Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon,

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
and originally titled The Brothel of Avignon)[2] is a large oil
English: The Ladies of Avignon
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 from a
brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avignon Street) in Barcelona.
Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational
manner and none is 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."[3][4][5]

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
Artist Pablo Picasso
seminal in the early development of both Cubism and
Modern art. Year 1907
Medium Oil on canvas
Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led
Dimensions 243.9 cm × 233.7 cm (96 in × 92 in)
to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the
Location Museum of Modern Art. Acquired
painter's closest associates and friends. Matisse considered
through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, New
the work something of a bad joke, yet indirectly reacted to it
York City[1]
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.[6][7] Its resemblance to Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul
Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Sealhas been widely discussed by later critics.

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral.[8] The work, painted in Picasso's studio at Le Bateau-
Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, at an exhibition organized by the
poet André Salmon. It was at this exhibition that 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.[2][6][9][10] Picasso, who had always referred to it as mon bordel (my
brothel),[8] or Le Bordel d'Avignon,[9] never liked Salmon's title, and as an edulcoration would have preferred Las chicas de Avignon
instead.[2]

Contents
Background and development
 Rivalry with Matisse
Influences
El Greco
Cézanne and Cubism
Gauguin and Primitivism
African and Iberian art
Mathematics
Impact
Public view and title
Interpretation
Feminist interpretation
Form over content
Did they have to be whores?
The trauma of the gaze
Rubin, Seckel, Cousins
Purchase
Legacy
Painting materials
Notes
References
External links

Background and development

Picasso came into his own as an important artist during the first decade of the 20th
century. He arrived in Paris from Spain around the turn of the century as a young,
ambitious painter out to make a name for himself. Although he eventually left most of
his friends, relatives and contacts in Spain, he continued to live and paint in Spain while
making regular trips back to France. For several years he alternated between living and
working in Barcelona, Madrid and the Spanish countryside, and made frequent trips to
Paris.

By 1904, he was fully settled in Paris and had established several studios, important
relationships with both friends and colleagues. Between 1901 and 1904, Picasso began
to achieve recognition for his Blue period paintings. In the main these were studies of
poverty and desperation based on scenes he had seen in Spain and Paris at the turn of the
century. Subjects included gaunt families, blind figures, and personal encounters; other
paintings depicted his friends, but most reflected and expressed a sense of blueness and
Paul Cézanne, Bather, 1885–87, despair.[11]
Museum of Modern Art, formerly
collection Lillie P. Bliss He followed his success by developing into his Rose period from 1904 to 1907, which
introduced a strong element of sensuality and sexuality into his work. The Rose period
depictions of acrobats, circus performers and theatrical characters are rendered in
warmer, brighter colors and are far more hopeful and joyful in their depictions of the bohemian life in the Parisian avant-garde and its
environs. The Rose period produced two important large masterpieces: Family of Saltimbanques (1905), which recalls the work of
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) and Édouard Manet (1832–1883); and Boy Leading a Horse (1905–06), which recalls Cézanne's
Bather (1885–87) and El Greco's Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597–1599). While he already had a considerable following by the
middle of 1906, Picasso enjoyed further success with his paintings of massive oversized nude women, monumental sculptural figures
that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive (African, Micronesian, Native American) art. He began
 El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar, c. 1597–1600, Art Institute of Chicago

Pablo Picasso, Boy Leading a Horse 1905-06, Museum of Modern Art

Picasso's Rose period masterpiece Boy Leading a Horse, recalls the paintings of bothPaul Cézanne and El Greco,
both of whom heavily influencedLes Demoiselles d'Avignon

exhibiting his work in the galleries of Berthe Weill (1865–1951) and Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939), quickly gaining a growing
reputation and a following amongst the artistic communities ofMontmartre and Montparnasse.[11]

Picasso became a favorite of the American art collectors Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo around 1905. The Steins' older brother
Michael and his wife Sarah also became collectors of his work. Picasso painted portraits of both Gertrude Stein and her nephew
Allan
Stein.[12]

Gertrude Stein began acquiring Picasso's drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon at her home in Paris. At
one of her gatherings in 1905 he met Henri Matisse (1869–1954), who was to become in those days his chief rival, although in later
years a close friend. The Steins introduced Picasso to Claribel Cone (1864–1929), and her sister Etta Cone (1870–1949), also
American art collectors, who began to acquire Picasso and Matisse's paintings. Eventually Leo Stein moved to Italy, and Michael and
[13]
Sarah Stein became important patrons of Matisse, while Gertrude Stein continued to collect Picasso.

Rivalry with Matisse

The Salon d'Automne of 1905 brought notoriety and attention to
the works of Henri Matisse and the Les Fauves group. The latter
gained their name after critic Louis Vauxcelles described their
work with the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello
among the wild beasts"),[15] contrasting the paintings with a
Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them.[16]
Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), an artist that Picasso knew and
admired and who was not a Fauve, had his large jungle scene The
Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope also hanging near the
works by Matisse and which may have had an influence on the
particular sarcastic term used in the press.[17] Vauxcelles'
comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in the daily newspaper
Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre (1905–06), oil on
Gil Blas, and passed into popular usage.[16][18]
canvas, 175 × 241 cm.Barnes Foundation, Merion,
Although the pictures were widely derided—"A pot of paint has PA. A painting that was called Fauvist and brought
Matisse both public derision and notoriety . Hilton
been flung in the face of the public", declared the critic Camille
Kramer wrote: "owing to its long sequestration in the
Mauclair (1872–1945)—they also attracted some favorable
collection of the Barnes Foundation, which never
attention.[16] The painting that was singled out for the most permitted its reproduction in color, it is the least
attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat; the purchase of this familiar of modern masterpieces. Yet this painting was
work by Gertrude and Leo Stein had a very positive effect on Matisse's own response to the hostility his work had
Matisse, who was suffering demoralization from the bad met with in the Salon d'Automne of 1905."[14]
reception of his work.[16]

