All of Picasso's paintings were rather two-dimensional up to this point, but then he began exploring pictorial volume, and this led to one of his most revolutionary works,"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'', which he painted in 1917. This is usually considered the first Cubist painting. You can see how Picasso reduces the ladies' figures to a series of wide, intersecting planes that are aligned with the surface of the canvas. In this way, they suggest a dissected, multiple view of the world. This was a radically new, abstract pictorial language.
In my handout, you'll also find some other examples of how Picasso's Cubism developed between 1907 and 1921-"Woman with a Guitar" is from 1912,for instance, and "Three Musicians”,which is a masterpiece of his later "synthetic cubism" style, was painted in 1921. You can see in the "Three Musicians" how Picasso's planes have become much broader and more simple, and how they exploit colour so much more.
The invention of Cubism is Picasso's greatest contribution to art, but he was also interested in many other arts-in sculpture, ceramics, graphics, printmaking, and even in stage design-and he experimented imaginatively in all of these areas. Also, as early as 1911,he began to include newspaper clippings into some of his paintings, and he thus invented collage. His first and most famous collage is "Still Life with Chair Caning''. You can see it on your sheet-you can see that,in addition to the painted lemon and wine glass, it includes some fragments of literary letters and a piece of oilcloth-and Picasso framed it himself with a length of real rope.
And of course I should mention "Guernica",the last painting on your handout,which is an extraordinary landmark of modern art-an infuriated Cubist condemnation of war and the atrocities of war that is still unmatched today. Picasso painted it in 1937,just after the Spanish town of Guernica was bombed in an air raid by German planes during the Spanish Civil War. You can feel the brutality,the pain and suffering,in his images of screaming people and animals. And you can see how Picasso could turn his art so effectively into political statement.
By 1945, Picasso was well established as one of the great masters of modem art, but he continued to experiment with styles and techniques throughout his life. We'll be looking at him again later in the term, when we examine Cubism, Surrealism, and other modem visual movements in more detail.