TITLE:
Pablo Picasso’s 1906-1907 Transformation: from the “Primitive” to the “Rational”
AUTHORS:
Enrique Mallen
KEYWORDS:
Picasso, Iberian, Gauguin, Matisse, Cézanne, African, Cubism
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.14 No.3,
July
1,
2025
ABSTRACT: 1906-1907 was a transitional period for Picasso, dividing youth from maturity, promise from fulfillment. In two years of intense work, a painter of late-nineteenth-century sensibility would be reborn as a prophet of modernity. Taking crucial steps on the path to an artistic revolution, he had no clear destination in mind except the intention to push his art in a new direction to challenge Matisse and his Fauve colleagues. In seeking an alternative to the Frenchman’s chromatic profligacy, he steeped himself in the art of his country’s Iberian past. His search led him back to the art of Gauguin, but also forward to new discoveries like the work of Paul Cézanne and African sculpture.