If this wasn’t a WTF moment in art history then I don’t know what was.
Sick of playing by the rules, Picasso just went for it in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon), and quite literally changed the face of painting as we knew it. Folks say this painting hails the advent of modern art, which is probably why it is one of the most visited painting at the MoMA.
These odd looking ladies stare out at us from a brothel window in a very “whatchu lookin’ at?” kind of way. The frank, direct gaze of Manet’s Olympia and how she makes the viewer uncomfortable may have inspired Picasso, but these prostitutes make Olympia look run of the mill. The art world was shocked by Picasso’s total dismissal of those little things taught in art school like perspective, anatomy, scale, yadda-yadda-yadda. But for real, what is going on in this painting? Is that woman on the right peeking out of curtains behind everyone else or on the same visual plane? Are the two figures in the center standing up or lying down? And I can’t even start with the squatting figure that looks like she's doing her best The Excorcist impression.
Before this painting, Picasso was stuck in his Rose period and playing it quite safe. And then suddenly – there was this. It was like shards of glass had exploded all over the canvas and left these jagged ladies behind. Originally, in the sketches, there was a man holding a book in the painting too, but he was left out of the final composition. And a good thing, too. Because girl power is going strong here. Even though the ladies look like they’re posing in the display case of a shop window, they seem completely unapologetic. They appear unaware of the fact that their faces are nothing like the ones you’d see on earlier nudes. They’re just not pretty. In fact, Picasso drew inspiration from Iberian and African masks he’d seen at an exhibition at the Louvre, something that is pretty obvious when you look at both the chicks on the right. Other inspirations: Matisse, Gauguin, El Greco, and Cezanne.
One of the curators from the MoMA talks about how Picasso was afraid of contracting syphilis from these working girls, whose faces might be showing some symptoms of the STD. And that apprehension may be reflected in the uneasiness that the viewer feels when these women stare back. Because, let’s not forget, the very first viewer was Picasso and it's his anxiety that we’re indirectly feeling. It also tells us that Picasso liked to party with hookers, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.
Like most famous artworks, everyone obviously hated this painting when they first saw it. His buddies Braque and Matisse thought it might be some kind of terrible joke, but were intrigued by it nonetheless. The painting was originally titled The Brothel of Avignon but was changed by the curator of the exhibition in which it first raised the publics’ eyebrows. It was bought for the close to nothing price of $24,000 by MoMA in 1937. They had to pawn a Degas to raise the money for this, but I’m guessing they got their money’s worth.
Here is what Wikipedia says about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Calle de Avinyó, a street in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. The in fact, his subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the cubist revolution. Its resemblance to Cézanne's The Bathers, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics.
At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. The work, painted in Picasso's studio in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, at an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon.. Picasso, who always referred to it as mon bordel ("my brothel"), or Le Bordel d'Avignon, never liked Salmon's title and would have instead preferred the bowdlerization Las chicas de Avignon ("The Girls of Avignon").