Girls of Avignon 244x233 cm 1907 Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Picasso was increasingly drawn to the world of primitive art and, under the influence of Cézanne's rationalism, reflected simplified forms in his Self-Portrait (1906). Works from this period are filled with geometric forms and linear planes. In 1907, Picasso completed his epoch-making Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, revealing the birth of a new painting language—“Cubist painting”—which broke through the illusion of two-dimensional pictorial space since the Renaissance and moved toward the autonomy of painting itself, igniting an unprecedented and unparalleled wave of radical modernism. Other works from this time include Two Figures under a Tree (1907), Mother and Child (1907), and Nude Woman and Figure (1907).