by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Introduction
Five women fill an almost square canvas. There is scarcely room for them to stand, sit or turn. One pulls aside a curtain at the left; another crouches at the lower right with her back toward us but her face twisted around. The three others face out. Between their bodies are hard blue and white shapes that might be drapery, wall or intervals of empty space. At the bottom, a small arrangement of fruit projects toward the viewer. Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is unsettling not simply because it depicts naked bodies, but because it refuses to let the viewer look at those bodies from one comfortable, stable position. [1]
Picasso made the large oil painting in Paris in 1907. The Museum of Modern Art in New York dates the finished canvas to June–July and records its size as 243.9 × 233.7 centimetres (about eight by seven feet eight inches). It belongs to MoMA's collection as object 333.1939. The painting is commonly described as a turning point on the way to Cubism. That is useful if it opens a question—how a figure and its surrounding space can be taken apart and remade—but misleading if it suggests that one picture, completed on one day, single-handedly invented an entire movement. Picasso worked through hundreds of studies, drawing on older European art and on African, Oceanic and other traditions encountered in a colonial capital. What the work changed, and what its sources ask us to confront, both deserve attention. [1][2][3]
At a Glance
- Made: Paris, June–July 1907
- Medium and size: Oil on canvas, 243.9 × 233.7 centimetres
- Collection: Museum of Modern Art, New York (333.1939)
- Composition: Five women in a shallow, fractured space
- First public display: Salon d’Antin, Paris, 1916
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in Picasso's career
First Communion
1896Three Musicians
1921Guernica
1937Las Meninas series
1957The highlighted work is dated with the qualifications explained in the sources on this page. The other works are selective points of comparison, not the start or end of a style.
Contents
- What do we see in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?
- Who are the women, and why is the painting called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?
- How did Picasso develop the picture?
- What artistic sources shaped the five figures?
- Is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a Cubist painting?
- How was it received, and how did it reach MoMA?
- Why does the painting still matter?
What do we see in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?
The painting does not offer a window into a room in the conventional sense. Curtains and coloured planes press forward until they seem as active as the figures. The woman at far left is seen largely in profile as she opens or holds the drapery. Two figures near the centre raise their arms, presenting their bodies almost frontally. At the right a standing woman looks out with a dark, angular face, while the crouching figure below her turns in a way no single, fixed view of a body could easily explain. The five bodies are recognisable, yet they do not appear to have been painted according to one consistent account of depth, light or anatomy. [1]
Look especially at the crouching woman. Her back and legs suggest that we are behind her, but her face turns outward. The different directions coexist instead of being tidied into a natural pose. The surrounding blue fragments can be read as the folds of a curtain, as a broken background, or as shapes that cut across the figure. Picasso makes it hard to decide where person ends and room begins. This uncertainty is a formal achievement, not a mistake to be corrected in the viewer's imagination.
The little still life of fruit at the foot of the canvas offers another point of entry. Its forms are more readily named than many of the passages above it, but they are just as sharply angled. Fruit in a painting can carry associations with appetite, display and the still-life tradition. No reviewed primary source, however, establishes one fixed symbolic code for each piece here. The fruit helps draw the eye into the crowded lower edge and makes the encounter feel close; it need not be decoded as a secret message to matter.
The faces differ strikingly. The two central women have relatively simplified, almond-shaped features. The right-hand faces are jagged and mask-like, while the left-hand figure is built by yet another set of conventions. This is not a progression from an “ordinary” face to a supposedly less developed one. MoMA points out that Picasso combined visual references from several places and periods. The differences are part of the painting's deliberate disjunction, and they also open difficult questions about what Picasso took from artworks made by others. [1]
Who are the women, and why is the painting called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?
The French title is often translated as The Young Ladies of Avignon. That translation alone can lead readers to imagine the Provençal city of Avignon, or a harmless group portrait. MoMA instead connects the title to sex workers on Carrer d’Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, where Picasso spent formative years. The scene's brothel setting is also supported by surviving early studies. Nothing in the principal object record identifies the five finished figures as portraits of named women or establishes that Picasso painted a particular Barcelona interior from life. [1][4]
The familiar title was not simply written on the canvas in 1907. Picasso showed the untitled or differently described picture privately to visitors in his Paris studio that summer. Its first public exhibition came in 1916, at the Salon d’Antin in Paris. MoMA's historical account says Picasso's friend, the writer André Salmon, gave it the name Les Demoiselles d’Avignon for that exhibition. The painting had previously been referred to as The Philosophical Brothel. These are stages in its reception, not evidence that a title alone tells us exactly what Picasso intended every painted feature to mean. [1][5]
The women face the viewer rather than interacting in a settled story. That confrontational arrangement can make us aware of the position from which we look. The early brothel studies make the shift clearer: once male visitors were removed from the composition, the relation between the painted women and the actual viewer changed. It is possible to discuss the painting's sexual setting without turning the women into a moral warning, inventing individual life stories, or repeating the old habit of describing them merely as a device in a male artist's formal experiment. [4]
Watch: Pablo Picasso
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Watch on YouTubeHow did Picasso develop the picture?
