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03 Pink Ladies: A Prelude to ★Les Demoiselles d’Avignon★

In the autumn of 1906, carrying on from what he had begun during the summer spent in Gósol—a remote village in the Catalan Pyrenees—Picasso worked on simplifying form and space, focusing almost exclusively on the female body. All are characterised by the abandoning of illusionist procedures in favour of a new expressive language, forged in contact with a growing interest in Iberian art, which he discovered at the Musée du Louvre in Paris at the beginning of the year: construction through the articulation of simplified forms with clearly defined outlines; a hieratic and frontal viewpoint; and the restriction of the colour palette to ochre hues. Picasso subsequently developed his proto-Cubist language, making the anatomical forms rougher and thereby asserting the androgynous quality of his feminine figures, which would emerge dramatically a few months later in ★Les Demoiselles d’Avignon★.