Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Five larger-than-life female nudes crowd together in a shallow, confined space.

In the foreground lie pieces of fruit, including a slice of melon as sharp as a blade.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—an elegant title.

A painting depicting noblewomen from the beautiful French city of Avignon.

Or so one might assume.

Yet it does not refer to Avignon in France.

Rather, it depicts prostitutes from Carrer d'Avinyó, an actual street in Barcelona, Spain.

The word "demoiselles" was added later to soften the scandal.

The winter of 1906.

At the Bateau-Lavoir, a studio in Montmartre, Paris.

Twenty-five-year-old Pablo Picasso was just emerging from extreme poverty.

Yet his mind was far from at ease.

Henri Matisse's monumental Le Bonheur de Vivre was winning rapturous acclaim across the avant-garde art world.

A fierce sense of rivalry gripped him.

Picasso poured his heart and soul into conceiving a masterpiece that would overturn the traditions of Western painting.

It was not a commission from a patron.

It was conceived entirely on his own initiative.

For his subject, he chose a brothel in Barcelona he had frequented in his youth.

He created hundreds of preparatory studies.

In his initial composition, two men appeared alongside the five prostitutes.

One was a medical student carrying a book or a skull.

A figure of reason, mindful of the perils of venereal disease.

The other was a sailor drinking wine, surrounded by women.

A man indulging in physical desires.

An allegorical narrative.

Yet when working on the final canvas, Picasso completely removed both men.

He stripped away the storyline.

Then, in the summer of 1907, he drastically repainted the faces of the two figures on the right.

Resembling African tribal masks, they featured sharply angled noses and dark, hollow eye sockets.

These were faces forged as magical weapons against terrifying, unknown forces.

When the finished painting was unveiled in his studio,

the reaction from close friends and fellow artists was merciless.

There was intense outrage and bewilderment.

Matisse ridiculed it as a bad joke on modern art.

Georges Braque remarked, "It feels as though you want to make us drink gasoline and eat tow so that we can spit fire."

André Derain said:

"One day Picasso will hang himself behind this canvas."