Les Demoiselles was the outcome of months of work, not a sudden flash detached from Picasso's earlier paintings. MoMA dates his first preparations to the winter of 1906–07 and counts hundreds of drawings and sketches. The Musée national Picasso-Paris preserves many drawings and a sketchbook with successive arrangements of figures. The Spanish Museo Reina Sofía goes further in its interpretation: its Picasso 1906 research presents the 1907 canvas as the culmination of a rich period of experimentation in Paris and Gósol, rather than treating everything Picasso made in 1906 as a mere warm-up. [1][2][3]
One small oil study at MoMA makes the changing cast especially vivid. It shows seven figures in a curtained brothel room: five nude women and two men. A sailor sits near the centre. At the left is a medical student holding a skull. Neither man appears in the completed painting. The women, rather than facing these male figures, come to face out toward us. The skull belongs to this early study, not to a concealed corner of the finished picture. MoMA describes the study as an unusually direct view into Picasso's process. [4]
The French museum's sketchbook records reveal further adjustments: arrangements with a medical student, others with a sailor, and studies of individual bodies and heads. These pieces should not be collapsed into a single preliminary drawing that Picasso simply enlarged. They show choices made and remade. A later five-figure composition moved closer to the final grouping. What changed was not only the number of people but the kind of encounter the picture stages. [2][6]
Nor does the evidence allow us to say that the seven-figure study is literally hidden whole beneath the final canvas. It is a separate work. Technical examination of Les Demoiselles does reveal reworking on the large canvas, especially in the heads. X-radiographs and conservation study have helped specialists distinguish earlier and later paint decisions. The painting's unequal degrees of finish once encouraged some viewers to call it incomplete, but MoMA's conservation account cautions against treating its roughness as proof that Picasso simply abandoned it. The awkward joins and conflicting styles can be seen as part of what the finished painting does. [6][7]
The work also belongs to a larger transition in Picasso's treatment of the body. The Reina Sofía's Spanish-language account stresses his 1906 experiments with the nude, with bodies that do not sit easily within inherited academic ideals, and with formal ideas drawn from El Greco, Cézanne, Iberian and ancient Mediterranean art. That history complicates a convenient myth in which the 1907 canvas appeared from nowhere after one revelatory visit to a museum. It does not make the painting any less daring; it lets us see daring as sustained, searching labour. [3]
What artistic sources shaped the five figures?
The painting brings unlike visual systems into close proximity. MoMA relates the far-left woman's striding pose and clenched hand to ancient Egyptian and South Asian sculpture. It finds echoes of classical sculpture, known through Roman copies of Greek works, in the raised arms of the central women. Iberian sculpture and European paintings were among the forms Picasso examined. The two faces at the right evoke features of nineteenth-century African and Oceanic masks. Such comparisons help us look carefully, but no single source named here should be imagined as an exact template proved for every line of a figure. [1]
The sources were not all equally available to Picasso, and they did not meet in Paris on equal terms. African and Oceanic objects entered French museums, markets and private collections through colonial channels. Their makers' names, functions and local meanings were often not retained in the accounts through which European artists encountered them. Calling these artworks merely “primitive influences” would repeat that loss. It would also misdescribe sophisticated objects as though their value began when a European painter borrowed from them. MoMA itself raises the question of appropriation in discussing Les Demoiselles. [1]
There is a familiar story of Picasso visiting the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro and being transformed by the masks he saw. That encounter matters to the work's history, but it is too simple to make it the single cause of the painting or to assume that every mask-like passage must have begun there. The Reina Sofía notes that Picasso had already encountered African art in 1906, before the much-told 1907 visit; this longer context is explored in our African Period guide. A German-language Museum Berggruen object record for an individual study of a right-hand figure treats the Trocadéro connection as a scholarly supposition and notes that Picasso later disputed African influence on the painting. His retrospective denial and the evident formal comparisons need to be considered together, not made to cancel each other automatically. [3][8]
The Museum Berggruen's study also shows why it is useful to inspect individual works instead of stopping at a shorthand label. Its account points out that the face can seem mask-like partly because its colour is so different from the body below. In the final canvas this contrast is intensified by the dense, fractured surroundings. “Mask-like” describes an effect we can see; identifying a unique source object, a particular culture or Picasso's precise private intention requires further evidence. [8]
Is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a Cubist painting?
