Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)

by Pericles Lewis

Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) (click to elarge). Source: moma.org.
Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) (click to elarge). Source: moma.org.

Pablo Picasso’s painting “The Young Ladies of Avignon” (“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”; 1907) is the most famous example of the way in which the use of geometric forms and planes in African masks helped to inspire the rise of cubism and abstract art. Picasso plays with the tradition that makes the female nude a symbol of natural purity; the subjects of his painting are prostitutes. The distorted shapes of the women’s bodies, as also in Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude of the same year, challenge the expectation that paintings will offer idealized representations of female beauty.


Picasso's distortion of the women's faces makes the painting a famous example of primitivism in modern art. While the appeal to primitive art served in part as a challenge to western tradition, African art also seemed to Picasso and his contemporaries to confirm the direction that modern painting had taken since Cézanne. The modernists admired the abstract quality of African and other native art, its tendency to turn the human face into a geometric form rather than a realistic copy of nature. This interest in the formal qualities of the work of art, rather than its accuracy as a representation of reality, contributed importantly to the development of modernism.[1]


  1. This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 73, 75.