Description
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso brings five women into a compressed arrangement of angular bodies and fractured planes. Their differing poses and facial treatments refuse a single, consistent viewpoint. Rather than opening onto a convincing room, the shallow space presses figures and surroundings together, making the structure of the painting as insistent as its human subjects.
Painted in Paris in 1907, this oil on canvas emerged from an extensive sequence of studies. Picasso drew on European painting and on sculptural traditions including African and Iberian art, transforming those sources into sharply contrasting forms. The title, adopted later, refers to a street in Barcelona rather than the French city of Avignon. Held by the Museum of Modern Art, the work is central to discussions of modern painting and the origins of Cubism, although its precise relationship to that movement remains debated.
Read our guide to giclée prints or browse the Pablo Picasso collection.