Matisse's notoriety and preeminence as the leader of the new

movement in modern painting continued to build throughout
1906 and 1907, and Matisse attracted a following of artists
including Georges Braque (1880–1963), André Derain (1880–
1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958). Picasso's work had
passed through his Blue period and his Rose period and while he
had a considerable following his reputation was tame in
comparison to his rival Matisse. To make matters worse Matisse
shocked the French public again at the 1907 Société des Artistes
Indépendants when he exhibited his painting Blue Nude,
completed in early 1907. The Blue Nude was one of the paintings Henri Rousseau, The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the
that would later create an international sensation at the Armory Antelope, 1905, was the reason for the termFauvism,
Show of 1913 in New York City.[19] and the original "Wild Beast"

By the spring of 1907 when he began to paint Les Demoiselles

d'Avignon, until its completion later in the year, Picasso was vying with Matisse for the preeminent position of being the perceived
new leader of Modern painting. Upon its completion the shock and the impact of the painting propelled Picasso into the center of
controversy and all but knocked Matisse and Fauvism off the map, virtually ending the movement by the following year. In 1907
Picasso joined the art gallery that had recently been opened in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). Kahnweiler was a
German art historian, art collector who became one of the premier French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent in
Paris beginning in 1907 for being among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, and especially his painting
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Before 1910 Picasso was already being recognized as one of the important leaders of Modern art alongside Henri Matisse who had
been the undisputed leader of Fauvism and who was more than ten years older than he was and his contemporaries the Fauvist André
Derain and the former Fauvist and fellow Cubist, Georges Braque.[20]

In his 1992 essay Reflections on Matisse, the art critic Hilton Kramer wrote,
 After the impact of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
however, Matisse was never again mistaken for
an avant-garde incendiary. With the bizarre
painting that appalled and electrified the
cognoscenti, which understood the Les
Demoiselles was at once a response to Matisse's
Le bonheur de vivre (1905–1906) and an assault
upon the tradition from which it derived, Picasso
effectively appropriated the role of avant-garde
wild beast—a role that, as far as public opinion
was concerned, he was never to relinquish.[21]
Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), 1907,
92 × 140 cm, Baltimore Museum of Art. One of the
paintings that created an international sensation at the Kramer goes on to say,
Armory Show of 1913 in New York City
Whereas Matisse had drawn upon a long tradition
of European painting—from Giorgione, Poussin,
and Watteau to Ingres, Cézanne, and Gauguin—
to create a modern version of a pastoral paradise
in Le bonheur de vivre, Picasso had turned to an
alien tradition of primitive art to create in Les
Demoiselles a netherworld of strange gods and
violent emotions. As between the mythological
nymphs of Le bonheur de vivre and the grotesque
effigies of Les Demoiselles, there was no question
as to which was the more shocking or more
intended to be shocking. Picasso had unleashed a
vein of feeling that was to have immense
consequences for the art and culture of the
modern era while Matisse's ambition came to
seem, as he said in his Notes of a Painter, more
limited—limited that is, to the realm of aesthetic
pleasure. There was thus opened up, in the very
first decade of the century and in the work of its
two greatest artists, the chasm that has continued
to divide the art of the modern era down to our
own time.[22]

It has been argued that the painting was a reactionto Henri Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.[10][23]

Influences
Painted in Paris during the summer of 1907, Picasso had created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the final
work.[9][24] He long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is
believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art
historians remain skeptical about his denials. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée
d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known today as Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and was unconsciously
influenced by African and Tribal art several months before completingLes Demoiselles.[25][26]
El Greco

El Greco, The Opening of the Fifth Seal, 1608–14

Pablo Picasso, Nus (Nudes), 1905, graphite on paper

El Greco's paintings, such a this Apocalyptic V
ision of Saint John, have been suggested as a source of inspiration
for Picasso leading up toLes Demoiselles d' Avignon[11]

In 1907, when Picasso began to work on Les Demoiselles, one of the old master painters he greatly admired was El Greco (1541–
1614). At the time El Greco was largely obscure and under-appreciated. Picasso's friend Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945) acquired El
Greco's masterpiece, the Opening of the Fifth Seal, in 1897 for 1000 pesetas.[27] While Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles, he
visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco'sOpening of the Fifth Seal.[28] The relation between Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Opening of the Fifth Seal was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the
relationship between themotifs and visually identifying qualities of both works were analyzed.[29][30]

El Greco's painting, which Picasso studied repeatedly in Zuloaga's house, inspired not only the size, format, and composition of Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, but it inspired its apocalyptic power.[31] Later, speaking of the work to Dor de la Souchère in Antibes,
Picasso said: "In any case, only the execution counts. From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Spanish origin
and that I invented Cubism. We must look for the Spanish influence in Cézanne. Things themselves necessitate it, the influence of El
Greco, a Venetian painter, on him. But his structure is Cubist."[32]
The relationship of the painting to other group portraits in the Western tradition, such as Diana and Callisto by Titian (1488–1576),
and the same subject byRubens (1577–1640), in the Prado, has also been discussed.[33]

Cézanne and Cubism

Both Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) and Paul Cézanne (1839–
1906) were accorded major posthumous retrospective
exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in Paris between 1903
and 1907, and both were important influences on Picasso and
instrumental to his creation of Les Demoiselles. According to
the English art historian, collector and author of The Cubist
Epoch, Douglas Cooper, both of those artists were
particularly influential to the formation of Cubism and
especially important to the paintings of Picasso during 1906
and 1907.[34] Cooper goes on to say however Les
Demoiselles is often erroneously referred to as the first Cubist
painting. He explains,

The Demoiselles is generally referred to as

the first Cubist picture. This is an Paul Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses(1906, oil on
exaggeration, for although it was a major first canvas, 210.5 × 250.8 cm., 827⁄8 × 983⁄4 inches,
step towards Cubism it is not yet Cubist. The Philadelphia Museum of Art) is generally believed to be a
disruptive, expressionist element in it is even likely inspiration for Les Demoiselles.
contrary to the spirit of Cubism, which looked
at the world in a detached, realistic spirit.
Nevertheless, the Demoiselles is the logical
picture to take as the starting point for
Cubism, because it marks the birth of a new
pictorial idiom, because in it Picasso violently
overturned established conventions and
because all that followed grew out of it.[35]

Although not well known to the general public prior to 1906, Cézanne's reputation was highly regarded in avant-garde circles, as
evidenced by Ambroise Vollard's interest in showing and collecting his work, and by Leo Stein's interest. Picasso was familiar with
much of Cézanne's work that he saw at Vollard's gallery and at the Stein's. After Cézanne died in 1906, his paintings were exhibited
in Paris in a large scale museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne
greatly impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, lending credence to his position as one of the most influential artists
of the 19th century and to the advent of Cubism. The 1907 Cézanne exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cézanne as
[11][36]
an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant especially to young artists in Paris.

Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for theirproto-Cubist works in Paul Cézanne, who said to observe and learn to see and
treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Cézanne's explorations of geometric
simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier, Gris and others to
experiment with ever more complex multiple views of the same subject, and, eventually to the fracturing of form. Cézanne thus
sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the
development of modern art.[36]

Gauguin and Primitivism

 Paul Gauguin, The Moon and the Earth (Hina tefatou), (1893), Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Gauguin, 1894, Oviri (Sauvage), partially glazed stoneware, 75 × 19 × 27 cm,Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Pablo Picasso's paintings of monumental figures from 1906 were directly influenced by Gauguin. The savage power
evoked by Gauguin's work led directly toLes Demoiselles in 1907.[37]

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the European cultural elite were discovering African, Oceanic and Native American art.
Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of
those cultures. Around 1906, Picasso, Matisse, Derain and other artists in Paris had acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian
sculpture,[38] African art and tribal masks, in part because of the compelling works of Paul Gauguin that had suddenly achieved
center stage in the avant-garde circles of Paris. Gauguin's powerful posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d'Automne in
Paris in 1903[39] and an even larger one in 1906[40] had a stunning and powerful influence on Picasso's paintings.
[11]

In the autumn of 1906, Picasso followed his previous successes with paintings of oversized nude women, and monumental sculptural
figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive art. Pablo Picasso's paintings of massive figures
from 1906 were directly influenced by Gauguin's sculpture, painting and his writing as well. The savage power evoked by Gauguin's
work lead directly to Les Demoiselles in 1907.[11]

According to Gauguin biographerDavid Sweetman, Pablo Picasso as early as 1902 became an aficionado of Gauguin's work when he
met and befriended the expatriate Spanish sculptor and ceramist Paco Durrio (1875–1940), in Paris. Durrio had several of Gauguin's
works on hand because he was a friend of Gauguin's and an unpaid agent of his work. Durrio tried to help his poverty-stricken friend
in Tahiti by promoting his oeuvre in Paris. After they met Durrio introduced Picasso to Gauguin's stoneware, helped Picasso make
some ceramic pieces and gave Picasso a firstLa Plume edition of Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin.[41]

Concerning Gauguin's impact on Picasso, art historianJohn Richardson wrote,

The 1906 exhibition of Gauguin's work left Picasso more than ever in this artist's thrall. Gauguin demonstrated the
most disparate types of art—not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical
myths, and much else besides—could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could
also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing his demons to the dark gods (not
necessarily Tahitian ones) and tapping a new source of divine energy. If in later years Picasso played down his debt to
Gauguin, there is no doubt that between 1905 and 1907 he felt a very close kinship with this other Paul, who prided
himself on Spanish genes inherited from his Peruvian grandmother. Had not Picasso signed himself 'Paul' in
Gauguin's honor.[42]

Both David Sweetman and John Richardson point to Gauguin's Oviri (literally meaning 'savage'), a gruesome phallic representation
of the Tahitian goddess of life and death intended for Gauguin's grave. First exhibited in the 1906 retrospective, it was likely a direct
influence on Les Demoiselles. Sweetman writes,

Gauguin's statue Oviri, which was prominently displayed in 1906, was to stimulate Picasso's interest in both sculpture
and ceramics, while the woodcuts would reinforce his interest in print-making, though it was the element of the
primitive in all of them which most conditioned the direction that Picasso's art would take. This interest would
culminate in the seminalLes Demoiselles d'Avignon.[43]

According to Richardson,

Picasso's interest in stoneware was further stimulated by the examples he saw at the 1906 Gauguin retrospective at the
Salon d'Automne. The most disturbing of those ceramics (one that Picasso might have already seen at Vollard's) was
the gruesome Oviri. Until 1987, when the Musée d'Orsay acquired this little-known work (exhibited only once since
1906) it had never been recognized as the masterpiece it is, let alone recognized for its relevance to the works leading
up to the Demoiselles. Although just under 30 inches high, Oviri has an awesome presence, as befits a monument
intended for Gauguin's grave. Picasso was very struck by Oviri. 50 years later he was delighted when [Douglas]
Cooper and I told him that we had come upon this sculpture in a collection that also included the original plaster of
his Cubist head. Has it been a revelation, like Iberian sculpture? Picasso's shrug was grudgingly affirmative. He was
[44]
always loath to admit Gauguin's role in setting him on the road to primitivism.

African and Iberian art

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Europe's colonization of Africa led to many economic, social, political, and even artistic
encounters. From these encounters, Western visual artists became increasingly interested in the unique forms of African art,
particularly masks from the Niger-Congo region. In an essay by Dennis Duerden, author of African Art (1968), The Invisible Present
(1972), and a former director of the BBC World Service, the mask is defined as "very often a complete head-dress and not just that
part that conceals the face".[45] This form of visual art and image appealed to W
estern visual artists, leading to what Duerden calls the
"discovery" of African art by Western practitioners, including Picasso.
 The
stylistic
sources
for the
heads of
the
women
and their
degree of
influence
Female musician from the "Relief ofOsuna", Iberian, ca. 200 BC
has been
much
discussed
and
debated,
in
particular
the
influence
Iberian female sculpture from 3rd or 2nd century BC of African Fang mask similar in style
African to those Picasso saw in Paris just
This style influenced Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
tribal prior to painting Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon
masks,
art of Oceania,[46] and pre-Roman Iberian sculptures. The rounded contours of the
features of the three women to the left can be related to Iberian sculpture, but not obviously the fragmented planes of the two on the
[47] Lawrence Weschler says that,
right, which indeed seem influenced by African masks.

in many ways, much of the moldering cultural and even scientific ferment that characterized the first decade and a
half of the twentieth century and that laid the foundations for much of what we today consider modern can be traced
back to ways in which Europe was already wrestling with its bad-faith, often strenuously repressed, knowledge of
what it had been doing in Africa. The example of Picasso virtually launching cubism with his 1907 Desmoiselles
d’Avignon, in response to the sorts of African masks and other colonial booty he was encountering in Paris’s Musee
de l’Homme, is obvious.[5]

However, Picasso emphatically denied the influence of African masks on the painting: "African art? Never heard of it!" (L'art nègre?
Connais pas!),[9][48] asserting instead that the primitivism in his work during, before and after the painting of Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, from spring 1906 through the spring of 1907 was primarily influenced by Iberian sculpture.[11][49] Some Iberian reliefs
from Osuna, then only recently excavated, were on display in the Louvre from 1904. Archaic Greek sculpture has also been claimed
as an influence.

