Picasso was recognized as an artistic prodigy at an early age. These works illustrate his technical capability at that
stage of his career. However, he was not satisfied with the limited possibilities in such a traditional mode of representation.
His constant, incessant striving for new means of expression is the primary lesson of Picasso's art.
The beginnings of Cubism In late 1906, Picasso started to paint in a truly revolutionary
manner. Inspired by Cézanne's flattened depiction of space, and working alongside his friend Georges Braque, he began to express space in strongly geometrical terms. These initial efforts at developing this almost sculptural sense
of space in painting are the beginnings of Cubism.
The famous "Demoiselles d'Avignon" is often represented as the seminal Cubist work. Although its impact on later Modernism
cannot be denied, William Rubin has proven that it was actually a false start of sorts that did not lead directly into the Cubist work. You can tell this from the 1907
date of the Demoiselles, while the truly proto-Cubist works begin to appear later, in 1908-09.
By 1910, Picasso and Braque had developed Cubism into an entirely new means of pictorial expression. In the initial stage, known as Analytical Cubism,
objects were deconstructed into their components. In some cases, this was a means to depict different viewpoints simultaneously;
in other works, it was used more as a method of visually laying out the FACTS of the object, rather than providing a limited
mimetic representation. The aim of Analytical Cubism was to produce a conceptual image of an object, as opposed to a perceptual
one.
At its height, Analytical Cubism reached levels of expression that threatened to pass beyond the comprehension of the viewer.
Staring into the abyss of abstraction, Picasso blinked...and began to start putting the pieces of the object back together.
Picasso Images on the Web from his Analytical Cubism period
