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Les Demoiselles is a brothel scene; there had been a whorehouse on the Carrer d'Avinyo, or Avignon Street, in Barcelona, and Picasso and his friends frequented it. But the picture has none of the social irony or even the sensuality with which Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas invested their brothel paintings. More vividly than ever, against the backdrop of earlier Picassos, it becomes clear why his friends thought he had gone crazy, why the painter André Derain actually predicted that Picasso would hang himself behind the big picture. The painting is freighted with aggression, carefully wrought. The nudes are cut into segments, as though the brush were a butcher knife. Their look, eyes glaring from African-mask faces, is accusatory, not inviting. Even the melon in the still life looks like a weapon. The space between the figures is flattened, like a crumpled box: it was in this play of code between solid and void (one apparently as "tactile" as the other) that the formal prophecies of Les Demoiselles lay. Though he plundered African motifs such as masks and Bakota funerary figures for Les Demoiselles and its sequels, Picasso neither knew nor cared about their tribal meanings or uses. To him, they were merely shapes, conceptually opaque, with perhaps a secondary use as emblems of "savagery" to disrupt the field of "culture." The idea that Picasso had some sympathetic interest in African art as such is a complete illusion. All that counted for him was its ability to furnish alienated examples of form that clearly owed nothing to Raphael.
No Demoiselles, no cubism. But there was a long stretch between them while Picasso, grappling with late Cézanne, crossed from an art of paroxysm to one of exquisitely nuanced analysis. In a work like Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909, Picasso picked up on Cézanne's monumentality. Originally Picasso meant to paint a cabaret scene with figures at a table, in homage to Cézanne's Cardplayers, but the image mutated into still life, leaving the drinkers' legs fossilized, as it were, in the sloping table legs. The great brown half-moon of the tabletop, the bread loaves and fruit and napkin have a plastic intensity that makes one feel ready to pluck them away.
Gradually this jutting, sculptural quality dissolved in ever more complicated faceting, "cubifying"—though there are no real cubes in cubism—through the landscapes he painted at Horta de Ebro in 1909. By 1910 the cubist surface was reached, with a sort of gray-brown plasma, the color of fiddle backs, zinc bars and smokers' fingers. Objects were sunk in a twinkling field of vectors and shadows, solid lapping into transparency, things penetrating and turning away, leaving behind the merest signs for themselves—a letter or two, the bowl of a pipe, the sound hole of a guitar. This sense of multiple relationships was the core of cubism's modernity. It declared that all visual experience could be set forth as a shifting field that included the onlooker. It was painting's unconscious answer to the theory of relativity or to the principles of narrative that would emerge in Proust or Joyce. The supremacy of the fixed viewpoint, embodied for 500 years in Renaissance perspective, was challenged by the new mode of describing space that Picasso and Braque had developed in a supreme effort of teamwork.