Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso, 1907

oil on canvas

243.9 × 233.7 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

64 worlds greatest paintings

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a celebrated painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel, in the Avignon Street of Barcelona. Picasso painted it in France, and completed it in the summer of 1907. The eye-catching painting is one of Picasso's most famous.

Picasso created over one hundred sketches and studies in preparation for this work, one of the most important in the early development of Cubism. Within the narrative of early modern art, it is widely held as a seminal work.

At the time of its first exhibition, the painting was deemed immoral. Most critics failed to see its resemblance to Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal, two connections much discussed by later commentators. The painting now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Picasso drew each of the figures differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far left has heavy paint application throughout. Her head is the most cubist of all five, featuring sharp geometric shapes. The cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. The masked figure was derived from an African mask with green stripes and sharp edges. The two Iberian figures in the center were influenced by Iberian sculptures, and are characterized as such because of their prominent ears and wide, staring eyes; they are painted with similar features.

Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, a style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.