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resting on her leg and with her eyes fixed on the viewer. This coupled with Manet's use of flat overlapping color planes, surely must have contributed to Picasso's development of flat color areas. Secondly, the "Nike of Samothrace" could have suggested the dynamics of the figure in motion in the upper right of Picasso's painting. Both the Manet and the statue of Nike are in the Louvre Museum.

What does one see when facing "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?" Five nudes fill up most of the frame space. However, although nude, none of the figures display the sensuality of Bouguereau, Ingres, Delacroix and other harem scene painters. Picasso has robbed these figures of their sexual identity by minimalising any sex defining characteristics. Their poses seem awkward, contorted. However, there is some grace to the two figures in the center as their calm masks with chins tucked in slightly contrast with the violent color and shapes of the two masked figures on the right. Their skin tones are noticeably lighter than the other three. The Egyptian style of painting male skin tones darker than that of females suggests to me that perhaps the figure on the left is more male than female. The contrast of style, rather than making the painting look unresolved, makes it even more shocking. These figures stare back at us turning our gaze upon ourselves. The warm tones of Picasso's rose period are complimented by the cool patches of sky blue and torn clouds. Could the fragments between the seated figure and the women in the center be pieces of a broken mirror? Natasha Staller reminds us that superstitions warned of the malevolent portent of fragments "when a mirror is broken, it announces that a person has died." (Staller qtd. in Sierra 109, 105, 27). Staller also mentioned that an animal's apparent sexual inversions signed death. (Staller qtd. in Sierra 13). Theodore Chasseriau's "Orientalist Interior" 1850-52 (43G) in which an Algerian is holding up a large mirror to a female with arms raised may be associated with the possible symbolic use of the mirror.

Had Picasso laid to rest his confusion concerning his sexual identity? Do the two women in the center of the painting represent his feminine nature which he is suppressing as the more masculine figures on the right are ascendant? See (63) a detail from "Holy Trinity" (42A) where Picasso has made the association of the owl by seeing the suggested form of an owl in "Holy Trinity." He gave the seated figure a head which rotates like that of an owl. Owls symbolize wisdom,

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