In 1907 Picasso drew The Demoiselles D’Avignon. This work was a complete breakthrough from everything that he had done before that time. It was the early stage of Cubism and a mixture of every other “ism”: Fauvism, Expressionism, Primitivism, Futurism and Modernism. Followed by a series of large nude sketches leaning towards geometry, The Demoiselles was started in the spring of 1906 and was finished in the summer of the following year. However, Picasso never regarded it finished work and only allowed it to be exhibited in 1937 (Crespelle 98). Altering the composition several times, he finally took out two main figures, a sailor and a student holding a skull, and replaced them with two nude women.
The Demoiselles D’Avignon is undoubtedly advancement in 20th century art. The question however is where did Picasso get his inspiration and who influenced him? It was a summer in 1906 at Gosol, a little Spanish village, where its rough, primitive setting had led him to adopt a simplified style indicative of the sculptors of the Catalan Romanesque period (Crespelle, 97). Picasso put into his work influences that had interested him for some time: Egyptian symmetry, ancient Greek sculpture, the Virgins of Catalan art, Cezanne’s geometric planes and the rough expressionism of Negro statuettes (Crespelle, 99). Indeed, it wasn’t just Picasso who was interested in the latter. Many expressionists were influenced by Negro art since they were attracted by its reduction in artificial art. Picasso was also influenced by Cezanne. He begun to cut up his figures into geometric shapes, cones, spheres, cylinders and in clearly defined planes just like Cezanne used to do. In the painting, Picasso over highlighted the cutting up of the shapes with brightly colored lines that remind tribal scars on the faces of some African tribesmen (Boudaille, 36). Indeed, the figures’ shapes in Picasso’s painting show the influence of three major styles: on the left, the flattening of the woman’s torso reminds Egyptian art; the noses of the two central figures are seen in profile whereas the rest of the facial characteristics are face on, something which reminds Iberian art and finally, the features of the woman in the right are reminiscent of masks of the Negro art.
Common in most of The Demoiselles sketches is the general design of the picture inspired by Cezanne’s bather compositions as well as by a certain influence of El Greco in the abstract breaking of the planes (Picasso: 200 Masterworks, 34). In addition, Picasso was also influenced by Ingres’s Bain Turc (1859-63), Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre (1905-06) and the retrospectives of Gauguin. Each time that Picasso worked on his sketches on the Demoiselles, he kept making a transition from his Blue period through the style of Cezanne’s Bathers to his own crude mode. Considering the central figure of the Demoiselles, a clear connection can be made to Ingres’s seated figure at front right of the Bain Turc (Picasso: 200 Masterworks, 37). In addition, what can be said about the Demoiselles is the idea of figures that gambol nude in a circle, an image seen in ancient Greek vases that also Matisse incorporated in his Bonheur de Vivre, but this time the figures become crude, dissonant, ugly, ambivalent and the notion of innocence is lost.
Influence can also be found in the use of color. Imitating Cezanne and Van Gogh, Picasso gets rid of black. The open contours are drawn in dark blue-green whereas the shadows indicating the sky are painted in blue. This use of blue is a sign of reflected light that Cezanne made frequent use of (Picasso: 200 Masterworks, 34). Although Cezanne’s Bathers are painted outdoors, Picasso paints his figures indoors while preserving the blue and the light of outdoors. The blue Picasso uses seems to be a window behind the figures. 
Furthermore, what is obvious in the Demoiselles is the contrast between the use of red and blue. The two figures on the right with the primitive masks are framed by blue drapes which indicate a sense of melancholia and signify the socially marginalized. In addition, this blue is also found in Matisse’s Blue Nude. The use of bright color helped create the idea of flatness, something found in some of Gauguin’s paintings, limiting the illusion of depth (Harisson et al, 132). The Fauves also made use of this method. Moreover, what Picasso borrowed from Cezanne, was the extension of certain colors and shades belonging to one area and letting them spill into the neighboring area, ignoring the points where the lines meet (Fabre, 41). A prime example is the dark color around the face of the figure in the top right corner, which extends onto her arm.
To conclude, The Demoiselles d’Avignon sums up many of Picasso’s experiments in the preceding years but introduces some new aspects of his artistic influences, particularly of Iberian and Negro sculpture such as the extreme angularity in the forms and a savage brutality in the deformation of his female figures. From the Fauves’ sharp colors and the more violent expressiveness; the flat, angular planes of Cezanne’s Bathers compositions and the simplified forms of African Negro sculpture, Picasso drew a new path to the 20th century art which lead him to become distinct from every other artist of the period.
Pictures: Picasso Pablo. The Demoiselles D’avignon: sketches.