Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is called the painting that started Cubism because Picasso painted it in Paris in 1907: five women in a brothel, their faces cut into hard angles, two of them wearing features like African masks. Almost everyone who saw it in his studio disliked it. A year later, Georges Braque, who had looked hard at it, was working in the same broken style.
The title is misleading. The women are sex workers on the carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona's red-light district, not in Avignon in France.
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Cubism, though, did not get its name from this canvas. The word first appeared in print in 1908, in a review by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, and the painter he was reviewing was Braque.
Whether the canvas counts as Cubist is still argued. The dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who sold the work of both Picasso and Braque, called it the beginning of Cubism, and others deny that it is Cubist at all. I side with the others. The canvas broke the old rules, but it had not yet put anything in their place.
The name Picasso never used
Picasso most often called the painting "mon bordel," my brothel, and he disliked the title it carries today. Friends in his circle knew it as Le Bordel Philosophique.
The name on the museum wall came from the poet André Salmon, who organized the show where the canvas first appeared in public, at the Salon d'Antin in Paris in 1916. The art historian William Rubin suggested that Salmon picked Avignon because the city had long been linked with pleasure and vice.
Until then the canvas stayed in Picasso's studio. In 1907, one painter who saw it there predicted that Picasso would one day be found hanged behind it.
What You'll Discover
Which painter foresaw Picasso hanged behind it.
Where the masked faces really came from.
Two men Picasso cut from the sketches.
What Braque painted at L'Estaque in 1908.
What a couturier paid for it in 1924.