Winter 1906
Picasso was 25, broke, and living at the top of a tenement on the Montmartre hill called the Bateau-Lavoir — the “laundry boat,” because it creaked when it rained and there was one tap on each floor. He was painting in oils on the back of broken doors. He was selling two or three canvases a month. He was about to make the painting that would change twentieth-century art.
He was looking at three things he could not stop looking at.
Cézanne, who had just died
Paul Cézanne died in October 1906 in Aix-en-Provence, of pneumonia, after painting in a storm. In the months that followed, every painter in Paris went to two memorial shows — one at the Salon d’Automne, one at Bernheim-Jeune — and tried to understand what they had been missing.
What Picasso would later say he saw was an old painter so tired of pretending that perspective was real that he had stopped pretending. The bathers were a pyramid. The trees were a pyramid. The colors did not blend, they butted. The brushstrokes were visible blocks. You could see how the painting had been built.
An Iberian head, in the Louvre
In March 1907, his friend the writer Guillaume Apollinaire introduced Picasso to a junior employee of the Louvre, who introduced him to a pair of stone heads. They were Iberian — stolen, it would later turn out, by the man doing the introducing — small, frontal, with almond eyes and a stillness that had nothing in common with the smooth classicism of the Greeks one floor up. Picasso bought them for fifty francs each.
He took them back to the studio. The face he was painting on the leftmost figure of his new canvas began to look more and more like those stone heads, every week.
A mask, in the Trocadéro
One afternoon in June 1907, Picasso wandered into the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro and, by his own later account, was hit by a feeling he could not name. The hall was full of masks — Fang, Kota, Dan, Songye, taken in colonial loot from across French West and Central Africa, displayed in vitrines without labels or context, smelling of mildew and disinfectant.
I understood, he said, what painting was actually for.
The two faces on the right side of the canvas, which had been Iberian three weeks earlier, began turning into masks.
Eight feet tall, on the studio wall
The canvas had been pinned to the wall since the spring. It was nearly eight feet square — and Picasso had been making sketches for it since November. There would be hundreds of them by the time he was done. The early ones showed a brothel scene with two clothed men: a sailor in the middle, a medical student on the left holding a book or a skull. By the time it was finished the men were gone. There were only the five women, the curtain, the small still life of fruit on the table in front, and the masks.
He started painting it in earnest in May. By the end of July it was done. Then he showed it to his friends.