Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear slightly menacing and are rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. The figure on the left exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are shown in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features.
The racial primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force. In this adaptation of primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane , Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting.
This proto-cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art. Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends. Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke yet indirectly reacted to it in his Bathers with a Turtle. Georges Braque too initially disliked the painting yet perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great detail.
And in fact, his subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the cubist revolution. At the time of its first exhibition in , the painting was deemed immoral. It was at this exhibition that Salmon who had previously titled the painting in Le bordel philosophique renamed the work its current, less scandalous title, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , instead of the title originally chosen by Picasso, Le Bordel d'Avignon.
Picasso came into his own as an important artist during the first decade of the 20th century. He arrived in Paris from Spain around the turn of the century as a young, ambitious painter out to make a name for himself. Although he eventually left most of his friends, relatives and contacts in Spain, he continued to live and paint in Spain while making regular trips back to France.
