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Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
The moment when the Renaissance tradition was unceremoniously done away with by Pablo Picasso’s audacious imagination
(L to R) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal
[(L to R) Public domain/Rogers Fund 1956/CC]
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PABLO PICASSO, an immigrant from Spain in Paris, was a 25 when he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. The preparatory work took over six months and hundreds of sketches.
The Girls of Avignon, or Le Bordel d’Avignon, which was Picasso original title, depicts women of a brothel in Carrer d’Avinyo, a street in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, where Picasso lived and which he was familiar with.
It was Picasso’s friend, the art critic Andre Salmon, who managed its first exhibition and, anticipating public outrage, renamed it Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
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