The influence of Iberian sculpture became an issue in 1939, when Alfred Barr claimed that the primitivism of the Demoiselles
derived from the art of Côte d'Ivoire and the French Congo.[50] Picasso insisted that the editor of his "catalogue raissonne", Christian
Zervos, publish a disclaimer: the 'Demoiselles,' he said, owed nothing to African art, everything to the reliefs from Osuna that he had
seen in the Louvre a year or so before.[51] Nonetheless, he is known to have seen African tribal masks while working on the painting,
during a visit to the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadero with Andre Malraux in June 1907, about which he later said "When I
went to the Trocadero, it was disgusting. The flea market, the smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away, but I didn't leave. I stayed,
I stayed. I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren't like any other pieces of
sculpture, not at all. They were magic things."[9][52][53] Maurice de Vlaminck is often credited with introducing Picasso to African
sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.[54]
Picasso biographer John Richardson recounts in A Life of Picasso, The Cubist Rebel 1907–1916, art dealer Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler's recollection of his first visit to Picasso's studio in July 1907. Kahnweiler remembers seeing dusty stacks of canvases in
Picasso's studio and African sculptures of majestic severity. Richardson comments: so much for Picasso's story that he was not yet
aware of Tribal art.[55] A photograph of Picasso in his studio surrounded by African sculptures c.1908, is found on page 27 of that
same volume.[56]

Mathematics
Maurice Princet,[57] a French mathematician and actuary, played a role in the birth of Cubism
as an associate of Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Metzinger, Robert
Delaunay, Juan Gris and later Marcel Duchamp. Princet became known as "le mathématicien
du cubisme" ("the mathematician of cubism").[58][59]

Princet is credited with introducing the work of Henri Poincaré and the concept of the "fourth
dimension" to artists at the Bateau-Lavoir.[60] Princet brought to the attention of Picasso,
Metzinger and others, a book by Esprit Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre
dimensions (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1903),[61] a
popularization of Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis in which Jouffret described hypercubes
and other complex polyhedra in four dimensions and projected them onto the two-dimensional
surface. Picasso's sketchbooks for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon illustrate Jouffret's influence on
the artist's work.[62] An illustration from Jouffret's
Traité élémentaire de
géométrie à quatre
Impact dimensions. The book,
which influenced Picasso,
Although Les Demoiselles had an enormous and profound influence on modern art, its impact
was given to him by Princet.
was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. At first, only
Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work.
While many were shocked and some outraged, influential people such as Georges Braque and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were
supportive. Soon after the late summer of 1907, Picasso and his long-time lover Fernande Olivier (1881–1966) had a parting of the
ways. The re-painting of the two heads on the far right of Les Demoiselles fueled speculation that it was an indication of the split
[63]
between Picasso and Olivier. Although they later reunited for a period, the relationship ended in 1912.

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.[64]

Les Demoiselles would not be exhibited until 1916, and not widely recognized as a revolutionary achievement until the early 1920s,
when André Breton (1896–1966) published the work.[24] Richardson goes on to say thatHenri Matisse was fighting mad upon seeing
the Demoiselles at Picasso's studio. He let it be known that he regarded the painting as an attempt to ridicule the modern movement;
he was outraged to find his sensational Blue Nude, not to speak of Bonheur de vivre, overtaken by Picasso's "hideous" whores. He
vowed to get even and make Picasso beg for mercy. Just as the Bonheur de vivre had fueled Picasso's competitiveness, Les
Demoiselles now fueled Matisse's.[65]

Among Picasso's closed circle of friends and colleagues there was a mixture of opinions about Les Demoiselles. Georges Braque and
André Derain were both initially troubled by it although they were supportive of Picasso. According to William Rubin, two of
Picasso's friends, the art critic André Salmon and the painter Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), were enthusiastic about it while
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) wasn't. Both the art dealer-collector Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), and art dealer Daniel-Henry
.[66]
Kahnweiler were more enthusiastic about the painting however

According to KahnweilerLes Demoiselles was the beginning of Cubism. He writes:

 Early in 1907 Picasso began a strange large painting depicting women, fruit and drapery, which he left unfinished. It
cannot be called other than unfinished, even though it represents a long period of work. Begun in the spirit of the
works of 1906, it contains in one section the endeavors of 1907 and thus never constitutes a unified whole.

The nudes, with large, quiet eyes, stand rigid, like mannequins. Their stiff, round bodies are flesh-colored, black and
white. That is the style of 1906.

In the foreground, however, alien to the style of the rest of the painting, appear a crouching figure and a bowl of fruit.
These forms are drawn angularly, not roundly modeled in chiaroscuro. The colors are luscious blue, strident yellow,
next to pure black and white. This is the beginning of Cubism, the first upsurge, a desperate titanic clash with all of
the problems at once.

