1906-1908: the room where Picasso invented Cubism

The museum, the dation, and why this room exists

The Musée Picasso has occupied the Hôtel Salé, in the Marais, since its opening on 28 September 1985. Its collection does not come from purchases: it comes from the dation, a mechanism created by the law of 31 December 1968, which allows inheritance tax to be paid in works of art rather than money. When Picasso died in 1973, his heirs settled the inheritance tax this way; the dation was formalised in 1979 and brought into public collections more than 200 paintings and 150 sculptures that had remained in his studios. A second dation, in 1990, followed the death of his widow Jacqueline in 1986.

This origin explains Room 3. The great finished canvases of the 1906-1908 period left early for dealers and collectors — this is the case with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon itself. What stayed with Picasso, and so what arrived through the dation, is above all the studies, the trials, the canvases he never sold. A visitor will not see here the outcome of the Cubist gesture, but its rough draft. Worth noting too: the room holds Black Hair, a portrait dated 1918 — but it is not a Picasso. The painting is by Amedeo Modigliani, whom Picasso owned as part of his personal collection of works by other artists, itself brought into the national collections through the dation. It therefore has no connection to the birth of Cubism told by the rest of the room.

1. The studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in Paris between June and July 1907, at the Bateau-Lavoir. The canvas then stayed rolled up in his studio, shown to a few close friends — Braque, Matisse and Derain saw it and remained puzzled — before its first public exhibition in 1916, at the Salon d'Antin. It did not leave France until 1937, to join MoMA's collections in 1939, where it remains. Woman with Joined Hands and Bust of a Man, the two studies shown here, both date from spring 1907: they precede the final painting by only a few weeks, and belong to the moment when Picasso was multiplying trial hands and faces rather than composing the canvas directly.

This multiplication has a precise cause: between the winter and summer of 1907, Picasso entirely rethought the composition, and the faces of the two right-hand figures in the final painting carry the clearest trace of this reworking. The three figures on the left remain close to Iberian art, which Picasso had known since 1906; the two on the right, their features fragmented into angular planes, owe more to the African masks he discovered at the Trocadéro ethnographic museum, in spring or early summer 1907. Picasso would tell of this visit decades later as a sudden revelation — the story, popularised by André Malraux, is now considered by art historians to have been partly reconstructed after the fact, but the stylistic break between the two halves of the painting is, itself, verifiable on the canvas. In front of these two studies, it is worth looking for the pentimenti: in Woman with Joined Hands, beneath the white layer, the outline of a painted-then-abandoned figure can be made out.

2. Nude Boy, the last summer of the Rose Period

Before Cubism, there is Gósol. In summer 1906, Picasso and Fernande Olivier went to live in this Catalan village in the Pyrenees for about ten weeks. There he painted in a palette of ochres and terracottas, with simplified, almost archaic figures — the influence of Iberian sculpture, examples of which Picasso had been able to see in Paris that same year, begins to show through.

Nude Boy, painted in autumn 1906 after his return to Paris, directly picks up this palette and this economy of means: the two-part background, split by a grey and ochre line, recurs in other canvases of the same period such as The Two Brothers. It is a transitional painting — the last breath of the Rose Period before Picasso engages, a few months later, in the radical deconstruction of the Demoiselles. In the room, a direct comparison with the surrounding 1907 studies is the best way to gauge the speed of the shift: less than a year separates this still-classical canvas from the fragmented faces of the following spring.

3. The Tree and Landscape with Two Figures, Cézanne's lesson

The Tree, painted in summer 1907, shows a different project from that of the Demoiselles: the geometrisation of landscape, without tipping into abstraction. Cézanne, who died in 1906, is the subject of a major retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne in Paris — an event Picasso and Braque followed closely, and which weighs directly on this canvas as it does on the landscapes Picasso painted at La Rue-des-Bois the following year.

Landscape with Two Figures, painted in autumn 1908, pushes this lesson further: the palette of greens and ochres picks up almost exactly that of Cézanne's late landscapes, and the figures dissolve into the geometry of the terrain rather than standing apart from it. This canvas belongs to what art historians call Cézannian Cubism, the phase in which Picasso and Braque, each on his own side, built the vocabulary of Cubism out of the Master of Aix's geometrised volumes. Between the fragmented faces of the Demoiselles and the landscapes that follow lie the two sources of Cubism at its birth: the mask and geometry.

How much time

Six works, one small room: allow fifteen to eighteen minutes to go through it without rushing. If time is short, the two studies for the Demoiselles and The Tree are enough to grasp the shift; the rest completes the story without being essential to understanding it.

Woman with Joined Hands — 3 minutes.
Bust of a Man — 2 minutes.
Nude Boy — 3 minutes.
The Tree — 3 minutes.
Landscape with Two Figures — 3 minutes.
Black Hair (Modigliani, 1918, outside the chronology) — 2 minutes.

Sources and verification

Checked against the Centre d'étude Picasso (the museum's scholarly database), the Musée Picasso Paris, MoMA, and cross-checked with Wikipedia FR/EN, for dates of creation, acquisition and provenance.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the Musée Picasso website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.