New, penetrating insights into a Picasso masterpiece

"The most important painting of the twentieth century." This was said of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon before the century was even half over. It remains one of the most original and disturbing works in the history of art.

At almost three metres high, Les Demoiselles is an intimidating presence. Reproductions in books shrink its power. The painting was executed over three months in 1907 in Picasso's jammed, squalid one-room studio apartment in bohemian Montmartre in Paris. Its fleshy pinks are a flourish from the artist's Rose Period but with a stunning change of tone.

There is no longer any humour or pleasure - we seem to have wandered into a torture den. It's the reception room of a brothel, where bored women lounge with their hair down as they wait for customers - a scene frequently drawn by Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Picasso had painted prostitutes in Paris cafes, where they were dancing or flirting with one another. In Les Demoiselles, however, each of the women seems locked in her own severe, remote consciousness. They are like Fates, frigid masters of man's destiny.

When this painting finally became known to the world after its acquisition by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1939, commentary focused on its formal properties as a prefiguration of cubism, co-created by Picasso and Georges Braque before the second world war. Because so many of Picasso's preparatory sketches were preserved, studies of the painting's genesis are extensive, but little or no attention has been paid to a variety of later details. Its demurely ambiguous title, The Maidens of Avignon, has proved an irritant: Picasso did not coin it, and he disliked it. He simply called the painting "mon bordel" (my brothel).

It is staged like a tableau vivant. The woman standing at left lifts a heavy curtain, while her opposite bursts like a wind into the tent-like space. On a stool at lower right, a nude sits with legs brazenly spread. The two apparently upright central figures are actually reclining with arms behind their heads, a white sheet draping their legs.