After Doucet's death Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was included in a 1937 exhibition at Jacques Seligmann and Co. in New York, where the painting came to the attention of The Museum of Modern Art's first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Barr persuaded MoMA's trustees to acquire Picasso's masterpiece for the Museum, describing it as "one of the few pictures in the history of modern art which can justly be called epoch-making." Les Demoiselles d'Avignon went on view at the Museum in 1939 and was included in the exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, which traveled throughout the United States until the spring of 1941. Although no treatment was done at this time, a thorough condition report was made.

Pictured at top:
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 8, 1939, in front of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, shown in the exhibition Art in Our Time. From the left: John Hay Whitney, Mrs. W. T. Emmet, A. Conger Goodyear, President, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mrs. John Sheppard, Edsel Ford, and Mrs. John Parkinson, Jr. Photographed by Herbert Gehr. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York: A. Conger Goodyear Papers