The two leading rival modern artists of early 20th century Paris were Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Because photography and film were by now established ways of reproducing reality, both men sensed that painting, if it was to stay relevant, had to develop different ways of representing the world. Under the influence of non-European art, artists that the two admired such as Paul Cezanne and contemporary events within the society in which both lived, the solutions that they found in the early s to move painting forward were radically different.
Matisse found the joy of vivid colour, Picasso conflict and form. The painting fast tracks all of the artistic innovations that had been slowly developing, pushing them onto a crowded, cramped surface. Picasso ditches artistic convention. It decisively projects painting towards non-naturalistic modern art.
He uses angular geometric forms to depict their bodies and pink, orange and purple areas of colour for their skin. The girls are one-dimensional and volumeless. Everything is just shoved up front on the cramped flat canvas. Two of the figures to the right are portrayed with primitive mask-like features. The figure entering from the left has an eye as though seen facing us whilst her head is in fact in profile. It looks as though the two women on the edges are in conflict whilst anotherโwho is also possibly arguing with the figure who has just appeared through the curtainโswivels around to angrily confront the viewer.
The two who are posing stare out at us in blank resignation. There is no depth behind the models and little sense of foreground or background because Picasso has purposefully abandoned perspective. They stare out at the viewer and almost push us back. The second figure from the left resembles the young Picasso. The artist also exists in a market hoping to catch the eye of a dealer or collector. There was no known cure for Syphilis in ; it remained a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease.
Picasso, the argument goes, was said to be indifferent to the condition of the prostitutes. The conflictual attitudes of the women, their grotesque masks, is a reflection of his own mixed feelings of desire, repulsion and misogyny.
