Pablo Picasso
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1907
Pablo Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907) is a seismic painting: five women of a Barcelona brothel are confronted with a distorted, angular vocabulary drawn from Iberian sculpture and African masks — the two figures on the right with masked features — rupturing Western pictorial tradition and opening the way to Cubism. Kept largely private by the artist for decades, the picture was bought by MoMA in 1939 and has since been canonical to the museum's narrative of 20th-century modernism.
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