Gender complexity in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: The precedent of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus sculpture

This essay visually reinterprets details of the two central figures in Picasso’s breakthrough, epochal painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), to propose that these bodies, long presumed female, also can be interpreted as «gender-flexible» and genderplural. Such a strategy is shown to be connected to Picasso’s lifelong interest in bi-directional figures, as analyzed by Leo Steinberg. The connection is explored in depth with reference to Version B of Picasso’s Women of Algiers series. All of this material is then recast as deriving from the precedent of the famous classical Sleeping Hermaphroditus sculpture, which Picasso likely saw at the Louvre and at the Prado (in its copy, commissioned by Velázquez), and as allusions in works by other artists.