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
Radiography of cultural objects Albert Museum, the artist painted over a previous picture that had not even dried yet. Pigments from the lower painting appear through cracks in the surface layer. The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso at the Art Institute of Chicago had been previously examined with visible and ultraviolet light, which had hinted at the possibility of an earlier composition. X-rays of the painting revealed that Picasso had originally painted two female figures behind the guitarist. The x-rays also penetrated far enough to reveal how Picasso had prepared the wooden panel for painting. X-rays can provide a better picture of plaster casts