The painting seen only in a studio for years

Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in Paris in the summer of 1907. Some artists and friends saw the canvas in his studio before its first public exhibition; Georges Braque saw it in November 1907 and was initially shocked. The painting was not publicly shown around 1911, but in 1916—nearly nine years after it was made. This history helps explain how the work could affect a small avant-garde circle before reaching a broad audience, but it does not prove that it alone launched modernism.