A painting shown nine years after it was painted
Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in Paris between June and July 1907, in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir. The canvas then stays rolled up, shown only to a few close friends — Braque, Matisse and Derain see it and remain unsettled — until its first public exhibition in 1916, at the Salon d'Antin. Picasso himself seems to have hesitated over what he had painted: the current title is not his but the critic André Salmon's, borrowed from the name of a street in Barcelona known for its brothels.
Room 502 brings this painting together with two works that flank it in time: a preparatory study and an earlier canvas that shows where the central figure comes from.
1. Five women, two styles in a single painting
Look at the five figures from left to right: the three on the left stay close to the Iberian art Picasso had known since 1906, while the two on the right, their faces treated in angular planes evoking masks, owe more to the African art he discovered at the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in spring 1907. This internal break, visible within a single canvas, is one of the reasons Les Demoiselles is considered the birth certificate of Cubism rather than the endpoint of the Fauvism Picasso started from.
The canvas measures 2.43 by 2.33 metres — the scale of grand history painting, usually reserved for religious or mythological scenes, here applied to five nude figures in a brothel. It is this mismatch between the solemn format and the raw subject that unsettled the first visitors who came to see it in 1916.
2. Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: the face before the mask
The Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted in early 1907, shows an earlier stage of the composition, before Picasso pushed the faces toward the angular abstraction of the final painting. Placed next to the finished work, it lets you measure concretely how far things moved in just a few months — a still-legible face becomes an almost geometric mask.
3. Two Nudes and Nude with Joined Hands: the faces that anticipate Les Demoiselles
Two Nudes, painted in late 1906, shows two women in near mirror image, their terracotta tones and heavy bodies betraying Picasso's interest in ancient Iberian sculpture from his native Spain. The face of the figure on the left, with its angular nose and dark, hollow eyes, strikingly resembles that of the woman at the far left of Les Demoiselles, hanging in the same room — like her, this figure holds open a curtain and gazes outward, as though inviting the viewer in.
Nude with Joined Hands, painted the same year, once belonged to Leo and Gertrude Stein, who bought it directly from Picasso before it remained in Gertrude Stein's collection until 1946 — the American collectors whose Paris salon brought together Picasso, Matisse and their respective circles at a very early stage.
4. Woman Plaiting Her Hair: Iberian art before Africa
Woman Plaiting Her Hair, painted in Paris in late summer or fall 1906, shows a nude woman, her arms raised behind her head to braid her hair — an intimate, natural gesture, rendered with firmer contours than the softness of the body. The painting belongs to the same period as Two Nudes, marked by Picasso's discovery of ancient Iberian sculpture at the Louvre, where he saw pieces from Cerro de los Santos and the Lady of Elche — an influence that, combined with Cézanne's lesson on the cube, the cylinder and the sphere, directly prepares the break of Les Demoiselles the following year.
5. Boy Leading a Horse: just before the break
Boy Leading a Horse, painted in Paris in 1905-06, belongs to the period immediately preceding Les Demoiselles: still-classical drawing, muted colours, an almost timeless subject. Placed in the same room, it serves as a point of comparison — less than two years separate this harmoniously built boy from the fractured faces of Les Demoiselles.
The painting entered MoMA's collection in 1939, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest — but not directly: the museum obtained it in exchange for a Degas already in the Bliss collection, Jockeys on Horseback before Distant Hills. It was this exchange mechanism, provided for in Bliss's will, that allowed MoMA to bring together several major pieces of its collection in the years following her death in 1931.
6. Head of a Sleeping Woman: a study from the same sketchbook
Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), painted in Paris in the summer of 1907, comes from a sketchbook — Carnet 10 — that Picasso used between June and July 1907 to prepare both Les Demoiselles and Nude with Drapery, now held at the Hermitage Museum. The face, simplified into broad planes, shows the same investigation that leads to the most radical figures in Les Demoiselles, here applied to a single isolated head rather than a whole composition.
Hung in the same room, this study is a reminder that Les Demoiselles was not an isolated accident in Picasso's output in the summer of 1907, but a project pursued on several fronts at once — paintings, studies, sketchbooks — of which the main canvas is only the most visible piece.
7. Two heads: the 1906 watercolour and the 1908 Woman’s Head
Head (Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), from 1906, is a watercolour on paper measuring 22.4 × 17.5 cm (John S. Newberry Collection). Picasso made hundreds of sketches and preparatory studies from the winter of 1906, before arriving at the final composition in the autumn: this small face is one of them.
Woman’s Head, from early 1908 (oil on canvas, 73.6 × 60.6 cm), was painted a few months after the Demoiselles. It first belonged to Maurice de Vlaminck in Paris in 1908, then passed through the hands of several dealers and collectors — Flechtheim, Cassirer, Thannhauser — before entering MoMA in 1996 through the Florene May Schoenborn Bequest.
How much time
The room can be seen quickly, but Les Demoiselles is worth a long stop: it is a painting that reads left to right, like a stylistic shift caught in the act.
- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — 14 minutes.
- Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — 5 minutes.
- Two Nudes — 7 minutes.
- Nude with Joined Hands — 6 minutes.
- Woman Plaiting Her Hair — 6 minutes.
- Boy Leading a Horse — 7 minutes.
- Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery) — 5 minutes.
- Head (Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), 1906 — 4 minutes.
- Woman's Head, 1908 — 7 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against MoMA's collection and conservation pages (moma.org) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- MoMA — Conservation, History of the Painting
- Wikipedia EN — Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- Almine Rech — Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern
- The Met — Lillie P. Bliss, Modern Art Index Project
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Two Nudes
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Nude with Joined Hands
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Woman Plaiting Her Hair
- MoMA — Gallery 502: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery)
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Head (Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), 1906
- MoMA — Pablo Picasso, Woman's Head, early 1908
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Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
