Ten years on
By 1921 Cubism was no longer a scandal; it was a style, fourteen years old, taught and collected and copied. The world that made it was gone. The First World War had come and emptied the cafés: Braque was wounded at the front, the dealer Kahnweiler had been exiled as an enemy alien, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (Cubism’s loudest champion) was dead, carried off by the 1918 influenza while still weak from a war wound. Picasso himself was rich now, married, moving in fashionable circles and even painting calm, classical nudes on the side.
That summer he rented a villa at Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and worked in its garage. There he sat down and, in effect, wrote Cubism’s grand farewell, a huge, bright, ceremonial picture that gathers up everything the movement had discovered and stages it like a final curtain call.