— Kahweiler, 1920[67]

Public view and title

From 16 to 31 July 1916 Les Demoiselles was exhibited to the public for the first time at the Salon d'Antin, an exhibition organized
by André Salmon titled L'Art moderne en France. The exhibition space at 26 rue d'Antin was lent by the famous couturier and art
collector Paul Poiret. The larger Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants had been closed due to World War I, making this the
only Cubists exhibition in France since 1914.[68] On 23 July 1916 a review was published inLe Cri de Paris:[69]

The Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense. They are exhibiting at
the Galerie Poiret naked women whose scattered parts are represented in all four corners of the canvas: here an eye,
there an ear, over there a hand, a foot on top, a mouth below. M. Picasso, their leader, is possibly the least disheveled
of the lot. He has painted, or rather daubed, five women who are, if the truth be told, all hacked up, and yet their
limbs somehow manage to hold together. They have, moreover, piggish faces with eyes wandering negligently above
their ears. An enthusiastic art-lover offered the artist 20,000 francs for this masterpiece. M. Picasso wanted more. The
art-lover did not insist.[68][69]

Picasso referred to his only entry at the Salon d'Antin as his Brothel painting calling it Le Bordel d'Avignon but André Salmon retitled
it Les Demoiselles d'Avignon so as to lessen its scandalous impact on the public. Picasso never liked the title, however, preferring "las
chicas de Avignon", but Salmon's title stuck.[2]

The only other time the painting might have been exhibited to the public prior to a 1937 showing in New York was in 1918, in an
exhibition dedicated to Picasso and Matisse at Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris, though very little information exists about this
exhibition or the presence (if at all) ofLes Demoiselles.[68]

Afterwards, the painting was rolled up and remained with Picasso until 1924 when, with urging and help from Breton and Louis
Aragon (1897–1982), he sold it to designerJacques Doucet (1853–1929), for 25,000 francs.[70][71]

Interpretation
Picasso drew each of the figures in Les Demoiselles differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the upper right is rendered with
heavy paint. Composed of sharp geometric shapes, her head is the most strictly Cubist of all five.[72] The curtain seems to blend
partially into her body. The Cubist head of the crouching figure (lower right) underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure
to its current state. She also seems to have been drawn from two different perspectives at once, creating a confusing, twisted figure.
The woman above her is rather manly, with a dark face and square chest. The whole picture is in a two-dimensional style, with an
abandoned perspective.
 Much of the critical debate that has taken place over
the years centers on attempting to account for this
multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant
understanding for over five decades, espoused most
notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City and
organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist,
has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a
transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to
connect his earlier work to Cubism, the style he
would help invent and develop over the next five or
six years.[1]
Pablo Picasso, Head of a
Sleeping Woman (Study for Art critic John Berger, in his controversial 1965 Pablo Picasso, Les
Nude with Drapery), 1907, oil biography The Success and Failure of Picasso,[73] Demoiselles d'Avignon,
on canvas, 61.4 × 47.6 cm, interprets Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as the detail of the figure to the
The Museum of Modern Art, provocation that led to Cubism: upper right
New York

Blunted by the insolence of so much

recent art, we probably tend to
underestimate the brutality of the Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon. All his
friends who saw it in his studio were
at first shocked by it. And it was
meant to shock…

A brothel may not in itself be

shocking. But women painted
without charm or sadness, without
irony or social comment, women
painted like the palings of a stockade
through eyes that look out as if at Pablo Picasso, Les
death – that is shocking. And equally Demoiselles d'Avignon,
detail of the figure to the
the method of painting. Picasso
lower right
himself has said that he was
influenced at the time by archaic
Spanish (Iberian) sculpture. He was
also influenced – particularly in the
two heads at the right – by African
masks…here it seems that Picasso's
quotations are simple, direct, and
emotional. He is not in the least
concerned with formal problems. The
dislocations in this picture are the
result of aggression, not aesthetics; it
is the nearest you can get in a
painting to an outrage…
Pablo Picasso, Nu aux bras
levés (Nude), 1907
 I emphasize the violent and
iconoclastic aspect of this painting
because it is usually enshrined as the
great formal exercise which was the
starting point of Cubism. It was the
starting point of Cubism, in so far as
it prompted Braque to begin painting
at the end of the year his own far
more formal answer to Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon…yet if he
had been left to himself, this picture
would never have led Picasso to Pablo Picasso, 1907, Nu à
Cubism or to any way of painting la serviette, oil on canvas,
remotely resembling it…It has 116 x 89 cm
nothing to with that twentieth-
century vision of the future which
was the essence of Cubism.

Yet it did provoke the beginning of

the great period of exception in
Picasso's life. Nobody can know
exactly how the change began inside
Picasso. We can only note the results.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, unlike
any previous painting by Picasso,
offers no evidence of skill. On the
contrary, it is clumsy, overworked,
unfinished. It is as though his fury in
painting it was so great that it
destroyed his gifts…

By painting Les Demoiselles

d'Avignon Picasso provoked Cubism.
It was the spontaneous and, as
always, primitive insurrection out of Pablo Picasso, 1907,
which, for good historical reasons, Femme nue, oil on canvas,
the revolution of Cubism 92 x 43 cm, Museo delle
Culture, Milano
developed.[73]

In 1972, art critic Leo Steinberg in his essay The Philosophical Brothel posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of
stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches—which had been ignored by most critics—he argued that far from evidence of an artist
undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze
of the viewer. He notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus
solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare.[1]

The earliest sketches feature two men inside the brothel; a sailor and a medical student (who was often depicted holding either a book
or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a memento mori, a reminder of death). A trace of their presence at a table in
the center remains: the jutting edge of a table near the bottom of the canvas. The viewer, Steinberg argues, has come to replace the
sitting men, forced to confront the gaze of prostitutes head on, invoking readings far more complex than a simple allegory or the
autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso's own history with women. A world of meanings
then becomes possible, suggesting the work as a meditation on the danger of sex, the "trauma of the gaze" (to use a phrase of
ge.[1]
Rosalind Krauss's invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at lar

According to Steinberg, the reversed gaze, that is, the fact that the figures look directly at the viewer, as well as the idea of the self-
possessed woman, no longer there solely for the pleasure of the male gaze, may be traced back to Manet's Olympia of 1863.[1]
William Rubin (1927–2006), the former Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA wrote that "Steinberg was
[74]
the first writer to come to grips with the sexual subject of the Demoiselles."

