One painter, three obsessions
Cubism did not arrive as a manifesto. It arrived as a private problem in the head of a 25-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso, living broke at the top of a Montmartre tenement, and it began with three things he had recently seen and could not stop thinking about. Think of them as three sticks of dynamite stored in one small studio: harmless apart, and together the blast that splits European art in half.
Cézanne, who had just died
Paul Cézanne died in October 1906, and within months every ambitious painter in Paris had filed through his memorial shows to work out what they had been missing. What they found was an old man who had quietly stopped pretending a painting was a window onto a real scene. Cézanne built his apples and his mountains out of small facets of color that did not blend but butted up against each other, like a bricklayer who lets you see every brick. He even let a single tabletop tilt at two angles at once — which is, if you think about it, closer to how you actually scan a table than the polite fiction that you take it in from one frozen spot with one unblinking eye.
“Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” Cézanne had written to a young painter. Picasso and his eventual partner Georges Braque both read that line less as advice than as a dare.
A stolen stone head and a room of masks
The second thing was a pair of ancient Iberian stone heads — frontal, almond-eyed, severe — that Picasso acquired in 1907 from an associate of his poet friend Apollinaire. The provenance turned out to be the kind that makes a museum curator reach for a drink: the heads had been lifted straight out of the Louvre. Stolen or not, they did their work. The faces in the huge canvas on Picasso’s wall began to harden into their stillness.
The third thing was a visit, in mid-1907, to the ethnographic museum in the Trocadéro palace — a hall crammed with masks and figures from the Fang, Kota and other West and Central African peoples, hauled to Paris as colonial plunder and displayed as curiosities rather than as the precise, purposeful sculpture they were. By his own account, given to the writer André Malraux decades later, Picasso had something like a conversion experience there: he understood, he said, that an image could be a weapon or a charm, a thing made to do something rather than to flatter. It is a wonderful story, and worth remembering that it is also a story Picasso told about himself, long after the fact and after years of denying he owed African art anything at all.
He carried all three obsessions back to a canvas nearly eight feet square. By the end of July 1907 it was finished: five women, a slash of curtain, a little still life, and two faces dragged halfway into masks. Picasso called it, bluntly, the brothel of Avignon; the loftier title we use now — Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — was a later, more respectable coat of paint applied by his friends. The picture has its own five-chapter story one level down. Here it matters as the starting gun.
Braque, and a word coined as an insult
Georges Braque, born in 1882, was a young Fauve — one of the painters then using raw, blazing color with no shading to round things out — when a friend marched him into Picasso’s studio to see the Demoiselles. He hated it. He is supposed to have said it was like being made to eat rope and drink turpentine, though the exact wording drifts from teller to teller. Within a year he was painting in the new manner anyway. That summer at L’Estaque in the south of France he sent back landscapes in which houses and trees had been squared off into tilting brown blocks.
When Braque showed these, the painter Henri Matisse reportedly grumbled to the critic Louis Vauxcelles that they were nothing but “little cubes,” and Vauxcelles printed the jibe. As with “Impressionism” and “Fauvism” before it, the movement took its name from a critic reaching for an insult. By the next summer the insult was a banner.