Picasso's Brothel: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Wayne Andersen presents a revisionist view of Picasso's most famous painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, taking issue with prevailing interpretations by William Rubin and Leo Steinberg. To anchor his argument, Andersen reconstructs how Les Demoiselles looked before Picasso experienced an epiphany in the Musée d'Ethnologie and painted the Africanizing masks on three of the prostitutes.

One by one, conventional notions in modern art studies are put on the rack and made to own up to the truth, no longer allowed to hide behind the novelizing and psychologizing distortions that have plagued studies of Picasso and his works.