Introduction
Some artworks push the boundaries of technique; others ignite profound shifts in a society’s values and beliefs, becoming turning points in how we see our world and ourselves. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Jenny Saville’s Odalisque (2012-14), though separated by more than a century, move in remarkable dialogue. Each confronts and disrupts prevailing beliefs and values surrounding beauty, representation, and most critically the gaze that helped shape them. Our belief systems are formed through our shared education, family life, socialisation, and lived experience. These beliefs, in turn, shape our values – the principles and standards by which we judge worth – and those values guide our actions, how we operationalise our beliefs. Artists, at their core, translate these inner beliefs into form, inscribing their truths on paper, canvas, sculpture.
In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso threw the gauntlet of liberty at his viewers by challenging socially ingrained beliefs concerning female representation and beauty, shaped by early 20th-century Parisian culture. This act of liberty – a break from classical form, narrative and moral expectation – was blunt, unapologetic and revolutionary. Saville, on the other hand, does not smite her viewers in the same way Picasso once did. Instead, Saville offers an olive branch of justice to her viewers – a form of tough love. Justice here being the presention of a perspective, without jolting the viewer but gently enticing them to see our collective point of view. That view being a direct challenge to the male gaze; whereby women are framed as objects for male pleasure, shaping representation through patriarchal perspectives. Picasso once liberated us from beliefs and values surrounding convention, Saville coaxes us away from societal expectations around ideals of beauty in favour of humanist beliefs and values. Her work embodies restorative representation of the human form – a representation of the human form that speaks of the lived experience, not of idolisation. In the same vein, these works are challenging the same ideals, albeit in contextually different circumstances.
This essay will explore how these two works are aligned in terms of their significance, how each marks a decisive redefinition of what it means to depict the human form and, as a consequence, what this means for our collective beliefs and values. This essay considers not only how Saville and Picasso disrupted artistic traditions, but also how their works reflect the belief systems and values shaped by the societies in which they were made. The difference between Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Odalisque lies within the method of expression, how reality is presented, but Saville’s development on Picasso is not about pushing the medium forward but about communicating a message in a much more enticing and subtle way. We will explore the ways in which they communicate these truths, regarding beliefs and values surrounding idealised notions of beauty, alongside how and why their expression differs.
Advancing from Abstraction to Pictorial Reality
Saville’s work is significant as it confirms that our concern, as viewers of art, no longer lies wholly with the medium itself. Much attention has been given to the fundamental changes within the delivery of expression; specific brushstrokes, the way in which paint is laid on canvas, what those changes mean from the perspective of the artist’s intention and how, in turn, this relates back to society. We are now beyond utilising this oeuvre for defining seminal works. Marshall McLuhan famously argued “the medium is the message”, meaning that the medium through which a work is conveyed shapes and often determines the nature of its content. Yet in the contemporary moment, media is insufficient in delivering the whole message; our engagement is now dependent upon the underlying beliefs, and values, a work of art communicates to us. Saville’s Odalisque exemplifies this shift, using the medium not as the central statement but as a vessel for layered social commentary.
If we were only to be concerned with the so called ‘progression’ of media, then I believe we have reached our expressive ‘peak’ with Rothko, Pollock – most notably, Twombly. These were the final surrenders in the progression of the medium of paint, the final deliveries of expression in abstract form. But, as McLuhan suggested, once we shape our tools, those tools shape us; the possibilities and limitations of abstraction have now shaped our expectations as viewers. In our present moment, the messages we need to communicate are more nuanced and inherently more complex, mirroring the levels of complexity that surround us in society. The human condition is no longer a linear path of progression, where we required only a simple window from art in order to understand our environment. It is full of twists, ruptures, and intricate details that we must not miss if we are to truly understand our environment. What is required from art is no longer a window, but a mirror – not a passive view into reality, but a reflection of the irregularities, contradictions, and complexities of modern existence. While Abstract Expressionism, within the Postmodernist paradigm, brought us to a critical point in freeing art from representation, it is now necessary to return to pictorial realities – but with an approach freed from the male gaze that dominated much pre-Abstract Expressionist art.
Abstract Expressionism – by removing the figure – disrupted centuries of objectification of female form, yet its non-representational language no longer suffices for the messages we need to communicate. What once freed art from convention now risks alienating the viewer. This is because the message that needs to be communicated now is more sophisticated than pure emotion; they must engage both the rational, analytical parts of our minds and the emotional. Abstraction excelled at the expediency of “seeing and feeling” – stripping experience down to its emotive core – but that very efficiency is not a limitation. In our present complexity, we require art that compels us to see, think, and feel, as we did at the turn of the twentieth century, when pictorial representation could operate on both cognitive and emotional levels.
