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Portrait of a conceptual innovator:
Pablo Picasso’s youthful breakthrough
The scene is the slums of Paris. It was 1907, the spring after Cézanne’s death. The setting: a tenement in the city’s Montmartre district, a ramshackle building on Rue Ravignan with sagging floors, dusty windows and lopsided walls. It had no running water except in the basement. The solitary toilet was down there, with a door that wouldn’t lock. Transient artists, students, and poets who loved the old wreck of a building nicknamed it “The Laundry Boat.” Their laughs, cries and groans echoed day and night  through the thin walls. Among its inhabitants: Picasso, young, cocky and impoverished. In his studio, the couch had caved in, wallpaper peeled from the walls, a mound of ashes sat beside the stove, and dust covered his rolled-up canvases.
Picasso was different in many ways from wealthy, self-critical, frustrated Cézanne. At age 26, Picasso was confident of his talent and not shy about telling others how impressive he was. “I am God,” he would joke. “God is really another artist like me.” But if he was a god, he was a god without the gift of small talk. Invited to Saturday gatherings at the home of poet Gertrude Stein and her brother, art collector Leo Stein, Picasso was inhibited and sullen, standing to one side and rarely speaking. He had “nothing to say except an occasional sparkle,” Leo Stein recalled. But Picasso was alert, proud and combative – Gertrude Stein compared him to a bull-fighter at the head of a procession.
In early 1907, seven years after he traveled to Paris from Barcelona to pursue his career as an artist, Picasso decided it was time to create a masterpiece. He purchased a high-quality eight-by-eight-foot canvas, and Gertrude Stein helped him rent a new studio big enough to hold it. He kept friends out and began work. As a warmup, he painted bordello scenes. In one small oil sketch, he portrayed a group of five women, a student and a sailor in a curtained room. In a small watercolor, he repositioned the women and left out the two men. With oil and and pencil, he sketched distorted heads and angular torsos. Then he turned to the main canvas. Month after month, he stood before it and painted. From wedges of color and clashing shapes emerged an array of five grotesque nudes with blank expressions, contorted limbs and empty eyes. Part-way through the work, he changed his mind about the style he was using. “I had finished half the picture. I felt: this is not it!” he recalled. With the first three nudes on the left completed, he decided that the faces should be more distorted. He kept painting, making two faces on the right darker, more mask-like, with geometrically curving noses and slashing brush-work. “I wondered whether I ought to redo the whole thing. Then I thought, ‘No, they’ll understand what I wanted to do.’ ” Picasso kept painting through the spring and into the summer. Finally he put down his brush and let friends, admirers, art dealers and other artists enter the studio to see his new creation, which he sometimes called The Philosophical Brothel and sometimes simply El Bordel.
The visitors
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Pablo Picasso – the career
of a young genius
Auction prices for Picasso show that the painter did his highest-valued work early in his career. (Horizontal axis is age. Vertical axis is a weighted measure of auction prices. Source: Painting Outside the Lines)
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were dismayed. Poet Guillaume Apollinaire was confused by the painting, but said it was “revolutionary.” Leo Stein found it funny. Matisse thought it was a mockery of modern art. It almost made painter Georges Braque gag.
“It’s as if you are making us eat rope and drink turpentine,” he told Picasso.
The painting filled artist André Derain with foreboding, though he admired it.
“One day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas,” Dérain said.
Art dealer Ambroise Vollard lost interest in selling Picasso’s work after seeing El Bordel. Félix Feneon, a critic with a reputation for recognizing promising new talent, told Picasso to stick to caricature. Art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who had been selling most of Picasso’s works, insisted that the painting was incomplete. Later he declared it a masterpiece.
“I wish I could convey to you the incredible heroism of a man like Picasso,” Kahnweiler recalled later. “(His) spiritual solitude at this time was truly terrifying, for not one of his painter friends had followed him. The picture he had painted seemed to everyone something mad or monstrous.”
Picasso rolled up the canvas and tucked it away. Occasionally, he would unroll it for a curious visitor. He painted more works in his shocking new style, although at first no one else dared to try it. Then, after a few months, Braque joined him. Together the two painters explored an even more geometric style, creating paintings that by 1908 came to be called “cubism.” In 1916, critic André Salmon gave El Bordel the title Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a name that was more palatable and almost defensible, since the five figures were partly based on Picasso’s recollection of a brothel on Avignon Street in Barcelona. Still, the painting was scary.
It didn’t find a buyer until the early 1920s. It wasn’t labeled a groundbreaking achievement until the mid-1920s, when the Surrealists singled it out for praise. Gradually, it became known as a turning point in modern art. In 1937, the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought it for its permanent collection. In 1991, Picasso biographer John Richardson called it “the most innovative painting since Giotto … the first unequivocally twentieth-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of twentieth-century art.”
Picasso accomplished that when he was 26, with help from works that Cézanne created in his 50s and 60s.
See also: Basics about experimental and conceptual innovators
See also chart: Comparing experimental and conceptual painters
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