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''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'' is a celebrated Painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five Prostitute s in a Brothel . Picasso painted it in France , and completed it in the summer of 1907 . Picasso created over one hundred sketches and studies in preparation for this work, one of the most important in the early development of Cubism . Within the narrative of early modern art, it is widely held as a Key Work . It hangs in the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City . :Medium: Oil on canvas :Original Size: 8 ft x 7 ft 8 in ANALYSIS OF FIGURES Picasso drew each of the figures differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far left has heavy paint application throughout. Her head is the most cubist of all five, featuring sharp Geometric Shape s. The cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. The Mask ed figure was derived from an African Mask with green stripes and sharp edges. The two Iberian figures in the center were influenced by Iberian Sculpture s, and are characterized as such because of their prominent ears and wide, staring eyes; they are painted with similar features. Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably Alfred Barr , the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, a style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years. In 1974 , however, critic Leo Steinberg in his landmark essay "The Philosophical Brothel" posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches, which were completely ignored by most critics, he argues that, far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer. He notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare. The earliest sketches of the work actually feature two men inside the brothel, one a sailor and the other a medical student (often depicted holding either a book or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a 's invention, "trauma of the gaze", and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and Sexual Relation s at large. TRIVIA Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a perfect anagram of "vile meaningless doodles", as noted in the book '' The Da Vinci Code '' by Dan Brown . EXTERNAL LINKS |