Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher. In his early work The Birth Of Tragedy Out Of The Spirit Of Music he invents the Apollonian-Dionysian Concept. This concept has great influence ever since in the field of art, literature and philosophy.
This essay is about the interrelations between the Apollonian-Dionysian Idea and the work of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1888-1973). Picasso read Nietzsche and was heavily inspired by his work. In this work I wish to visualize Nietzsche’s presence in Picasso’s paintings, especially in his ground-breaking work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which introduced Primitivism and Cubism and therefore deliberate Abstraction.
Apollonian and Dionysian.
| Apollonian | Dionysian |
| Thinking | Feeling |
| Self-controlled | Passionate |
| Rational, logical | Irrational, instinctual |
| Ordered | Chaotic |
| Individuation | Wholeness |
| Human order and culture | Celebration of nature |
| Appearance/illusion | Realism, absurdity |
The name derives from ancient Greek mythology. Apollo and Dionysos are sons of Zeus, the King of Gods. Apollo is the God of light and music. Furthermore he is associated with harmony, rationality and order. He is often depicted in a chariot, also accompanied by Aurora, the Godess of dawn. Dionysus was not regarded as his counterpart, however, he represented opposite values. Primarily was the God of wine and intoxication who had excessive orgies in the forest with his disciples. From that, the Roman version, the Baccanal arouse, named after the Roman version of the god of wine, Bacchus. Bacchus and Dionysos symbolize drunkeness, excess, extasy and irrationality.
Eventough these two gods were originally not perceived as contradictory, Nietzsche established this connection. The connection is not historical but metaphorical. He uses them as metaphors for two different kinds of art. Apollo, traditionally the God of music, often depicted with a harp, becomes the patron of the visual arts. Sculpture, painting and architecture fall into this category. There are similarities to Hegel’s system of the arts. He places the disciplines on a horizontal axis between two poles. One of them is devoted to the physical part of the artwork, the other one to the intellectual part. The disciplines range on this axis between the extremes according to their degree of physicality and spirituality. The most physical art is architecture and, more towards the middle which represents the ideal, painting. On the spiritual, non-physical side, there is music and literature. The ideal that holds the balance is sculpture.
However, Nieztsche does not distinguish the arts exactly like that. He juxtaposes the Apollonian and the Dionysian as characteristics that can be found within different mediums, despite of the initial connection between Dionysos and music. There is apollonian music as well as dionysian painting.
As a matter of fact, Nietzsche developed the idea of these two opposing forces straight out of Greek tragedy. In ancient Greek plays there was a chorus which would comment on the protagonist’s actions and thus support the understanding of the plot. The chorus contrasted with the outstanding action of the single character. Nietzsche saw the overwhelming force and frenzy of the chorus’ music as wholeness in comparison to the individual protagonist’s words.[1] He regards music as going “right to the heart, as the true universal language that is understood everywhere.”[2] Language itself is an instrument of consciousness whereas music is pure being. The mixture of words and music in Greek tragedy has been lost over the time. Nietzsche sees the logical, dialectic and apollonian pushing aside the subconscious, universal dionysian up until his own days.[3]
However, he had the vision of the reinvention of the Dionysian. During his engagement with The Birth of Tragedy, he was a great admirer of Richard Wagner. The German opera composer and Nietzsche retained a strong friendship that strained and broke over time. Nevertheless, Nietzsche strongly promoted his work in his lectures as the art that finally brought the dionysian back to attack the strictly dialectical approach in art and philosophy.
Pablo Picasso.
Picasso still perpetuates the reputation of the greatest modern artist. His œvre is vast and includes hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints and design objects. He gave birth to numerous styles, cubism probably being the most famous one. Pablo Picasso is known to have read Nietzsche and I wish to accentuate the influence of the Dionysian in his work, particularly in the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The painting is fairly large, measuring 244 x
The painting seems flat. What Picasso would later make the trademark of cubism, the planarity and flatness, the surface of painting and color, can be observed in this work already. The background does not create a defined space in which the figures are placed but seems to be a composition of abstracted curtains and drapery. The only spacial statement that he makes is the ground plane, indicated by the very left figure’s foot.
In the foreground there is a still life with fruit. Scholars have suggested that the placement of fruit in a brothel is pure sarcasm from Picasso’s side – men do not visit brothels to eat fruit.[4]
The figures seem to show a progression from left to right. The most distinctive features in the painting are definitely the masks worn by the women on the right. The figure’s faces appear to morph into these grotesque visages that are inspired by African tribes’ masks worn for rituals.
Picasso’s treatment of color is not very traditional. He divides the human figure into planes only distinguishable by slightly different hues and values. He does not use gradients but shapes the body with line – mostly outline and inner contour. There is no indication of directional light which enables his palette to focus exclusively on the subtle rendering of the figures’s volume.
Dionysus in Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.
The impact of Nietzsche’s philosophy is evident in this painting as well as in other works by Picasso. He did several paintings that were caricatures of traditional works by, for example, Dominique Ingres.[5] Picasso did a self-portrait of himself as Bacchus, the Roman aquivalent of Dionysus around the time that he painted the Demoiselles.[6]
Artists and writers in the early 1900’s were inspired by prostitutes. The constituted a different appeal of beauty. A beauty that did not confirm the society’s ideal of traditional female beauty depicted in Ingres’ work. In comparison, prostitutes resembled a wild, polyamorous image of beauty. It is an attractiveness induced by sinfulness. It is the evil, the forbidden attraction that lured artists and made them sublimate this feeling in their work. For that part, the demoiselles represent a very dionysian image of beauty and love.
The masks give another hint towards the presence of the dionysian in Picasso’s painting. He was heavily influenced by pieces that he saw in a Parisian museum. They were African tribes’ masks, worn by shamans, medicine men or chiefs during rituals. Let us not forget – the ritual of Dionysus is what gave birth to Greek tragedy and therefore Nietzsche’s concept.
Above all, I would like to expound the metaphorical, painterly presence of the dionysian in Picasso’s painting. Picasso is a master of abstraction. He does not rely on detailed, realistic naturalism. He goes beyond that. Traditional, academic art can reasonably be called apollonian, since it comprises the human strive for order and system. Picasso breaks with this approach and employs broad shapes, curvy lines to sublimate his impression of the subject. He does not use detail – single, individualistic parts of the subject – to construct a composition. He rather grasps the scene as a whole and therefore conveys it as a whole that is more than just an accumulative collection of parts.
Picasso and Nietzsche.
This last paragraph means to point out the similarities between two people who are not as different as we suspected in the beginnig. Nietzsche was ahead of his time that was dominated by rationality and logic. He was convinced that the dionysian within a society could not be surpressed effectively for an indefinite amount of time, but would break loose at some point. Picasso also advocated this point of view. As Nietzsche did not engage in art himself (except for literature), Picasso wanted to bring the notion of the dionysian into the fine arts – just as Nietzsche did to philosophy and Wagner did to Opera.
[1] Safranski, Rüdiger, Nietzsche. A Philosophical Biography., W.W. Norton & Company Inc. (
[2] Ibid.
[3] Chessick, Richard D., A Brief Introduction to the Genius of Nietzsche., University Press of America (Lanham, MD, 1983) 39
[4] Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso. 1907-1917. Volume II. The Painter of Modern Life.; Randomhouse (New York, 1996) 14
[5] Richardson; 15
[6] Ibid.
