Spanish Village

Picasso mastered several traditional and contemporary manners of painting before he and Georges Braque arrived at the breakthrough innovation of cubism in 1907–8. More than merely an experimental phase, his early practice established an instinct for pluralism that would characterize the artist’s practice throughout his life. In this work, which embodies a rebellion of sorts against his early academic training, Picasso took inspiration from the coarse graphic art of popular periodicals, a probable source for the sinuous art deco–inspired lines that circumscribe fields of flat color in the dreamlike landscape. Amorphously rendered, a woman in the foreground contemplates the ravine below while another woman and her charge descend the path from a hilltop village. In the early years of his career the artist shuttled between Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, and small Spanish towns; recent scholarship suggests that this painting was included in Picasso’s first Paris exhibition in 1901.