Art: Anatomy of a Minotaur

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are so excruciatingly sentimental that they stand to Picasso's work rather as the death of Little Nell does to Dickens'. At this early stage one can see, especially in the Rose Period, that urge toward nostalgic generalization that repeatedly crept into Picasso's art in later years. The circus performers in Family of Saltimbanques (8) are conceived in the manner of a Watteau fête champêtre, and Picasso apparently tried to rival the psychological tension of glance and gesture in that master's work; their fragile simplicity is idealized; it is a bruised, poor Arcadia, but Arcadia still, inhabited by a species of post-industrial Noble Savage.

Immovable Object. If everything Picasso painted up to 1906 were subtracted, it would leave no real gap in the history of modern art. But in that year Picasso began his advance to Cubism. Perhaps the first unqualified masterpiece in his career was his portrait of Gertrude Stein (14). "Picasso," Stein recalled, "sat very tight on his chair and very close to the canvas, and on a very small palette, which was of uniform brown-gray color, mixed some more brown gray and the painting began."

Picasso's irresistible fluency now struck its immovable object. The portrait took 80 sittings to finish. It taxed Picasso's concentration to the limit, and the result was one of the few indisputably great portraits that he, or anyone else in this century, has produced: a densely sculptural image, hieratic and masklike, more compact almost than matter itself. Picasso's absorption of "primitive" shape (he had spent a lot of time with Iberian and Egyptian sculpture that year) was now complete, and the way to Cubism was open.

Financially this moment was the nadir of Picasso's life. He was living in the Bateau Lavoir, a studio building in Rue Ravignan. "No one," Kahnweiler recalls, "could ever imagine the poverty, the deplorable misery of those studios. The wallpaper hung in tatters from the unplastered walls. There was dust on the drawings and rolled-up canvases on the caved-in couch. Beside the stove was a kind of mountain of piled-up lava, which was ashes. It was unspeakable."

But if the studio was squalid in those days of 1907, the painting in it, Les Démoiselles d'Avignon (16), struck Picasso's fellow artists as little short of mad. André Derain feared it presaged Picasso's suicide, and its hacked dislocation alarmed Braque, who compared the performance to "someone drinking gasoline and spitting fire." Perhaps it is too simple to say that Cubism "came out of" Demoiselles, for the raggedness, fury and inconsistencies of the canvas were alien to the spirit of calm inquiry that afterward pervaded Cubist painting. But Demoiselles was so extreme that it presented the artists in Picasso's circle with a coup d'etat against every visual convention they knew. It was a totally radical painting—so much so, indeed, that even Picasso withdrew slightly from it, and for the next several years worked to stabilize the buckling planes and shallow space in such magnificent canvases as After the Ball (18) and Still Life with Liqueur Bottle (19). Braque, unable to ignore the challenge of Demoiselles, did likewise. By 1911 they were working together, joined, in Braque's phrase, like mountaineers on a rope.