Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Five naked women in a Barcelona brothel, broken up into angular planes. Two have faces like masks. The painting shocked even Picasso’s friends and paved the way for Cubism.
The bodies are shown from several angles at once; the space behind them is as angular as the figures.
Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Paris in 1907, in his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir building in Montmartre. He worked on it for several months and made a very large number of sketches and studies. The title was not his own. It refers to a street in Barcelona, Carrer d’Avinyó, known for its brothels.
The painting shows five naked women in a cramped room with draperies. At the bottom centre is a small still life with a slice of melon, grapes and other fruit. The woman on the left pulls back a curtain. The two in the middle look straight at the viewer. The two on the right have faces that resemble masks. One of them squats with her back to us but with her face turned forward.
Early sketches show that Picasso first envisaged a narrative scene, with a sailor and a student among the women. He removed the male figures, and instead the viewer becomes the one the women are looking at. The space is shallow. The background is broken into angular shards, and the bodies are drawn with sharp angles. The canvas measures about 244 × 234 centimetres, so the women are close to life-size and meet the viewer almost eye to eye.
The colours are limited to pink, ochre and blue. The bodies have a strong pink tone, while the draperies are blue and white. The two figures on the right are painted in a rougher, more fragmented manner with hatching and strong contrasts. This suggests that Picasso repainted them at a later stage.
Picasso was influenced by Iberian sculpture, which he had seen in the Louvre, and by African masks, which he had seen in Paris. How great the African influence was is debated, and Picasso himself later denied it. The painting also shows his interest in Cézanne and El Greco. The work is regarded as an important precondition for Cubism, which Picasso and Georges Braque developed over the following years. The name Cubism itself was coined only a year later by critics writing about Braque’s landscapes.
The painting shocked even Picasso’s closest circle, and he did not exhibit it for several years. It was first shown publicly in 1916. In the mid-1920s it was bought by the French collector Jacques Doucet. In 1939 it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it remains today.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is regarded as one of the most important paintings in the history of modernism. It has been read as a break with Renaissance perspective and idealised bodies. It has also been criticised and discussed from perspectives concerning colonialism and the depiction of the female body.