Out of necessity, many artists since the post-war period have returned to the figure and to recognisable forms – not in service of idealisation, but as a means to grapple with the anomie and alienation of modern life. We are required to go back to pictorial representations of the way things are in order to achieve a universally identifiable form of communication once again. This is a movement that has been in progress since the post-war period; artists such as Picasso and later, Richard Diebenkorn with Girl looking at landscape(1957), Woman in a window (1957) and reclining nude (1962), alongside artists such as Lucien Freud began to reintroduce the figure as a site of psychological complexity. Their work voiced dissatisfaction with the dominance of the male gaze and sought new ways of representing the human subject that could encompass vulnerability, estrangement and existential uncertainty. The culmination of this ongoing movement – the point at which the return to figuration reaches its fullest expressive and critical potential – can be found in Jenny Saville’s Odalisque.
This New Figuration movement started in the late 1950’s and rejected ‘impersonal’ abstractions of its era, emphasising the most devastating parts of the human condition: anomie, isolation, estrangement and loss of spiritual meaning. With abstraction erasing the human figure from artworks entirely, a certain wondering arose: if we are no longer represented in art, what happens to the human subject – and to the viewer? In other words, where has wo-man gone, and where will wo-man go?
Pictorial representation – whether through painting, drawing, sculpture – gives the artist broader scope for communicating truths with a richness that pure abstraction, for all its emotive force, cannot match. Yet pictorial realities are not expedient forms of communication, the message of what values are being conveyed are more hidden, harder to discern – and herein lies the glory. That understanding, that recognition of values is hard won. Unlike in Abstraction Expressionism, emotion is not channelled directly; we must work to uncover the truth the artist is offering. This is tough love in visual form – justice rendered in paint. The artist gives you the tools, and the challenge, to discover meaning for us.
The values we talk about here are the principles that drive the message, and ultimately, the artist’s intention. These values are shaped by societal institutions, education and lived experience – forces that inform the mind and the hand of the artist. To take the Marxist stance of Berger and Clark, they are the underlying determinants of artistic expression. In this sense, values and beliefs are not background influences but the very engine of the artists intention, of creation: the philosophy, the metaphysics, that brings an image into being. The artist’s intention is to communicate a message to you – to connect with the values in your own mind as a viewer. This is what great art is about: the pure relationship between what is seen, the one who sees it and what is understood as a result of that exchange. By returning back to pictorial representation, Saville shifts our attention away from medium and form toward the underlying message, inviting us to confront the values her work brings to the surface.
The stark contrast between Picasso and Saville – positioned at opposing ends of the spectrum of artistic expression – reveals just how far society has come in the last hundred years. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso embraced cubism; an art style that shows subjects from multiple perspectives using abstract, geometric forms. This marked the starting point of abstraction and struck directly at the conventions of his time whereby Picasso stunted conventionality. Saville, by contrast, has moved us back toward pictorial reality. Her delivery is more subtle, based in a universally recognisable form. In 1907, Cubism’s visual fragmentation mirrored the first tremors of a pluralistic society – a visual code understood only by a few. Today, in a world already fragmented, Saville’s pictorial realism speaks to everyone, offering a shared visual ground from which to confront our values. To see where the real weight of where these works lie, we must now turn to the canvases themselves – the places where this century-long journey from liberty to justice takes visible, tangible form.
Picasso, Pablo. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907, oil on canvas, 243.9 × 233.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by James Parsonage, 2023.
Picasso’s presentation of “ladies of the night” in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was nothing short of a provocation to polite society. Rather than rendering them as delicate, submissive and in a position of inferiority relative to others – the pose expected of women in art at the time – Picasso shows them upright, robust, and unflinchingly present. This reverses the traditional power dynamics between sex workers and the male gaze, overturning centuries of imagery in which such women were objects of desire or moral judgement. Here, sensuality gives way to raw human dignity and confrontation. Their faces are expressionless, with tired yet steady eyes; they do not gaze seductively, they stare. That stare meets the viewer without warmth or seduction, forcing the unsettling sense of being observed. This reversal strips the viewer of the usual control, and in its place, we find solidarity: five figures bound by shared resistance and experience. It is a rebellion in its most unvarnished form – liberty on stretched canvas, laid down in thick, matte paint. There is no glamour here, only humanity. This is a direct challenge to traditional ideals of beauty and what qualifies as “worthy” subject matter, a demand that we reconsider the beliefs and values society hands down to us. Early signs of this shift can be seen in Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814), a work still deeply embedded in the male gaze but quietly resistant: the figure’s back is turned, her gaze averted, her most idealised features concealed. Ingres’s protest was subtle. Picasso’s is blunt. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon embraces defiance without fear.
