Les Demoiselles D'Avignon - Picasso, 1907

• Picasso has radically compressed the space of his canvas and replaced sensual eroticism with a kind of aggressively crude pornography. (Note, for example, the squatting figure at the lower right.)
• His space is interior, closed, and almost claustrophobic. 
• Like Matisse’s later Blue Nude (itself a response to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), the women fill the entire space and seem trapped within it. 
• No longer set in a classical past, Picasso’s image is clearly of our time. Here are five sex workers from an actual brothel, located on a street named Avignon in the red-light district in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia in northern Spain—a street, by the way, which Picasso had frequented.
• Style


  Proto-Cubist. Art critic John Berger, in his controversial 1965 biography ‘The Success and

  Failure of Picasso’, describes the work as ‘the starting point of Cubism’.
• sharp, jagged planes create mass and solidity.
• Carol Duncan


  "Demoiselles prismatically mirrors her many opposing faces: whore and deity, decadent and savage, tempting and repelling, awesome and obscene, looming and crouching, masked and naked, threatening and powerless"
• Art critic John Berger, in his controversial 1965 biography ‘The Success and Failure of Picasso’, describes the work as ‘the starting point of Cubism’.
• Einstein's Theory of Relativity in this work

  by presenting multiple perspectives simultaneously, fragmenting forms into geometric shapes, and incorporating abstraction. These elements parallel the relativistic notions of space and time as flexible and interconnected, and the abstract, non-representational approach of theoretical physics.