Three figures, one block

Picasso worked this canvas for the better part of a year, and examination of the surface shows he buried earlier versions under it — a more striped, savage first attempt scraped back and rebuilt. What emerged is a single rust-red mass in which three nude women are fused so tightly you can barely prise them apart. Shoulders, thighs and arms lock together into one faceted block. The palette is fired clay: terracotta, ochre, brick, the colors of baked earth and old wood, with only thin slivers of cool green pressing in at the edges.

Set beside the Demoiselles, the difference is the whole point. The faces lose their snarl and settle into calm, heavy masks. The jagged shards harden into broad, blunt planes, each one shaded as if catching light on a chiselled surface. Where the Demoiselles felt like an attack, Three Women feels like a carving — something a sculptor might have cut from a single trunk of reddish wood and then, almost as an afterthought, painted. The savagery has been cooled into structure, and that cooling is exactly the road that leads, the next summer, to Cubism proper. What changed in that final step was mostly subtraction: the color drained almost to gray, the planes shrank and multiplied, the heavy modelling thinned — until the solid bodies of Three Women broke up into the restless faceting of Analytic Cubism.