Les Demoiselles d'Avignon facts for kids

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) was a 1907 cubist painting by Picasso. Part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it depicts five women. The far left figure exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are shown in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features, an interest of Picasso at the time. The female figures are distorted and appear slightly menacing with their angular body shapes.

Picasso created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the final work. He long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles.

When the 8 square feet (0.74 m²) painting was shown in his studio to a group of painters and critics, they were outraged. Henri Matisse called it a hoax and an attempt to paint the fourth dimension.

According to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler Les Demoiselles was the beginning of Cubism:

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. [...]

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....

Although Les Demoiselles had an enormous and profound influence on modern art, its impact was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years. 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. The painting was reproduced again in Cahiers d'art (1927), within an article dedicated to African art.

It has been called one of the most significant paintings of the 20th century.

Images for kids

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  Paul Cézanne, Bather, 1885–1887, Museum of Modern Art, formerly collection Lillie P. Bliss

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  Henri Rousseau, The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, 1905, was the reason for the term Fauvism, and the original "Wild Beast"

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  African Fang mask similar in style to those Picasso saw in Paris just prior to painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

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  Congo masks published by Leo Frobenius in his 1898 book Die Masken und Geheimbunde Afrika

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  An illustration from Jouffret's Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions. The book, which influenced Picasso, was given to him by Princet.

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  Jacques Doucet's hôtel particulier, 33 rue Saint-James, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1929 photograph Pierre Legrain

See also

In Spanish: Las señoritas de Avignon para niños