Oil on canvas
Among Picasso’s profuse output of more than 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In this painting, he did away with artistic conventions, like naturalism and perspective, hurling even the most forward-thinking viewers into a future they weren’t quite ready for.
Picasso was a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant to France when he made the painting, working in a cramped warren of studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre. The story of its making begins with hundreds of preparatory paintings and drawings, which he generated over an intensive six-month period, working out his ideas. They reflected Picasso’s responses to Paul Cézanne’s structured, almost sculptural depiction of objects and figures and his prismatic structuring of space in his still lifes and scenes of bathers. They also reflected his fascination with the African, Iberian, and Oceanic masks and statuary populating France’s ethnographic museums, as well as the lusts and anxieties wrapped up in his own, complex relationships with women.
Out of this intellectual-emotional tumult came a painting in which form and content were equalized. Its title refers to Avignon Street in Barcelona, home to the sex workers the artist frequented. The five women’s pinkish-peach-colored bodies, appearing larger than human-scale, fill the space of the large painting. The women’s shoulders, hips, and limbs are depicted with angular lines and flat, geometric planes. Cubic shapes or, in the case of the woman standing left of center, half-circles, form their breasts. Their faces, too, are sharp-edged and radically simplified, especially those of the two women at right, which he modeled directly after African masks.
As his preparatory studies reveal, Picasso initially conceived of the figure at the left of the painting as a male medical student, in the act of entering the brothel. Deciding that such a narrative detail would interfere with the work’s visual impact, he ultimately transformed the figure into a fifth woman. The women emerge from brown, white, and blue curtains that look like shattered glass, their bodies thrust forward toward the viewer by the scene’s lack of depth. Their eyes—enormous and almond-shaped, and inspired by African and Iberian carvings—are fixed daringly on the viewer. Near their feet sits a small arrangement of fruit, with a scythe-like sliver of melon set behind a bunch of grapes, an apple, and a pear, and which, like the women’s bodies, seems too sharp to touch.
Gallery label from 2024
Central to Picasso’s practice was his predilection for borrowing, combining, and transforming references from Western art history, popular visual idioms, and the material culture of colonized peoples from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon the stylized, geometric features of the two rightmost figures evidence the artist’s keen interest in the formal innovations of African masks and sculpture, which were imported into France via colonial channels, and which Picasso and his peers avidly collected. The stylistic disjunction between these heads and those of the other figures intensifies the painting’s psychological charge and raises questions about cultural difference.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
This work is as uncomfortable to look at as it is impossible to look away from. No other painting in the history of Western art so boldly, and baldly, confronts the viewer. Three of the five naked protagonists stare outward, trapping us with their gazes, just as the picture’s complicated space, populated by bodies that simultaneously press against and recede from its surface, draws us in. Pictorial conventions are banished and idealized notions of beauty jettisoned. The two rightmost figures’ masklike features are often connected to Picasso’s visit, midway through his work on the painting, to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris—the city’s first anthropological museum. There he had an epiphanic encounter with African and Oceanic art, which influenced the work’s ferocious antinaturalism—the degree to which the depicted figures resist mimetic norms.
Picasso produced an unprecedented quantity of preparatory drawings and paintings for Demoiselles. They speak to his struggle to reinvent Western painting in his own stylistically disjunctive, spatially contradictory, aggressively confrontational terms. The title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The women of Avignon) was given to the work around the time of its first public exhibition. It alludes to the prostitutes of Barcelona’s red-light district and foregrounds the psychosexual dimension and erotic content that conjoin with Demoiselles’s explosive form and fuel its continued ability to shock.
Provenance Research Project
This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.
The artist, Paris. 1907 - 1924
Jacques Doucet (1853-1929), Neuilly (Paris). Purchased from Picasso in February 1924 - 1929
Madame Jacques Doucet (Jeanne Roger), Neuilly. 1929 - September 1937
Jacques Seligmann & Co., New York. Purchased from Madame Doucet in September 1937
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased from Seligmann, through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, in 1937. Transaction completed in 1939
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Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Gallery 502Legend has it that Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon shocked those who first saw it in his Paris studio in 1907.
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