Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painting by Pablo Picasso completed in 1907.

At 25 years of age, with an already serious reputation as an artist, Picasso began work on a painting that he referred to as “mon bordel,” reflecting the painting’s original title, Le Bordel d’Avignon (The Brothel of Avignon). The starting point for a painting that was to become one of the most notorious and celebrated images of the 20th century was his memory of a brothel that had been located on the Calle Avignon in Barcelona, Spain. This source provided an unconventional subject to inspire a radical step forward as an artist.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was viewed, initially, by a collection of friends—including Henri Matisse and André Derain—in July 1907. (Some critics consider Picasso’s painting a response of sorts to Matisse’s Fauvist masterwork Le Bonheur de Vivre.) Their reaction was so negative, however, that Picasso did not exhibit it to the public for almost a decade, finally placing it on view in 1916. It is not surprising that this painting caused offense. Five nude women stare provocatively out of the canvas, locking the viewer in their gaze, as if it were the viewer on display and not they. Picasso presents us with a visual challenge—the multiplicity of viewpoints, the poses assumed by the prostitutes, and the masks distorting the faces of the two women on the right all combine to generate the painting’s power (even if the viewer has no knowledge of the subject matter). Those masks speak to Picasso’s longstanding interest in so-called primitive art, as well as the primitivism of contemporary painters such as Paul Gauguin. This memory of a bordello has become a vision of sexual power, rendered in a radical geometric style that signaled Picasso’s advances toward Cubism.

Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon is acknowledged as an essential reference point for art in the 20th century. A distinctly deliberate work for which Picasso made hundreds of preparatory sketches and studies, it contains elements that would be taken up by the Modernist movement and ideas that would repeatedly challenge the art world and the public. The painting is on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it has been part of the collection since 1939.