Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso, MoMA, New York: Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories – Spring 2026

Artist and art teacher Áine Andrews returns with another series of lectures on Famous Paintings and their Hidden Histories. For the second installment of this six part lecture series, Áine will focus on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, recounting its history, as well as that of the artist and his story.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, MoMA New York

One of the most well-known canvases of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso’s breakthrough painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, shocked the world. Not even the artist’s friends could understand his complete abandonment of artistic conventions, like naturalism and perspective, and it pointed to a future they weren’t quite ready for.

Painted in 1907 the huge canvas remained in Picasso’s studio in Paris until its debut in 1916 when it scandalized the public. No longer set in a classical past, this was an image clearly of its time. Here are five sex workers from an actual brothel, located on a street named Avignon in the red-light district in Barcelona, a street which the Spanish artist had frequented regularly when he lived there.

In this deeply unsettling work, the women are modelled directly on African masks, with angular lines and flat, geometric planes with sharp edged and radically simplified faces. They emerge from curtains that look like shattered glass and their enormous almond-shaped eyes, inspired by African and Iberian carvings, fix provocatively on the viewer. At the bottom near their feet is a small arrangement of fruit, with a sliver of melon, that like the bodies, seems too sharp to touch.

Its meaning, however, is clear; the fruit is pointing to the woman of the viewer’s choice. Picasso was no feminist and there is no doubt that the viewer is male.