The summer it became a movement

The Demoiselles had been a bomb — shocking, jagged, a one-off scandal that even Picasso’s friends recoiled from. What it was not was a method anybody could follow. The Horta paintings are the opposite: calm, systematic, repeatable. This is the summer the shock of 1907 hardens into a technique — the faceting of solid form that art historians call Analytic Cubism (the patient breaking-down of objects into planes seen from several angles at once). If the Demoiselles kicked the door open, Horta is where Picasso walked through it and found he could keep going — and he was not the only one walking through. Georges Braque, that same year, was arriving at almost exactly the same place from the other direction, breaking the houses of the southern French village of L’Estaque into the same blunt cubes.

That convergence is what made it a movement rather than a quirk. Within a year the two of them were “roped together” (as Braque put it) in Paris, faceting everything in sight — portraits, still lifes, the dealer Kahnweiler — in exactly the language they had hammered out, Picasso on a Catalan hillside and Braque in the south. Horta is the launch pad. The same ochre cubes you just climbed in this picture are the cubes that, three years on, would dissolve into the near-abstract shimmer of high Analytic Cubism (the style at its most extreme, the world almost faceted away to pattern).

There is a tidy irony in it, too. The most cosmopolitan revolution in modern art — the thing that would be argued over in Paris cafés and New York galleries — was worked out in a village with no railway, by a man who said he’d learned everything he knew there as a sick teenager. Cubism’s grammar was, in a real sense, Spanish before it was Parisian.