Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Among Picasso’s profuse output of more than 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In this painting, he did away with artistic conventions, like naturalism and perspective, hurling even the most forward-thinking viewers into a future they weren’t quite ready for. Picasso was a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant to France when he made the painting, working in a cramped warren of studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre. The story of its making begins with hundreds of preparatory paintings and drawings, which he generated over an intensive six-month period, working out his ideas. They reflected Picasso’s responses to Paul Cézanne’s structured, almost sculptural depiction of objects and figures and his prismatic structuring of space in his still lifes and scenes of bathers. They also reflected his fascination with the African, Iberian, and Oceanic masks and statuary populating France’s ethnographic museums, as well as the lusts and anxieties wrapped up in his own, complex relationships with women.