Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
"Conventionally, both the act of painting and that of viewing have been described as phallic acts, acts of penetration performed on the passive receptacle, the blank field of the canvas. "I paint with my prick," Renoir supposedly boasted. "A painter has also to paint 'with [his] balls,'" bragged Picasso to his mistress, the painter Françoise Gilot. "I guess that even if a painter fucks a picture to a real climax once a year, it is quite a record," Mark Rothko later estimated. And the critic Jean Clair once pithily proclaimed, "The gaze is the erection of the eye."
From New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism by Anna C. Chave
