Pablo Picasso painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in 1907.
The large oil painting shows five nude women in a brothel, rendered with sharp angles, fractured forms, and confrontational gazes. Picasso made it in his Paris studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, after producing numerous preparatory drawings and studies. Its radical treatment of bodies and space helped point modern painting toward Cubism.
The work was originally associated with a much more provocative title, “The Brothel of Avignon.” The final title refers not to the French city of Avignon, but to Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona, the street connected with the scene Picasso intended to depict. André Salmon helped introduce the less scandalous title when the painting was exhibited publicly in 1916.
The painting’s influences remain widely discussed. Iberian sculpture, African and Oceanian art, Cézanne, El Greco, and Picasso’s own earlier work all shaped interpretations of it. It is often called an early Cubist or proto-Cubist masterpiece, although Cubism developed through Picasso’s later collaboration with Georges Braque.