These ideas are reinforced through the painting’s abrupt, angular forms and Iberian mask–inspired faces. Such geometric reduction smashes Renaissance-derived perspective and distorts human anatomy, dismantling the conventions of idealised beauty and, with them, the polite fiction of “civilised” representation. In 1907, Picasso had recently encountered Iberian sculpture at the Louvre and ethnographic artefacts from Africa in Paris museums — works filtered through colonial acquisition and displayed as exotic curiosities. By integrating these so-called “primitive” forms into his avant-garde vocabulary, he not only disrupted European pictorial norms but also inserted aesthetics associated with marginalised cultures into the centre of modernist innovation. The effect is a jarring belief shift: an invitation to examine why we accept certain ideals as “good” or “proper” and to consider the possibility of returning to something rawer and less constrained — a kind of hiraeth for our origins in nature. This is freedom on canvas: the refusal to take inherited standards at face value, whether they concern beauty, class, nationality, or physical appearance, and the insistence on valuing human beings for their lived reality. Picasso delivers this message as a violent rupture in thought. The colours are dissonant, even illogical, refusing harmonious resolution. The matte surface strips away any sense of polish or seduction. This is not an image of glamour, fame, or fortune; it is an unflinching statement of honesty, a confrontation with who we are, where we have come from, and where we might go — and a challenge to understand our beliefs and values rather than passively inheriting them.
Some might rush to judgement on this, quoting Picasso:
“I think that everything is unknown, everything the enemy! Everything! Not just some things – women, babies, animals, tobacco, games… Everything!”[1]
When we introduce Gertrude Stein’s reflections on Picasso, a close confidant of his, there is a philosophical lens that deepens our understanding of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. She observed in her book on Picasso “the painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he lives in the reflections of his pictures” and that his long struggle was “not to express what he could see but not to express the things he did not see – that is to say, the things everybody is certain of seeing but which they do not really see”[2]. If we take ‘reflection’ in its optical sense, it is never a neutral copy; it is a reversal, an inversion of the original. In 1907 Paris, the social set of beliefs and values – reinforced by politics, culture and economics – cast women, especially sex workers, as submissive, idealised and existing for male pleasure. In Picasso’s reflected world, those values are turned inside out. The women of Les Demoiselles confront rather than submit, they occupy the visual and psychological space typically held for the male gaze; their power is active, not passive.
Seen through Stein’s lens, Picasso inhabits the rules of this inverted reality whilst he paints, making that reversal his operative truth, irrespective of personal beliefs outside the studio. The beliefs of passivity, compliance and objectification are supplanted in the reflected world by values of agency, dignity and defiance. For the viewer, to enter the painting is to enter its rules, where inherited certainties no longer hold. Here, the conventions that once dictated what a woman must be seen as are stripped away, revealing a more primal and unmediated human presence – closer to nature, raw and unvarnished. Whether or not Picasso personally embraced gender equality becomes immaterial to the argument; the integrity of the painting’s internal logic stands on its own. It is a logic that does not reproduce what ‘everybody is certain of seeing’ but insists on showing what has been hidden in plain sight – a reality liberated from visual codes of its time. This is liberty not only in subject matter and style, but in the deeper philosophical sense: the refusal to live under the inherited illusions of a culture and having the courage to inhabit the inverted world where those illusions have always concealed. Even if one was to say that Picasso had little respect for women, that does not align with his choice in endorsing his mother’s name[3] Picasso, rather than Ruiz, or both which is common in Spain.
[1] Clark, T.J. (2025) “Those Passions: On Art and Politics”, pp.345
[2] Stein, G. (2012) Picasso. New York: Dover Publications.
[3] Stein, G. (2012) Picasso. New York: Dover Publications. pp.1-20
La Grande Odalisque (1814) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Oil on canvas, 91 × 162 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo by James Parsonage, 2023.
I believe we stand at the threshold of another artistic turning point. In 1906, just before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Louvre displayed the ancient Iberian sculpture Osuna – a fragmentary, unconventional form that helped spark Picasso’s break from classical ideals. Today, in that same museum, the Venus de Milo presides: a marble embodiment of classical proportion and harmony, reinforcing the very ideals of beauty Picasso challenged. Jenny Saville’s Odalisque mirrors Les Demoiselles in its anti-Venusian stance. It refuses to glorify the human figure or uphold inherited, idealised standards of beauty. Like Picasso, Saville confronts the universalised ideal head on, replacing perfection with an unflinching representation of lived reality.
If Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was liberty in its rawest, most confrontational form – a shattering of beauty’s conventions through angular rupture and primitive force – then Saville’s Odalisque is justice rendered in flesh. Where Picasso’s women met the viewer with defiance, Saville’s figures confront us with estrangement, turning the gaze inward to expose the silent distances that fracture human connection today.
