Artnit

In 1957, Pablo Picasso isolated himself from his family, friends, and the world to create a series of fifty-eight paintings, variations on one of the most influential paintings in the world, Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas. The series is a confrontation with one of the most important works in the history of Spanish painting and also a commentary on contemporary events in Spain, observed by Picasso from his exile in France. By painting this series, he sought to understand the key elements of a work he admired while also giving his Las Meninas a life of their own. Pablo Picasso himself understood this series as a whole and as such donated it to the Museum in Barcelona in May 1968 in memory of his secretary and close friend Jaime Sabartés who died the same year.

Pablo Picasso was especially attracted to Diego Velázquez's masterpiece Las Meninas because it dealt with his central theme of painter and model. In 1957, he started an extended series of variations on Las Meninas where he produced a personal interpretation of the whole of Velázquez's work. Las Meninas, after Velázquez, is the first, largest, and most widely recognized variation of Las Meninas, and is the most faithful to the vertical composition created by Velázquez. It is situated in Picasso Museum, Barcelona.

Girl with a Mandolin is one of the most beautiful, lyrical, and accessible of all Cubist paintings but is also an early example of an Analytic Cubist painting. The idea for this painting originated in Cadaques where Pablo Picasso and Fernande Olivier spent a summer vacation in 1910. The same year Picasso painted in Paris Girl with a Mandolin within the Cubism. Today it is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Pablo Picasso's The Young Ladies of Avignon is usually compared to Paul Cézanne's The Large Bathers. Picasso had been very much inspired by this painting. It helped him to look at objects from varying viewpoints. Painted around the same time but with completely different feels, these paintings are influential and have given the painters their distinguished recognition, particularly those that include nude figures in their work.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon is a revolutionary large oil painting created in 1907 by Pablo Picasso. Picasso prepared this painting in his Paris studio over six months by making hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings of revision. He named the painting The Young Ladies of Avignon after a brothel in Avignon Street in Barcelona. This painting is considered to be the first cubist, avant-garde, and municipal modern painting of the XX century and the most famous example of cubism painting. It is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.