Picasso’s brothel canvas dethroned Matisse overnight
In 1907 Pablo Picasso finished a huge oil of five confrontational nudes in a Barcelona brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó—faces mixing Iberian, Egyptian or South Asian, and African-mask cues. Painted in the Bateau-Lavoir, it shook friends; John Richardson later called it the most pivotal Western painting since Giotto and the launchpad for cubism with Georges Braque.
Picasso first titled the work Le Bordel d’Avignon and still said mon bordel; André Salmon had floated Le bordel philosophique in 1912, then at the July 1916 Salon d’Antin exhibition—its first public hanging—softened the name to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The artist preferred Las chicas de Avignon. Critics in 1916 branded it immoral. Angular bodies reject Renaissance depth for a compressed plane, echoing Baroque push and Velázquez’s Las Meninas stare while discarding polite femininity.
The canvas answered a rivalry. After Blue Period despair (1901–04) and Rose Period circus warmth (1904–07), Picasso still trailed Henri Matisse, whose Fauves shocked the 1905 Salon d’Automne—Louis Vauxcelles’s “wild beasts” quip printed in Gil Blas on 17 October 1905. Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre and 1907 Blue Nude kept him the avant-garde king. Picasso began Demoiselles studies in October 1906 and finished in March 1907; Hilton Kramer argued the shock stole Matisse’s “wild beast” crown and opened a lasting split between savage modern rupture and Matissean aesthetic pleasure.
Close allies recoiled. Matisse reportedly treated it as a bad joke yet answered with 1908 Bathers with a Turtle; Braque disliked it, then studied it obsessively before partnering on cubism. Later writers link it to Cézanne’s Bathers, Gauguin’s Oviri, and El Greco’s Opening of the Fifth Seal. Dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler backed Picasso from 1907. Gertrude Stein’s salon had already connected the rivals around 1905. By 1910 Picasso stood among modern painting’s leaders—proof that five masked prostitutes could reroute a century.
Source: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
