Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, and 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 from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avignon Street) in Barcelona. Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style
Picasso's African Period and reworked in July of that year), especially in the treatment of the two figures on the right side of the composition. Although "Les Demoiselles" is seen as a proto-cubist work, Picasso continued to develop a style derived from African art before beginning the analytic cubism phase of his painting in 1910. Other works of Picasso's African Period include the "Bust of a Woman" (1907, in the National Gallery, Prague); "Mother and Child" (Summer 1907, in the Musée Picasso, Paris); "Nude with Raised Arms" (1907, in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain); and "Three Women" (Summer 1908, in the Hermitage Museum,