In the winter of 1907, Picasso turned a corner in his Montmartre studio and never looked back. The canvas that became Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shattered five centuries of pictorial convention — figures rendered from multiple angles at once, demanding the viewer reconstruct the scene from every facet simultaneously.
The Single-Viewpoint Trap
Since Brunelleschi codified perspective in 1420, painters served a single vantage — one eye, one moment. Picasso and Braque spent four years dismantling this contract. Their Analytic works fractured guitar, bottle, and face into overlapping planes in the gray-brown studio palette.
"A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions."
This was not abstraction for its own sake. Picasso never abandoned the subject — he multiplied it. The mandolin in a 1910 still life is viewed from the front, the side, and slightly from above, all at once.