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. 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.
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 — 12 minutes.
- Study for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — 3 minutes.
- Boy Leading a Horse — 5 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
Displays and room openings can change. Check the MoMA website on the day of your visit before following a route.
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.
