Visual Art of the Decade

Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 when, inspired by Cezanne, he and George Braque, "like two climbers roped together", were inventing Cubism. It was the movement that finally transcended the rules of representational perspective that had dominated Western painting since the Renaissance. With its jagged, fragmented figures, its multiple viewpoints, its rough-hewn borrowings from the idioms of tribal art, and its profane treatment of the theme of the nude, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon caused great consternation, and remains almost as shocking at the end of the century as it was at the beginning.