Influence of El Greco
When did Picasso begin Les Demoiselles?
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
In 1907, when Picasso began to work on "Les Demoiselles", one of the old master painters he greatly admired was El Greco (1541–1614). At the time El Greco was largely obscure and under-appreciated. Picasso's friend Ignacio Zuloaga (1870–1945) acquired El Greco's masterpiece, the "Opening of the Fifth Seal", in 1897 for 1000 pesetas. While Picasso was working on , he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's "Opening of the Fifth Seal." The relation between and the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs and visually identifying qualities of both works were analysed. El Greco's painting which Picasso studied over and over in Zuloaga's house inspired not only the size, format, and composition of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" but it inspired its apocalyptic power. Later, speaking of the work to Dor de la Souchère in Antibes, Picasso said: "In any case, only the execution counts. From this point of view, it is correct to say that Cubism has a Spanish origin and that I invented Cubism. We must look for the Spanish influence in Cézanne. Things themselves necessitate it, the influence of El Greco, a Venetian painter, on him. But his structure is Cubist. "The relationship of the painting to other group portraits in the Western tradition, such as "Diana and Callisto" by Titian (1488–1576), and the same subject by Rubens (1577–1640), in the Prado, has also been discussed.