Painting the village as blocks

Over that summer Picasso painted Horta over and over — the houses on the hill, the village reservoir, the factory on the edge of town — running the same geometric method across deliberately different subjects, as if to prove it could crack anything, not just a picturesque cluster of roofs. The method was consistent and ruthless. He took the houses and pared them down to their bare solid geometry: cubes, wedges, prisms. He tilted the planes so a wall and a roof you could never see at the same time are shown to you together. He drained the color back to dusty ochres, grays and greens, so nothing pretty distracts from the structure.

Most radically, he flattened the distance. In an ordinary landscape the far hills recede into haze; here Picasso pulls the background mountain up flat against the houses and breaks it into the same facets, so the whole canvas presses toward you at once. The village and the hillside are made of one continuous geometry. It is recognisably a place — and it is also a stack of painted blocks, refusing to settle into a comfortable view.

Here is the detail everyone remembers. While he was in Horta, Picasso took photographs of the actual village — and when he got back to Paris he showed them around — not least to the American writer and collector Gertrude Stein, an early buyer and fierce champion of his work when almost no one else would touch it — as if to say: I did not invent this. Stein later wrote that the photographs looked startlingly like the paintings, and even singled out one of the Horta canvases as the first true Cubist picture; the real houses really did pile up into blocks. Whether Picasso meant the photographs as proof or as a sly joke (a Cubist painting and a snapshot of Spain, side by side, both made of cubes) is part of the fun. Either way it makes the point that early Cubism grew out of looking hard at the world, not turning away from it.

He came home at the end of the summer with a suite of canvases and, in them, a working method. The shock of 1907 had become a technique anyone could see being applied.