Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Five women, five sets of impossible angles, masks where the faces should be.

1. 1
   Archaic faces · the left figures

   The figures at left

   The two central figures are calm and almond-eyed, lifted from the ancient Iberian stone heads Picasso had studied at the Louvre (he even owned two stolen fragments). The far-left woman, turned in true profile, is different again: scholars read her face as Egyptian or southern Asian in style. Either way, he is reaching past the Renaissance to older, pre-classical sources.
2. 2
   African mask · right-most figures

   The two figures at right

   The two figures on the right wear faces like carved African masks, gouged, striated, deliberately other. Picasso had just been hit hard by Fang and Kota masks at the Trocadéro ethnographic museum; here a “beautiful nude” is given a mask for a face.
3. 3
   Still life, faceted form (Cézanne)

   Bottom center, below the figures

   The wedge of fruit at the bottom is built from blunt, faceted planes, pure Cézanne, whose late work taught Picasso to construct a picture out of solid geometric blocks instead of smooth illusion.
4. 4
   Two views at once

   The crouching figure, lower right

   The crouching figure shows you her muscular back and, twisted impossibly round, her masked face at the same instant. There is no single spot you could stand to see this, which is exactly the point: Cubism abolishes the one fixed viewpoint a painting had assumed for 500 years.