The Adult Playhouse of Avignon(After Pablo Picasso)
Item
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Title
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The Adult Playhouse of Avignon(After Pablo Picasso)
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Description
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Tirtzah Bassel’s "The Adult Playhouse of Avignon (after Pablo Picasso)" (2022) is a 60” x 84” oil on canvas painting that reimagines Picasso’s 1907 masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Part of her "[Canon in Drag]" series, the work transforms the original brothel scene into an "adult playhouse," using mixed media to confront and recontextualize the original's power dynamics
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Date
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2022
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Identifier
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0006.SLAG
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Material
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Gouache on paper
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Measurements
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152 cm x 213 cm (60 inches x 84 inches)
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Analysis
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A critical rewriting of cubist fragmentation that reclaims agency from the hyper-sexualized female form:
(The Female Gaze) In The Adult Playhouse of Avignon(After Pablo Picasso), Bassel reinterprets Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to interrogate the fragmentation of women’s bodies into consumable visual parts. While Picasso’s original work contributes to modernist distortions of female sexuality, Bassel’s revision critiques this fragmentation as a mechanism of objectification. The figures are no longer passive subjects of stylistic experimentation but sites of resistance to visual domination. In relation to the male gaze, the work reveals how modern art often disguises objectification as formal innovation. Bassel reasserts subjectivity against this historical fragmentation.
