Pablo Picasso’s Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro is a significant painting as it represents the artist’s first completely cubist artwork. The painting was created in 1909 and demonstrates an angular network of gridlocked shapes that fuse until space. It is also a composition of simplified geometric shapes, which reflected his invention of cubism, where an object is broken into different planes to depict it from various angles.
It is known that Picasso spent a summer in 1909 in the village of Horta de Ebro in Spain where he began creating landscape views like this one. Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro depicts the view of the town and shows its architecture rendered devoid of any windows or doors with only outlines split into geometric forms. The topography of the scene was freely rearranged to emphasize further that the scenery has been produced from many viewpoints.
Picasso used interlocking planes to merge the background’s rugged topography with terra-cotta and stucco architecture in the village at the forefront. Overall, Houses on The Hill, Horta De Ebro represents Picasso’s mastery of cubism techniques and its influence extended in contemporary paintings and modern art movements throughout history.