A few years after writingThe Philosophical Brothel, Steinberg wrote further about the revolutionary nature of Les Demoiselles:

Picasso was resolved to undo the continuities of form and field which Western art had so long taken for granted. The
famous stylistic rupture at right turned out to be merely a consummation. Overnight, the contrived coherences of
representational art - the feigned unities of time and place, the stylistic consistencies - all were declared to be
fictional. The Demoiselles confessed itself a picture conceived in duration and delivered in spasms. In this one work
Picasso discovered that the demands of discontinuity could be met on multiple levels: by cleaving depicted flesh; by
elision of limbs and abbreviation; by slashing the web of connecting space; by abrupt changes of vantage; and by a
sudden stylistic shift at the climax. Finally, the insistent staccato of the presentation was found to intensify the
picture's address and symbolic charge: the beholder, instead of observing a roomfuI of lazing whores, is targeted from
ganization heightens its flagrant eroticism.[75]
all sides. So far from suppressing the subject, the mode of or

At the end of the first volume of his (so far) three volume Picasso biography: A Life Of Picasso. The Prodigy, 1881–1906, John
Richardson comments on Les Demoiselles. Richardson says:

It is at this point, the beginning of 1907, that I propose to bring this first volume to an end. The 25-year-old Picasso is
about to conjure up a quintet of Dionysiac Demoiselles on his huge new canvas. The execution of this painting would
make a dramatic climax to these pages. However, it would imply that Picasso's great revolutionary work constitutes a
conclusion to all that has gone before. It does not. For all that the Demoiselles is rooted in Picasso's past, not to speak
of such precursors as the Iron Age Iberians, El Greco, Gauguin and Cézanne, it is essentially a beginning: the most
innovative painting since Giotto. As we will see in the next volume, it established a new pictorial syntax; it enabled
people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds, new awareness. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the first
unequivocally 20th-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of 20th-
century art. For Picasso it would also be a rite of passage: what he called an exorcism.' It cleared the way for cubism.
It likewise banished the artist's demons. Later, these demons would return and require further exorcism. For the next
[76]
decade, however, Picasso would feel as free and creative and 'as overworked' as God.

Feminist interpretation

Form over content

Leo Steinberg in his 1988 text "The Philosophical Brothel" quotes from an uncited source which may provide insight regarding
Picasso's intent in the creation and context of Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. Quoting from an anonymous but well-informed New
Yorker, Steinberg suggests that "in 1907 Picasso had contracted VD, and painted the Demoiselles to vent his rage against
women".[77] This assumption may be reinforced in the artist's referral to the work as "My first exorcism-painting". In 1965 the
British critic John Berger suggested that Picasso, during his first years in Paris, "probably was suffering from venereal disease and
was obsessed by it". Then, in her Picasso: Art as Autobiography, Mary Gedo substantiated Berger's suspicion (having had it
confirmed by Françoise Gilot). Accordingly, she interpreted much of the evolution and final character of the Demoiselles in the light
of the artist's medical history and consequent ambivalence toward women.[78] While critics such as Alfred H. Barr Jr. would prefer
that the work be discussed in purely formalistic qualities, Edwin Mullins states that the effect of STIs cannot be so easily be
disregarded and that though these are "not today's experiences of art, they are among the experiences out which, and for which, art
[79] Carol Duncan in her 1973 article "Virility
has been made - and without which a great deal of art would not have been made at all".
and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting" states that:

No painting of this decade better articulates the male-female dichotomy and the ambivalence men experience before
it... What is so remarkable about this work is the way it manifests the structural foundation underlying both the
femme fatale and the new primitive woman. Picasso did not merely combine these into one horrible image; he
dredged up from his psyche the terrifying and fascinating beast that gave birth to both of them. The Demoiselles
prismatically mirrors her many opposing faces: whore and deity, decadent and savage, tempting and repelling,
[80]
awesome and obscene, looming and crouching, masked and naked, threatening and powerless.

These sources in close connection to each other suggest that the portrayal of women in the post-modern era may be more closely
linked to the spread of STIs, than some individuals and institutions within the art world would like to recognize. To quote Edwin
Mullins in The Painted Witch (1985) "One day somebody will have the art world reaching for its smelling-salts with a study of the
effects of disease on the making of art."[79]

Steinberg dismissed many of Barr's views which af voured that Les Demoiselles D'Avignon could be reduced to a strictly formal figure
composition. In particular that Barr argued that the intellectual observer would address the work was to view it in strictly formalistic
qualities: the work was a triumph of form over content; to see it with intelligence was to see it resolved into abstract energies.[77]
Barr's methodology of addressing Picasso's work was not fundamentally challenged until Leo Steinberg's article. Steinberg felt that
by 1988 this method of critique had transformed from criticism to cliché and that reducing the work to a purely formal figure
composition would make it a mere forerunner of things to come. Picasso had indeed abandoned the memento mori allegory but not
the sexual thematics of the painting.[81] Anna C. Chave for example in "New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender,
Race, and the Origins of Cubism" addresses that the work had come to be understood to mark or even to have precipitated the demise
of the old visual order and the advent of the new. A momentous act of destruction, the painting is also understood as one of
creation.[82] Designated the first Cubist painting "the signal for the Cubist revolution" in its full-fledged dismantling of
representational conventions the painting is now more loosely considered a curtain raiser or trigger to Cubism. Others had pulled
crucial triggers before Picasso. When Baudelaire told Manet, "You are only the first in the decrepitude of your art," he referred to the
scandalously frank picture of a courtesan, Olympia, rendered with startling flatness in 1865. For that matter, a compressed or
compromised female form, often that of prostitute or femme fatale, would come to serve almost as an avatar of modernism.' Picasso,
often lifted his imagery from the lexicon of European art and by revisiting works, jolted the viewer into reacting to it afresh."[82] If
the disintegration of the great traditions of painting could already be detected in Olympia, the evidence of that decrepitude was
plainly that much further advanced in Les Demoiselles. And insofar as it calls the very notion unified style, and so the possibility of
finish, into question, the painting's ruptured aspect made it serve the purpose of signifying a moment of rupture particularly well. The
evolution of Cubism was impelled by a realization of "the conventional rather than the imitative nature of representation", as art
history professor Christine Poggi succinctly phrases it; and a corollary of that realization was "that style can be a kind of mask, to be
[82]
worn at will", so that "there was no reason to observe the law of unity".

