The painting in the corner
Picasso rolled up the Demoiselles in late 1907 and propped it against the wall behind some other canvases. It stayed there. He moved twice in the years that followed — to a bigger studio on the boulevard de Clichy in 1909, and then again, after his marriage to Olga Khokhlova, to a respectable flat on the rue La Boétie in 1918 — and the rolled canvas moved with him each time.
What he did instead, in those nine years, was paint Cubism.
Braque comes back
Within months of Braque’s “turpentine” visit, Braque had started painting landscapes at L’Estaque in the south of France that, to Matisse, looked like little cubes. Matisse said so to a critic. The critic wrote it down. The label stuck. By 1909 Picasso and Braque were working in the same studio building in Paris, visiting each other daily, deliberately not signing the fronts of their canvases so that buyers had to flip them over to find out whose was whose.
Salon d'Antin, one room
In July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, the poet André Salmon organized a small exhibition at the Salon d’Antin, on the boulevard d’Antin in Paris. Picasso lent a single picture. It was the rolled-up canvas from 1907. Salmon, who had to invent a title on the spot to print in the catalog, called it Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — a softened-up reference to the women on the Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona. The title stuck. It is now what it is called.
The painting was on the wall for one month. The war was on. Paris was distracted. A few critics noticed. Most did not. Picasso took the picture down at the end of August, rolled it up again, and put it back in the studio.
He sold it eight years later, in 1924, to a couturier named Jacques Doucet.
Most of the painters who would go on to make Cubism — Léger, Delaunay, Gris, the Italian Futurists — never saw the Demoiselles itself. They saw photographs, and they heard about it, and they took inspiration from the work Picasso made AFTER it. The picture that broke the window had been hiding behind another window the whole time.