Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro

Picasso spent a summer in a Spanish hill town, painted its houses as a tumble of bare cubes, and came home with Cubism worked out.

1. 1
   Houses as cubes

   The heart of the picture: the village’s flat-roofed houses, stripped down to bare ochre blocks — cubes, wedges, prisms — stacked and tilted up the slope. Picasso throws out the fussy detail and keeps only the geometry, the lesson he took from Cézanne: build the world out of solid shapes.
2. 2
   The hill, faceted too

   The mountain behind is broken into the same angular planes as the buildings. Village and hillside rhyme; nature and architecture are made of one geometry. There is no soft, hazy distance — the far hill is pulled up flat against the houses.
3. 3
   A roof becomes a plane

   Follow a single house and watch a roof flatten into a tilted facet, a wall into another, the two meeting at an impossible angle. Picasso lights each plane from a different, unfixable direction, so the cube reads as solid and as flat at the same time.
4. 4
   The one green note

   A patch of cool green — vegetation — clings to the left edge: almost the only green in a picture of relentless ochre and gray. In all that dry, faceted geometry it is the one hint of organic life, though Picasso gives it the same angular planes as everything else.