Essay "To Kill The Nineteenth Century" By Tamar Garb

The essay “To Kill the Nineteenth Century” by Tamar Garb introduce the well-known painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon created by Pablo Picasso connote and has been determined to be view by the male. It was for “virile, heterosexual men of European origin” which the painter himself described. For this reason, the problem leads on how women felt and observed the famous painting. But one woman was able to view and explore this art piece. This essay basically focuses on Gertrude Stein, an American writer and collector of modernist paintings, was one of the first spectators to view and analyze Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo had been friends of Picasso for two years before Picasso's portrait of Stein was completed in 1906. By having Picasso’s friendship as an advantage, she began to collect some of his art pieces which more likely Stein became to be affectionate and enthusiastic of Cezanne artworks. It can be implied that Stein started to have an attachment through the compositional techniques of Cezanne. For this matter, Stein became more expose and susceptible to Picasso’s negative response of traditional modes of representation. Besides, she was one of the first spectators to believe that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was primarily a painting of the modernist era. Essentially, from her dedicated study of Cezanne, Stein was able to analyze and learn how to delineate Picasso artworks.

The modernist writer could identify with experimentation of the art piece the “rejection of traditional aesthetic principles.” Hence, Stein indicated, and from many spectators, that it wasn’t interpreted in the sense of “beauty” but in the sense of “ugliness” and “brutally” which was to admire its “innovative power”. However, Stein preferred to be accredited as “ugly giants” as well as the artists that created it such as Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. As it is stated, “The ‘brutality’ of each of their works was the outcome of the process that created them-the successive shucking off of old habits of seeing and rendering, and the ultimate emergence of a new art.” (Garb, pg.58) Eventually, the title of the essay "To Kill the Nineteenth Century" has been an important step through the visual arts because Picasso and Gertrude Stein fight against restrictive conventions of past art. There is no doubt that continuously Les Demoiselles d’Avignon painting has been mark drastically in the history of art.

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