Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso began Les Demoiselles d’Avignon during the winter of 1906-7, in his cramped, cluttered Parisian studio. The following summer, visitors expressed shock upon seeing the massive canvas—not yet formally titled—and its radically compressed, strikingly fractured forms. But when the painting was exhibited publicly for the first time in 1916, some viewers regarded it as a turning point in the history of modern art.

It was around the time of the 1916 exhibition that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon received its current title, which refers to sex workers on the carrer d’Avinyó (Avignon Street) in Barcelona, the city where Picasso spent his youth. The canvas centers on five women whose figures are composed of angular lines and flattened, splintered planes. To create them, Picasso engaged with artistic sources ranging from European paintings to African, Iberian, and Oceanic sculptures that had entered French collections through colonial channels. Always in search of visual stimulation, the artist is known to have sought out these works in Parisian museums and studios, and in books, magazines, prints, and photographs.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon changed dramatically over the course of several months, as Picasso—then a twenty-five-year-old Spanish immigrant eager to establish himself in France—produced hundreds of preparatory sketches and studies. In these works, the artist experimented with different postures, gestures, and expressions using graphite, pen, ink, and paint. For inspiration, he turned to images and objects from diverse time periods and geographical regions, as well as cultural traditions and artistic mediums. The striding pose and clenched fist of the figure at far left, for instance, echo ancient Egyptian and South Asian sculptures, while the stylized facial features of the two figures at right evoke nineteenth-century African and Oceanic masks. Between them are two middle figures whose raised elbows have been traced to Roman copies of ancient Greek sculptures. As a group, these figures also share similarities with multifigure paintings by artists as varied as El Greco, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse.

The five figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon are pressed together closely in a shallow space. Nonetheless, they seem to be portrayed from distinct perspectives and in distinct styles. These disjunctions raise important questions about cultural differences. What did Picasso appropriate from Western and non-Western sources while at work on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon? How did the artist understand these appropriations, and how should we?

Art critics and scholars have offered many readings of Picasso’s sources for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. They have also debated the relationship between this painting and Cubism, the artistic style that Picasso invented with his close friend and collaborator, Georges Braque, during the first decade of the twentieth century. According to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s art dealer, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon marked the “beginning of Cubism” due to its fragmented forms and contrasting perspectives. Yet others have denied that the painting is Cubist. Picasso, though, had little interest in disagreements over art historical labels and timelines. “When we invented Cubism, we had no intention of inventing Cubism,” he explained. “We simply wanted to express what was in us.”