Women of Avignon. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine.
The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. The three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features.
The racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force. In this adaptation of primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting.
This proto-cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art. Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle. Georges Braque too initially di
The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine.
The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. The three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features.
The racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force. In this adaptation of primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting.
This proto-cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art. Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle. Georges Braque too initially di
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