Did they have to be whores?

The employment of the disenfranchised female as visual icon within the art world is a fact that feminist critics have diagnosed, as the
avant-garde's testing of cultural limits, where the female body, as symptomatic of a visual regime where "Woman" serves as "the very
ground of representation, both object and support of a desire which, intimately bound up with power and creativity, is the moving
force of culture and history."[82] The ability of male artists to form new expressive modes of representation filled with dynamic
power is not a new concept within art history; Duncan in particular emphasizes and exposes the relationship between art historians
and the avant-garde painters of the post modern era in that art historians emphasize the notion: "that avant-garde art consists of so
many movements of individual artistic freedom, a freedom evidenced in the artist's capacity for innovation"[80] and in this freedom
both artist and historian are freed to analyze and construct work in a larger structure without recognizing the social constraints and
responsibilities of the past and their impact on contemporary society. Duncan questions where does this innovation arise? Is it
completely unmotivated? A gift from God? We may never know. Picasso in discussing the work was often resistant to acknowledge
any guidance in context; favouring instead to address it in a way which ranged from vague, humorous and sarcastic. For example,
when "speaking to Kahnweiler in December 1933, Picasso recalled the jokes he and his friends bandied about the women in the
Demoiselles painting, identifying one of them as Picasso's girlfriend, Fernande, another as Marie Laurencin, a third as the
vignon!" [77]
grandmother of his poet friend Max Jacob-"all in a brothel in A

Picasso in choosing his subject matter with the intention of creating a new visual language as addressed by Barr that "The
Demoiselles is a transitional picture, a laboratory or, better, a battlefield of trial and experience; but it is also a work of formidable,
dynamic power unsurpassed in European art of its time" [81] Did the work have to be a representation of whores? Couldn't the Proto-
Cubist effects previously described have been accomplished just as easily with a cast of card players?" [77] According to various
critical sources such as Steinberg, Chave, Mullins, Rubins and other critics of Les Demoiselles the answer is no. They had to be
whores. If the viewer is able to fully understand the disquieting effect created by Picasso in their viewing of the work, this reshaping
of power could only have been accomplished by the role of Woman or as labelled by Edwin Mullins; Man-Eaters. This is due to the
entity of Woman existing as the symbolic embodiment of the natural world in its beauty and ferocity to exist in contrast and outside
of the hegemonic structures created by man. As such, a picture of a dangerous woman is powerful because it is the icon of a man's
innermost terrors."[83] As, Woman is a creature which threatens to usurp the power and control of her male counterpart through the
employment of her sex; described by Freud as Castration Anxiety. The anxiety present in Les Demoiselles presumes as virtually
every critic who has addressed Les Demoiselles the picture's intended viewer is male and heterosexual. As conventionally, both the
act of painting and that of viewing have been described as phallic acts, acts of penetration performed on that passive receptacle, the
blank field of the canvas and the critic Jean Clair once pithily proclaimed, "The gaze is the erection of the eye."' Such metaphors and
the general conceit of penetration as a trope for knowing implicitly exclude the female artist and viewer, as such and from a
masculinist vantage point, the work would be read as a horror story, but from a feminist one it could be, to the contrary, a fable or
.[84]
even a good omen of vengeance won against male tyranny

The trauma of the gaze

Freudian analysis is a fairly recent step in literature devoted to the painting. Several psychoanalytic scenarios dealing with the "primal
scene" and the "castration complex" apply well to Les Demoiselles D'Avignon. They help us understand both the suppression of the
"memento mori" allegory and the brutality of the finished picture.[81] According to Sigmund Freud the female body figures in male
fantasy are mapped as a castrated body, Les Demoiselles do not simply represent a figure of impotence; rather, woman becomes
phallic through her association with this powerful fantasmatic energy. As Steinberg and others see them, Picasso's demoiselles are
eminently phallic: the prostitute second from left "arrives like a projectile"; the one in the centre is "a pillar nude"; the crouching
figure at the right evokes "a jumping jack"; and all the women "start up like jerked puppets."[84] To construct the female figure as a
phallus is, in Freudian terms, a fetishistic strategy, a gesture at once of recognition and disavowal of the alarming fact that women
have no penises. Numerous critics have framed Picasso's act in creatingLes Demoiselles in related terms, as a self-ministering ploy to
exorcise his private "demons," his fear of women and others. "My first exorcism-painting," the artist once called the picture, in an oft-
quoted statement.[84] The demons within the work however, represented are mere fissions of danger. As, the images presented are
merely paintings on canvas and rather than putting the viewer at risk of physical harm allow them to address their anxiety within the
sanitized gallery space.[83] Freud's short text Medusa's head with all its multitude of meanings - Including the notion that Medusa's
head is the female sex organ - the sight of which arouses castration anxiety in the young male; the image of castration itself
(decapitation); and the denial of castration, on the one hand by the multiplication of penises (her hair consists of snakes) and, on the
[81]
other, by its power to turn the spectre to stone, in other words, into an erect, albeit dead, phallus.

Rubin, Seckel, Cousins

The 1994 book Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by William Rubin, Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins represents an in-depth analysis of
the work and its genesis. Rubin suggests that some of the figure's faces symbolize the disfigurements of
syphilis, and that the painting
was created following a series of brothel visits by Picasso, who was then temporarily separated from his mistress Fernande Olivier.
Rubin interprets the painting as expressing the artist's atheism, his willingness to risk anarchy for freedom, his fear of disease and
illness, and, most forcefully, 'his deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body, which existed side by side with his craving for and
ecstatic idealization of it.'[85]

Purchase
Jacques Doucet had seen the painting at the Salon d'Antin, yet remarkably seems to
have purchased Les Demoiselles without asking Picasso to unroll it in his studio so
that he could see it again.[68] André Breton later described the transaction:

I remember the day he bought the painting from Picasso, who

strange as it may seem, appeared to be intimidated by Doucet and
even offered no resistance when the price was set at 25,000 francs:
"Well then, it's agreed, M. Picasso." Doucet then said: "You shall
receive 2,000 francs per month, beginning next month, until the sum
of 25,000 francs is reached.[68]

