The Girls of Avignon

Five angular nude women confront the viewer head-on, their bodies splintered into hard planes, two of their faces transformed into masks borrowed from African and Iberian sculpture, the space around them shattered and tilting. Picasso worked obsessively toward this brutal, electrifying picture, smashing every convention of beauty, perspective, and the female nude. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the great hinge of modern art - the violent breakthrough, soon developed with Braque, that launched Cubism and changed the course of painting in the twentieth century.