1Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

The ur-canvas of 20th-century art, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ushered in the modern era by decisively breaking with the representational tradition of Western painting, incorporating allusions to the African masks that Picasso had seen in Paris’s ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro.

Its compositional DNA also includes El Greco’s The Vision of Saint John (1608–14), now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The women being depicted are actually prostitutes in a brothel in the artist’s native Barcelona.

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