John Richardson quotes Breton in a letter to Doucet aboutLes Demoiselles writing:

through it one penetrates right into the core of Picasso's laboratory

and because it is the crux of the drama, the center of all the conflicts
Jacques Doucet's hôtel particulier, 33
that Picasso has given rise to and that will last forever....It is a work
rue Saint-James, Neuilly-sur-Seine,
which to my mind transcends painting; it is the theater of everything 1929 photograph Pierre Legrain
that has happened in the last 50 years.[86]

Ultimately, it seems Doucet paid 30,000 francs rather than the agreed price.[68] A few months after the purchase Doucet had the
painting appraised at between 250,000 and 300,000 francs. Richardson speculates that Picasso, who by 1924 was on the top of the art
world and didn't need to sell the painting to Doucet, did so and at that low price because Doucet promised Les Demoiselles would go
to the Louvre in his will. However, after Doucet died in 1929 he did not leave the painting to the Louvre in his will, and it was sold
[68]
like most of Doucet's collection through private dealers.

In November 1937 the Jacques Seligman & Co. art gallery in New York City held an exhibition titled "20 Years in the Evolution of
Picasso, 1903–1923" that included Les Demoiselles. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting for $24,000. The museum
raised $18,000 toward the purchase price by selling a Degas painting and the rest came from donations from the co-owners of the
gallery Germain Seligman and Cesar de Hauke.[87]

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition on 15 November 1939 that remained on
view until 7 January 1940. The exhibition entitled: Picasso:40 Years of His Art, was organized by Alfred H. Barr (1902–1981), in
collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition contained 344 works, including the major and then newly painted
Guernica and its studies, as well asLes Demoiselles.[88]

Legacy
In July 2007, Newsweek published a two-page article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing it as the "most influential work of
art of the last 100 years".[89] Art critic Holland Cotter argued that Picasso "changed history with this work. He'd replaced the benign
[90]
ideal of the Classical nude with a new race of sexually armed and dangerous beings."

The painting is prominently featured in the 2018 season of the television series
Genius which focuses on Picasso's life and work.
Painting materials
In 2003, an examination of the painting by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopyperformed by conservators at the Museum of Modern Art
confirmed the presence of the following pigments: lead white, bone black, vermilion, cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, emerald green,
and native earth pigments (such as brownochre) that contain iron.[91][92]

Notes
1. Steinberg, L., The Philosophical Brothel. October, no. 44, Spring 1988. 7–74. First published inArt News vol. LXXI,
September/October 1972
2. Richardson 1991, 19
3. Sam Hunter and John Jacobus,Modern Art, Prentice-Hall, New York, 1977, pp. 135–136
4. Gina M. Rossetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature
, University of Missouri Press, 2006(h
ttps://books.google.com/books?id=_OCk5D-2rfYC&pg=P A146&dq=%22Les+Demoiselles+d%27Avignon%22+%22s
avage%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hVSHVPiYGIu7UfvTgoAG&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Les%20Demois
elles%20d'Avignon%22%20%22savage%22&f=false) ISBN 0826265030
5. Weschler, Lawrence. "Destroy this mad brute": The African root of World W ar I (http://lawrenceweschler.com/library/a
rticle/destroy-this-mad-brute-the-african-roots-of-world-war-i)
. ISBN 9781632867186.
6. John Golding, Visions of the Modern (https://books.google.com/books?id=d5wXeMFxA2IC&pg=P
A56&dq=matisse+r
eaction+Les+Demoiselles+d%27Avignon&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UeiKVI6HA4jjaP_IgsgD&ved=0CDIQ6AEwA w#v=onepa
ge&q=Demoiselles&f=false), University of California Press, 1994,ISBN 0520087925
7. Emily Braun, Rebecca Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection(https://books.google.com/books?id=U_
10BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA147&dq=reaction+to+Les+Demoiselles+d%27Avignon&hl=en&sa=X&ei=teKKVN24LoLUOJTz
gZgF&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false), Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014,ISBN 0300208073
8. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (http://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/83671/sample/9780521583671ws.pdf) ,
edited by Christopher Green, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, Cambridge University Press, 2001
9. The Private Life of a Masterpiece(http://www.bbcactive.com/BroadcastLearning/MediaSupportFiles/PLOAM3%20sy
nopsis.pdf). BBC Series 3, Episode 9. 17, 18
10. Archives de France, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 2007 (French) (http://www.archivesdefrance.culture.
gouv.fr/action-culturelle/celebrations-nationales/2007/arts/les-demoiselles-d-avignon-pablo-picasso)
11. Melissa McQuillan, Pablo Picasso, MoMA, Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, 2009(http://www.moma.org/co
llection/artist.php?artist_id=4609)
12. Picasso Portrait de Allan Stein. Spring 1906(http://www.duvarpaper.com/main.php?g2_itemId=4883)Archived (http
s://web.archive.org/web/20090209044925/http://www .duvarpaper.com/main.php?g2_itemId=4883)9 February 2009
at the Wayback Machine.. duvarpaper.com. Retrieved 27 November 2008.
13. Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company
. Henry Holt, 2003. ISBN 0-8050-7351-5
14. Kramer, Hilton. The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005, 2006,Reflections on Matisse,p. 162,
ISBN 0-15-666370-8
15. Louis Vauxcelles, Le Salon d'Automne, Gil Blas, 17 October 1905. Screen 5 and 6. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale
de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k7522165g/f5.image)
, ISSN 1149-9397 (https://www.worldcat.org/sear
ch?fq=x0:jrnl&q=n2:1149-9397)
16. Chilver, Ian (Ed.). Fauvism (http://www.enotes.com/oxford-art-encyclopedia/fauvism), The Oxford Dictionary of Art,
Oxford University Press, 2004. 26 December 2007.
17. Smith, Roberta. Henri Rousseau: In imaginary jungles, a terrible beauty lurks(https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/
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External links
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the MoMA Online Collection
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Conserving A Modern Masterpiece
Julia Frey, Anatomy of a Masterpiece,New York Times Review of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon By William Rubin,
Helene Seckel and Judith Cousins
Gelett Burgess, The Wild Men of Paris, Matisse, Picasso and Les Fauves,1910 (PDF)

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