After Steinberg: Contextualist Interpretations

From Firenze University Press Book: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Modernism

Maite Méndez Baiges, University of Malaga

Steinberg’s “The Philosophical Brothel” completely modified the possible ways of dealing with the analysis of Les Demoiselles and it could be said that this text marked a turning point in the history of interpreting the work. Steinberg himself mentions this in the postscriptum of 1987 to his 1972 article in which he recognises that then, with formalism in full regression, recognition of the sexual charge in the painting could be considered almost a banality, although it certainly was not so when he pointed it out for the first time: “But such is the nature of my melancholic profession […] It is in the character of the critic to say no more, in his best moments, than what everyone’s lips in the following season repeats; he is the generator of the cliché” (Steinberg 1988, 74). And thus, from him at that moment, Les Demoiselles were sexualized to such an extent that in research about them, it is considered out of place to simply abide by the formal achievements of the work. Henceforth, for art historians who confront it, conscious of the force or the gravity of the matters it appears to contain, it will be practically impossible to detach the content from the context, whether biographical, historical, psychological, social or ideological, in which the work was created and its reception produced. A key question raised from Steinberg’s reading, and one crucial to the very understanding of Modernism, is the growing importance of the spectator in the aesthetics process. And if, as we shall see, from the decade of the 60s, one fundamental way of analysing Les Demoiselles was examining the condition of the spectator in front of the painting, just as another post-Steinberg approach will take the opposite direction, exploring the psychobiography of Picasso the author.

Steinberg, however, was openly sceptical about the potential of the biographic theories telling us anything meaningful about Modernism. These were two paradoxical, and even contradictory, directions. The biographical explored the understanding of the work of art from its title and partly from the idea of “genius” (as an inborn characteristic) while nourishing an immersion in the biography and psychology of Picasso that would consider more than the possible artistic influences that had contributed to shape the work. The other direction would tend towards the spectator and carry, on the contrary, the seed of a strong attack on the sacrosanct figure of the author. It implied admitting that the spectator, apprehensive of the work, endowed it with new meanings as legitimate as those bestowed by its creator. We must bear in mind that moving the centre of gravity from the author to the spectator can be considered one of the inherent elements of Modernism, even before the second half of the 20th century. Dividing the direction of analysis of Les Demoiselles is simply the reflection of the directions taken by the historiography of modern art in the postmodern era, once the common enemy that was formalism had been beaten.

DOI: 10.36253/978–88–5518–656–8.06

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