A new take on Picasso's love-hate relationship with women.
Few paintings have been as extensively analyzed as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Yet, according to Wayne Andersen's radical new interpretation of the painting, it has been repeatedly misunderstood by biographical characterization and reductive psychoanalysis.
Andersen rescues the painting from the myths that obscure its origins, stories that depict it variously as an outburst of rage against Picasso’s lover, or as an act of vengeance for having contracted syphilis from a prostitute. Such myths are the root of the artist's reputation for misogyny. Looking back to the original sources of these stories, Andersen identifies a catalog of errors which have distorted our view of Picasso.