The Spanish painter and sculptor who co-invented Cubism, transformed what Western art could look like, and became the most commercially dominant artist of the twentieth century
In the spring of 1907, Pablo Picasso finished a large canvas showing five women with fractured faces, sharp angles, and bodies that seemed to come apart and reassemble from multiple views at once. He showed it to almost no one. His dealer refused to look at it. His close friend and rival Georges Braque said it felt like drinking petrol. The painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, did not enter public view for decades. By the time it did, it had already changed everything.