the gaze" (to use a phrase of Rosalind Krauss's invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large. According to Steinberg, the reversed gaze, that is, the fact that the figures look directly at the viewer, as well as the idea of the self-possessed woman, no longer there solely for the pleasure of the male gaze, may be traced back to Manet's Olympia of 1863. William Rubin (1927–2006), the former Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA wrote that "Steinberg was the first writer to come to grips with the sexual subject of the Demoiselles." A few years after writing The Philosophical Brothel, Steinberg wrote further about the revolutionary nature of Les Demoiselles: Picasso was resolved to undo the continuities of form and field which Western art had so long taken for granted. The famous stylistic rupture at right turned out to be merely a consummation. Overnight, the contrived coherences of representational art - the feigned unities of time and place, the stylistic consistencies - all were declared to be fictional. The Demoiselles confessed itself a picture conceived in duration and delivered in spasms. In this one work Picasso discovered that the demands of discontinuity could be met on multiple levels: by cleaving depicted flesh; by elision of limbs and abbreviation; by slashing the web of connecting space; by abrupt changes of vantage; and by a sudden stylistic shift at the climax. Finally, the insistent staccato of the presentation was found to intensify the picture's address and symbolic charge: the beholder, instead of observing a roomfuI of lazing whores, is targeted from all sides. So far from suppressing the subject, the mode of organization heightens its flagrant eroticism. At the end of the first volume of his (so far) three volume Picasso biography: A Life Of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881–1906, John Richardson comments on Les Demoiselles. Richardson says: It is at this point, the beginning of 1907, that I propose to bring this first volume to an end. The 25-year-old Picasso is about to conjure up a quintet of Dionysiac Demoiselles on his huge new canvas. The execution of this painting would make a dramatic climax to these pages. However, it would imply that Picasso's great revolutionary work constitutes a conclusion to all that has gone before. It does not. For all that the Demoiselles is rooted in Picasso's past, not