuries-old artistic traditions perfected in the Italian Renaissance were set aside as relics of the past.