Title: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Description: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, and originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. 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 wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his 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. Braque too initially disliked the painting, yet perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great detail. And effectively, his subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the Cubist revolution. Its resemblance to Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics. A photograph of the Les Demoiselles was first published in an article by Gelett Burgess entitled The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves, The Architectural Record, May 1910. At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. The work, painted in the studio of Picasso at Le Bateau-Lavoir, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d’Antin in July 1916; an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon. It was at this exhibition that André Salmon, who had already mentioned the painting in 1912 under the title Le Bordel philosophique, gave the work its present title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (in preference to the title originally chosen by Picasso, Le Bordel d’Avignon) to lessen its scandalous impact on the public. Picasso, who had always referred to it as mon bordel (my brothel), or Le Bordel d'Avignon, never liked Salmon's title, and as an edulcoration would have preferred Las chicas de Avignon instead.
Author(s): Pablo Picasso