Picasso's African Period

[5] In May or June 1907, Picasso experienced a "revelation" while viewing African art at the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro.

[6][7] Picasso's discovery of African art influenced aspects of his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (completed in July of that year), especially in the treatment of the faces of two figures on right side of the composition.

[8] Picasso continued to develop a style derived from African, Egyptian, and Iberian art during the years prior to the start of the analytic cubism phase of his painting in 1910.

[9] While it is clear Picasso was inspired heavily by aesthetics from cultures not his own, many art historians and critics have argued that this sort of borrowing was a modernist expression.

[11] It could also be seen as problematic that in Demoiselles d'Avignon the women painted wearing African-like masks are meant to be prostitutes from Barcelona's red-light district.