Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)

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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) is a large oil painting of 1907 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) which portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona. All of the figures depicted are physically jarring, none conventionally feminine, all slightly menacing, and each is rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two of the women are rendered with African mask-like faces, giving them a savage and mysterious aura. In his adaption of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The work is one of Picasso's most famous, and is widely considered to be a seminal work in the early development of both Cubism and modern art. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, having been acquired by the museum in 1939.^[1]

Picasso created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the work.^[2] It was painted in Paris and completed during the summer of 1907.^[3] Demoiselles was controversial from its inception, creating anger and disagreement amongst Picasso's closest associates and friends. Picasso has long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on his painting. Demoiselles is also long thought to have been influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied that connection. Many art historians familiar with Picasso and his work are skeptical about Picasso's denials. Several experts maintain that at the very least Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known today as Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and was unconsciously influenced by African and Tribal art several months before completingDemoiselles.^[4][5]It has also been argued that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's paintings Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.^[6] Its resemblance to Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri, and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has also been noted and widely discussed by later commentators. At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. The art critic André Salmon (1881–1969) gave it its current name; Picasso had always called it Le Bordel ("The Brothel").^[2]