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
The Nature of Truth lies can skew our lives. Over dinner at the end of the novel, Jonathan Atwater—a gay librarian who, like a Jew victimized by Nazi storm troopers, was assaulted by homophobic thugs—presents his theory about the decline of civilization. "Two important things have gone by the wayside, in my opinion," he says, "and I believe they've affected each other in a miserable manner. Family and truth." According to Atwater, truth, disembodied from the living communities that give it meaning, has become a vapid abstraction. "The Nature of Truth" concludes within the embrace of la familia, in Chicano New Mexico. But ...