Odalisque (2012–2014) by Jenny Saville. Oil on watercolour paper mounted on board, 273 × 335 cm. Private collection. Photo by James Parsonage, 2025.
In Odalisque (2012-14) we find 3 people, each with vacant stares in different directions. Physically intertwined yet mentally adrift, they form no structure, no shared orientation. The scene feels drained of vitality, agency – a spiritual warzone disguised as intimacy. Proximity offers no connection; the distance between them is measured not in physical space but in emotional and psychological isolation. This is not a tableau of desire but of alienation, where the self seems dislodged from the body. Skin tones vary, but the divisions are no longer drawn along racial lines; instead, the rupture lies between minds – between thoughts, emotions, and states of being. One man looks toward the woman as if searching for answers or hope, yet she lies inert, her gaze unfocused, mirroring the man opposite her. No comfort passes between genders or race. Even her casual hand resting against the man’s thigh reads as an emotional rebuff – a gesture of quiet but decisive refusal.
Behind the central grouping lies another image — a mirror, or rather, a fractured reflection. It is less a faithful reproduction than a disorienting reconfiguration, a visual schizophrenia that scrambles figures and skin tones as though people were entirely interchangeable. Here, colour is incidental; what defines both the foreground, and its reflection is separation, the absence of symbiosis or shared life, even in close physical proximity. Humanity does not inhabit this space — only anomie, estrangement, and loneliness. The inaccuracy of the reflection recalls the surreal distortions of Dalí, suggesting that mirrored images are never neutral but shaped by the distortions of perception or projection. In the foreground, the female figure is disengaged, her presence withdrawn. In the reflection, however, she appears to occupy a position of strength. This shift underscores a crisis in contemporary gender dynamics: an idealised, “Venusian” image of feminine power projected outward, while in lived reality, disengagement and disconnection prevail. Such ideals, detached from lived experience, leave men searching for meaning in the wrong aspects of femininity, and women withdrawing from genuine exchange. The backgrounds reinforce this psychic battleground — vast blocks of colour, subtly modulated in the manner of Rothko, Mondrian, or Twombly, yet darkened and muted, suppressing emotional warmth and intensifying the painting’s atmosphere of quiet devastation.
The brushwork in Odalisque is more contained than in much of Saville’s wider oeuvre, leaning toward the representational, even the naturalistic. It carries a restrained energy, in marked contrast to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where vitality comes from fractured lines and jolting colour contrasts. Saville’s dynamism emerges instead from the mass and contour of the body; her colours complement rather than clash, and her strokes are decisive, allowing the viewer to absorb the composition as a whole rather than being pulled toward individual fragments. The bodies themselves are monumental — larger than life, intertwined in a dense tangle of flesh. This entanglement does not flatten individuality, but the abrasions of colour and scratched surfaces introduce a quiet unease: how did these bodies arrive in this configuration?
Unlike Picasso or Ingres, Saville resists objectification. The body is not a site for idealisation but a vessel for truth-telling — proof that we are more than our physical form, and that in our current moment we are spiritually adrift. In a world saturated with idealised images of what it means to be human, she dismantles those projections and reassembles them into something grounded in empathy and recognition. Her justice lies in presenting the body as it is — unchosen, imperfect, yet indivisible from our humanity. In doing so, she reminds us that the ongoing spiritual conflict between masculine and feminine cannot be resolved through domination or withdrawal, but only through mutual engagement. It is a conversation Picasso helped initiate, but one that Saville, in Odalisque, brings to its most human and unflinching expression.
Conclusion
Both of these paintings stand, in my view, as decisive turning points in art history – anchoring a century-long journey from liberty to justice. Picasso’s challenge was one of liberation: a break from classical form, narrative, and moral expectation, forcing viewers to confront the inherited values that shaped beauty and representation in his time. Saville’s challenge is one of justice: holding a mirror to the beliefs and values we live by today, exposing their imprint on our relationships, our bodies, and our sense of self.
Where Picasso moved into abstraction to free us from convention, Saville returns us to pictorial reality to confront the fallout of our current belief systems – systems shaped by centuries of idealisation, codified through institutions, and perpetuated by the images we consume. In Odalisque, there is no airbrush, only integrity, no idealisation, only an unflinching record of the present human condition.
If Picasso’s work urged us to claim liberty from the past, Saville’s calls us to take responsibility in the present – to question the values we inherit, the beliefs we carry, and the ways they shape not only art, but the experience of being human. Picasso gave us a window through which to break free; Saville gives us a mirror, in which we must face ourselves. In this shift, beauty is no longer a Venusian ideal to be measured against, but a living, plural vision – defined in the eyes, minds, and heart of those who choose to see.
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