1907

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Picasso completes Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in Paris

The eight-foot canvas had no formal title when visitors saw it in the studio, and it stayed out of public exhibition for about nine years afterward.

Summer 1907, in a Montmartre studio

Picasso finished the canvas sometime during the summer of 1907, in the Bateau-Lavoir building in Montmartre; MoMA catalogues it more specifically as Paris, June–July 1907. No exact completion day is documented. He was 25.

He had worked on it in at least two stages, beginning in the winter of 1906–07. The finished oil compresses five women into a shallow space using angular lines, flattened planes, conflicting viewpoints and deliberately disjunctive styles.

The man he painted out

Hundreds of preparatory drawings and paintings led to the large canvas. Earlier studies included a male medical student entering the scene; Picasso replaced him with a fifth woman.

The sources he drew on cannot be reduced to African masks. MoMA identifies references to European painting alongside African, Iberian, Oceanic, ancient Egyptian, Greek and South Asian sculpture.

Nine years before the public saw it

The work was not publicly exhibited in 1907 and carried no formal title when visitors encountered it in the studio. The name it now goes by was attached around its first public showing, at the 1916 Salon d'Antin.

Some contemporaries called the canvas unfinished because of its abrupt stylistic differences; MoMA notes that later art historians generally treat those differences as integral to the completed work. Its relationship to Cubism is disputed — Kahnweiler called it Cubism's beginning, while other scholars deny that the painting itself is Cubist.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at ~1907-07.

What the sources leave uncertain

No exact completion day is documented. MoMA gives June–July 1907 and elsewhere says only “sometime in the summer.”
Some contemporaries called the canvas unfinished because of its abrupt stylistic differences. MoMA notes that later art historians generally interpret those differences as integral to the completed work.
Accounts of individual friends’ first reactions were often recorded retrospectively and should not be treated as precisely documented events on the completion date.