No. No painting by Picasso was aboard the Titanic when it sank in April 1912. The idea comes from James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, in which the young heroine, Rose, travels with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon among her belongings.
The real painting never went near the ship. In 1912 it was in Paris, with the artist, and for decades it has hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art.
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The confusion comes from a short scene. Rose, played by Kate Winslet, is a young first-class passenger engaged to a rich man named Cal. In her private cabin, she unpacks the pictures she has brought aboard.
A maid asks who painted one of them, and Rose answers "Something Picasso." Cal declares that the man will never amount to a thing. The audience of 1997 laughs at him, because it knows what became of Picasso.
For 1912, though, Rose's taste is hard to believe. Picasso had finished Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in Paris five years earlier, in 1907, and in April 1912 it had never been shown to the public. It stayed in his studio.
The few friends who saw it there had been shocked. Picasso had painted a group of nude women whose bodies look cut from flat, angular pieces, like shards of glass, with none of the soft curves painters had always given the female body. Some of their faces look like masks.
The woman at lower right shows how far he went. She crouches with her back turned, and yet her face turns to look straight out, as if her head had been twisted all the way around.
Even the most adventurous painters of the day balked. Henri Matisse was furious, and he was then the boldest painter in Paris. Georges Braque, who would soon invent Cubism alongside Picasso, and André Derain, another close friend, were troubled.
The public saw the picture only in 1916, four years after the sinking. That year the poet André Salmon, a friend of Picasso, organized an exhibition in the Paris showroom of the fashion designer Paul Poiret, on the avenue d'Antin, which is why the show is known as the Salon d'Antin.
Salmon also gave the work the title it carries today. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon means "the young ladies of Avignon," and it refers to Carrer d'Avinyó, a street of brothels in Barcelona, the city where Picasso had trained. The women in the picture are prostitutes.
So in April 1912 the painting had no public and no name. When Rose says "Something Picasso," she cannot call it by its title, because that title did not exist yet.
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