Pablo Picasso's Curbism Style

When we think of the most famous artists of our time, artists such as Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso come to mind. Something that often doesn’t occur to many people is, where exactly did these artists develop their signature style of art, and what influenced them to create it? Claude Monet created the impressionistic style when quickly trying to catch the beauty of a sunset before it disappeared, spurring a new style of art that eventually influenced Van Gogh. But what exactly influenced Pablo Picasso’s seemingly bizarre style of cubism? In my paper I’ll be exploring how Pablo Picasso and other artists were influenced to create the cubism style, and how these influences were the cause of an entire art movement.

When colonists began bringing back artifacts of African art, the posh masses of France flocked to see the ‘art’ created by such savage and animalistic beings (.48).

When this Art was brought back to France, it inspired Pablo Picasso to create one of the first works of cubism. In 1907 Picasso visited the Trocadero Museum of Paris; He stated “the masks were not like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things.” In the same year, Picasso created “Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon” or, “The Young Ladies of Avignon”, which can be seen in Figure 1. This work is considered a major step in the creation of the cubist style. The work depicts five nude prostitutes from a brothel Picasso frequented. Figure 2 shows a work similar to that of what Picasso would have encountered before he created his work Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon. When you compare these two works side by side, you can see the similarities in the faces. Both works have almond shape eyes, elongated faces, long noses, arched eyebrows, and small mouths. Picasso chose to expand the abstract style of the face down to the bodies of the woman, giving them stiff poses and hard rigged