Before any paint
Picasso made roughly five hundred preparatory sketches for the Demoiselles between November 1906 and June 1907. He filled at least sixteen sketchbooks. Most of them survive, and reading them in order is like watching the painting fight its way out of a more conventional one.
The early drawings show a moralistic brothel scene called The Wages of Sin: five women, two men. The man in the middle is a sailor. The man on the left, in the early sketches, is a medical student. In some, he holds a textbook; in others, a human skull. The composition is theatrical — a curtain pulled back to reveal the women, the men reading the lesson on the wages of vice.
By the late spring the men are gone. The narrative is gone with them. What is left is the confrontation: five women, no men, no story, no allegory — a flat group portrait with the viewer standing exactly where the two clients used to be.
May, and then July
He painted the canvas in two waves. The first, in May and early June, was already strange: all five faces in the same Iberian-influenced style, big almond eyes and stiff frontal stares, like the stone heads from the Louvre. He nearly stopped. He showed the canvas, in this state, to almost nobody.
Then in late June he went to the Trocadéro. When he came back, he attacked the two right-hand figures and the left-most one and reworked them as masks. The face of the squatting figure — twisted, simultaneously frontal and in profile — is the one nobody can quite forget. It is where Cubism, three years later, actually begins.
The painting was finished at the end of July 1907.
A few facts about the object
It is just under eight feet square. It is painted in oils on a single piece of linen canvas. Its colors are the reds and pinks of flesh, the deep blues of drapery, the rust of earth. The picture plane is broken into shards even before Cubism arrives: the curtain on the left is a fan of straight cuts; the small still life at the bottom is rendered in three views at once. The Iberian face on the left coexists in the same canvas as the African mask on the right, as if Picasso wanted you to see, side by side, what painting had been doing — for three thousand years before Europe forgot.
He titled it, privately, Le Bordel philosophique — “the philosophical brothel.” The title it now bears was given by his friend the poet André Salmon, ten years later, for an early public showing. The “demoiselles” in question were five women on the Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona, where Picasso had spent his student years.