Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a large-scale oil painting created by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso in 1907. The work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and depicts five naked female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona. Each character is portrayed in a disturbing confrontational manner, and usually not feminine. These women look a little sinister, and have angular and incoherent body shapes. The image on the left shows facial features and dressing in Egyptian or South Asian style. The two adjacent figures are shown in the Iberian style of Picasso's hometown of Spain, while the two on the right have the characteristics of African masks. Picasso said that the racial primitivism evoked in these masks allowed him to "liberate a completely primitive artistic style, convincing and even barbaric." Through this pursuit of primitivism and abandonment of perspective, Picasso turned to a flat two-dimensional drawing plane, which made Picasso very different from traditional European painting. In the early development of Cubism and modern art, this primitive Cubist work is widely regarded as groundbreaking.