Pablo Picasso completed *Les Demoiselles d'Avignon* in the summer of 1907, in his Bateau-Lavoir studio in Paris, at 244 × 234 cm. The subject is a scene from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avignon Street) in Barcelona — five women look directly at the viewer. Picasso took the older faces from Iberian sculpture, the two on the right from African masks he had just seen at the Trocadéro Museum, and the central figures from Cézanne's late bathers.

The radicalism of the canvas is this: there is no single Renaissance-Baroque vanishing point. Each figure is seen from its own angle — front, side, above, below — simultaneously. Bodily contours break; breasts turn into flat triangles, elbows into sharp corners. The woman at lower right shows her front and back faces overlapping. Classical anatomy was a product of a single point of view; Picasso refuses that assumption.

Picasso kept the painting in his studio for some nine years, showing it only to friends. Matisse called it 'a joke'; Derain said 'one day Picasso will be found hanging behind this canvas.' Cubism only acknowledged it as its starting point after the 1916 exhibition. Even the painting's name was given later: Picasso called it 'the philosophical brothel'; the critic André Salmon proposed 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'.

It entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1937; it is today regarded as the most influential painting of the twentieth century. If a single canvas can be said to draw the line between 'before' and 'after' in the history of art, most commentators say it is this one.