The Young Ladies of Avignon

Oil Painting Reproductions

The Young Ladies of Avignon is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, giving them a savage aura. In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The proto-cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art. Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends.