Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, Spain. The figures are confrontational and not conventionally feminine, being rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes, some to a menacing degree. The far left figure exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are in an Iberian style of Picasso's Spain, while the two on the right have African mask-like features. Picasso said the ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force” leading him to add a shamanistic aspect to his project.

Drawing from tribal primitivism while eschewing central dictates of Renaissance perspective and verisimilitude for a compressed picture plane using a Baroque composition while employing Velazquez’s confrontational approach seen in Las Meninas, Picasso sought to take the lead of the avant-garde from Henri Matisse. John Richardson said Demoiselles made Picasso the most pivotal artist in Western painting since Giotto and laid a path forward for Picasso and George’s Braque to follow in their joint development of cubism, the effects of which on modern art were profound and unsurpassed in the 20th century.

Les Demoiselles was revolutionary, controversial and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends. Henri Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle. Georges Braque too initially disliked the painting yet studied the work in great detail. His subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the cubist revolution. Its resemblance to Cézanne's The Bathers, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics.

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. Painted in Picasso's studio in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, it was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, at an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon. It was at this exhibition that Salmon, who had previously titled the painting in 1912 Le bordel philosophique, renamed it to its current, less scandalous title, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, instead of the title originally chosen by Picasso, Le Bordel d'Avignon. Picasso, who always referred to it as mon bordel ("my brothel"), or Le Bordel d'Avignon, never liked Salmon's title and would have instead preferred the bowdlerization Las chicas de Avignon ("The Girls of Avignon").

Source: Wikipedia

10 funny things about "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"

1. The title of the artwork, "Avignon," does not refer to the location in Provence, but to the name of a street in Barcelona's prostitution quarter.
2. Picasso was strongly influenced by Paul Gauguin's Tahitian writings and his 1906 art show. In 1906, Picasso was inspired by Gauguin's sculpture of the Tahitian goddess Oviri to experiment with ceramics and woodcuts. Art historians credit Gauguin's work with having a considerable primitivism effect on "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."
3. In a previous version of "Les Demoiselles," the person to the left was a male medical student with a skull in his hand entering the brothel, but the artist believed that such a customer would detract from the overall drama of the picture.
4. Picasso's interest in primitive art, not only of African origin, but also of ancient Iberia, or modern-day Spain and Portugal, is reflected in the masks in the picture. Primitive art's simple forms, angular planes, and striking shapes were instrumental in the artist's reformation of artistic traditions.
5. By reducing his figures to geometric shapes, Picasso defies centuries of artistic history in which the human form is deified, anatomically replicated, and/or glorified.
6. The artist's neglect of perspective is one of the reasons "Les Demoiselles" so groundbreaking. There is no vanishing point, no place for the eye to travel beyond the women's piercing gazes.
7. When Picasso's colleague and rival Henri Matisse saw the work, he reacted violently. Matisse saw "Les Demoiselles" as a critique of the modern art movement, and he felt it took the spotlight from his own Blue Nude and Le Bonheur de Vivre. He referred to the women in the artwork as "hideous whores."
8. Picasso worked on hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings for "Les Demoiselles" over the course of six months. His preparation work for a single artwork was likely more extensive than that of any other artist in history, and certainly more intensive than that of any other artwork he produced.
9. The painting, Picasso's nascent Cubist work, was not embraced by the art world until early in the 1920s, when Andre Breton republished the photo and the essay headlined "The Wild Men of Paris: Matisse, Picasso, and Les Fauves."
10. Due to the generally negative reactions of his immediate circle of friends and coworkers, Picasso kept "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in his Montmartre, Paris studio for years after its completion in 1907. The painting was originally shown to the public at the Salon d'Antin in 1916, however a photograph of it appeared in The Architectural Record in 1910.