It is often called the beginning of Cubism. There is a reason for that. A body is no longer presented as a smoothly modelled volume in a consistently deep room. Angular pieces and shifting viewpoints create a surface that seems to break figures apart and join them to the space around them. These experiments fed the subsequent work through which Picasso and Georges Braque developed what came to be called Cubism. The painting belongs centrally in that history. [1][2]
Yet belonging to Cubism's history is not the same as fitting every definition of a Cubist picture. MoMA records a disagreement: Picasso's dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler regarded Les Demoiselles as Cubism's beginning, while other scholars deny that the painting itself is Cubist. Its faces and bodies draw on visibly different traditions, and its brothel subject retains a dramatic force that cannot be reduced to an exercise in analytic form. The most useful answer is therefore qualified: the canvas is a crucial precursor and turning point, and whether it is already Cubist depends on how the term is defined. [1]
The Reina Sofía's account complicates the timeline further by finding important steps toward modernist form in works of 1906, before Les Demoiselles. This does not diminish the 1907 painting. It reminds us that an artistic movement rarely begins with a switch thrown by one artist in one room. Braque did not help Picasso paint this canvas; their collaboration and the art later called Cubism belong to a subsequent history. [2][3]
How was it received, and how did it reach MoMA?
Visitors to Picasso's studio saw the painting in 1907. MoMA's 2007 exhibition research describes reactions among friends, artists, dealers and critics that ranged from shock and incomprehension to laughter. These private encounters were important, but they were not a public unveiling. That happened nine years later at the 1916 Salon d’Antin. Even then, the canvas did not immediately become the universally familiar museum icon it is today. Its reputation grew through further looking, argument, collecting and exhibition. [1][5]
The French collector Jacques Doucet acquired the painting in 1924. After his death it passed through his estate and then the art market. MoMA's founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. pursued it for the museum in the late 1930s; the museum's purchase was completed in 1939. It appeared that spring in Art in Our Time, the tenth-anniversary exhibition opening MoMA's new building. Saying that MoMA “acquired it in 1937” compresses a transaction that took longer to complete. The museum's collection number, 333.1939, is a useful reminder of the final acquisition year. [1][5]
The picture's physical history did not stop when it entered the museum. Conservators examined earlier interventions and undertook treatment during MoMA's early-2000s renovation. X-radiography helped document changes Picasso made on the canvas, while conservation addressed materials added after he painted it. These studies do not solve every question about his motives, but they make the painting's making and later care more concrete. [6][7]
MoMA owns the work and publishes its object record online. Display locations can change with loans, conservation or gallery rotations, so anyone planning a visit should check that current record before travelling. The museum's online image is useful for viewing and study, but its presence on a public page does not grant another publisher permission to reproduce it. [1]
Why does the painting still matter?
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon refuses several comforting expectations at once. It presents a brothel scene without settling into an anecdote about individual customers and women. It makes bodies recognisable but denies them a single, obedient perspective. It takes visual ideas from traditions that had previously been kept apart in European art histories, while exposing the unequal colonial conditions under which some of those ideas were made available to Picasso. Its later fame cannot erase those conditions, and its formal power cannot be fully understood without them. [1][3]
The strongest claim for the painting is not that it single-handedly invented modern art. It is that it made the problem of looking newly urgent. We have to move between five distinct figures, an unstable room, a changing history of sketches, and sources whose cultural meanings cannot be flattened into a story of one artist's genius. Later Cubism is one part of its legacy. The continuing debate about the title, the bodies and the borrowed forms is another. The canvas still asks not only what Picasso changed in painting, but what a viewer chooses to see—and to leave unseen. [1][2][3]
Discussion
Use the evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. These are editorial prompts, not reader comments.
Reader Insights
How do the five figures deny you one comfortable viewpoint?
Which sources of form can be named without erasing their makers’ cultures?
What changed between the painting’s 1907 completion and 1916 public display?
Join the Conversation
Which reading best fits the evidence?
References
The Museum of Modern Art, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, collection object 333.1939.
Musée national Picasso-Paris, French account of Picasso and Cubism and 1907 drawings archive.
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spanish Picasso 1906: La gran transformación research dossier, 2023.
The Museum of Modern Art, Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, object 372.1991.
The Museum of Modern Art, announcement for Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon at 100, 2007.
The Museum of Modern Art, conservation research on the painting's working process and its preparatory studies.
The Museum of Modern Art, technical analysis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum Berggruen, German catalogue record for Weiblicher Akt (Studie für “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”).
Image Credits
- Pedro J Pacheco. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Resized to 1024px; no crop. Source record. Licence.
