Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

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

1. 1
   Iberian stone heads · the three left faces

   The three figures at left

   The three faces on the left are calm and almond-eyed — lifted from the ancient Iberian stone heads Picasso had studied at the Louvre (he even owned two stolen fragments). Only the far-left woman is turned in true profile; the other two stare straight out. He is reaching past the Renaissance to Spain’s own pre-Roman past.
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.