Picasso, Pablo Three Women Paris, autumn 1907-late 1908 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 70 1/8 in. (200 x 178 cm.) The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Daix 131 ©2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From John Golding, "Cubism, A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914":

John Golding, "Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907-1914":

"Although [Three Women] is not truly Cubist, it is of great significance in the emergence of the style. A photograph taken in Picasso's studio in the summer of 1908 shows an earlier, apparently more or less completed version of the Three Women executed in a style which makes use of rough, almost violent striations, used to emphasize the different areas to the sides of the figures, while the figures themselves appear to have the rough-hewn bulkiness of much of the most characteristic contemporary African-influenced figure pieces. The canvas was reworked during the winter months... Each of the three women is now rendered somewhat differently. The figure at the left is the most "African" in appearance. The body of the woman to the right is modelled in softer, riper forms. The third figure is the most abstracted and schematic. But whereas the Demoiselles is a stylistically disjunctive painting, here each figure seems simply to qualify and reaffirm the properties and existence of her neighbors. The figures now form a tight sculptural group and the space around and behind them is limited and seems to press in upon them. In the two figures on the right in particular the earlier striations and hatchings have given way to more discreetly and subtly modelled planes delineating the component parts of the trunks and limbs of the figures; these planes are angled away from each other along clearly defined ridges in some passages, but softly opened up into each other in others. The violence of the Demoiselles has given way to a mood of gravity: the monumental figures appear to be in reverie or slumber...

"But it is deeply revealing that... the revolutionary perspectival implications of the Demoiselles [are not] explored or developed, or indeed more than hinted at... The formal experiments and in
ovations on which Picasso was about to embark, and which were to result in a fully developed Cubist language were too innovative, too complex and demanding to be developed or pursued within the context of multifigure compositions. For the next six years, Picasso, like Braque, was to fix his attention on single figure compositions, still lifes, and, to a lesser extent, landscapes."