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Today one is not apt to think of allegory as a "modern" form, since it contradicts the abstraction of modernist painting. But it mattered a great deal to Picasso, and he resorted to it at some of his intense moments—not only the death of Casagemas, but in the construction of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (which began as an allegory of venereal disease, a subject of great interest to the energetic Pablo), of Guernica, and on into his "Mediterranean" subjects of the 1930s, with their bulls and horses, virgins and Minotaurs, caves, ruins and nymphs. Allegory was the conscious, intelligible form of Picasso's vast instinctive talent for metamorphosis, whereby a single form could harbor two or more literal meanings: a glass of absinthe including a drunkard's head, a guitar turning into a torso or a vagina, a bicycle seat becoming a bull's head. Moreover, the ability to handle allegory was the proof of high ambition: Gauguin had gone to Tahiti to paint huge emblems of human fate, not just to see papayas.
By the age of 25 Picasso was an able and gifted artist, but not yet a modern one. He had managed to tame the mannerism of the Blue Period, with its wistful elongations and neurotic passivity of form, by studying Degas. In the Woman with a Fan, 1905, with its "Egyptian" gesture of the raised hand and gravely extended fan, or in the robust columnar body of the Boy Leading a Horse, 1906, Picasso's digestion of Puvis was complete. At that point he could have kept painting such pictures for the rest of his life and died in honors.
What happened was very different. The detachment of expression in his Rose Period hardened: through 1906 the faces took on an increasingly masklike air, blank, inexpressive, with empty eye sockets. Picasso had been looking at archaic Spanish carvings from Osuna. Now he stressed the sculptural, instead of the linear and atmospheric: solid impacted form, not fleeting mood. His 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, almost leaden in its pictorial ineloquence, marked the start of this change, and the pink stony torsos of Two Nudes, 1906, delineate the period's end. In between lay some magnificent paintings, such as the Seated Female Nude with Crossed Legs, 1906, whose solidities of thigh, trunk and breasts anticipate the swollen torsos of Picasso's "classical" women 15 years later. It was one more element in the predictions, recapitulations and variations of theme that composed the tissue of Picasso's imagination.
Having brought solid form to such density, having set so absolute a division between figure and field, what choice did Picasso have but to break it all down again? Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, was the painting that provoked cubism, and one of the most astounding feats of ideation in the history of art. These days the word radical is patched on to any newish artistic gesture, no matter how small: a puddle of lead on the floor, or a face pulled on video tape, or an array of bricks. This use of the word cannot begin to convey the newness of Les Demoiselles. No painting has ever looked more convulsive and contradictory, and, though one can follow its development through Picasso's early studies, which are part of the MOMA exhibit, the sheer intensity of its making is beyond analysis.