Angela Liu:

Take a moment to observe this unfinished painting. You may start to see parts of a church coming together. This is the iconic Sacré-Cœur Basilica, which sits atop a hill in the Montmartre neighbourhood of Paris. Montmartre was a popular residence for artists in the early 1900s. Picasso moved here around this time.

Picasso saw this church almost every day when it was still under construction and started to consider how he could represent and capture the church in every angle in one picture plane. You can see how he used geometric shapes and lines to depict the building and its surroundings. Notice how the dome, the sharp spires, and the nearby houses are presented as fragments instead of a single picture. Imagine walking around the church and looking at it from different angles—this is what Picasso wanted us to experience when we see this painting. This is an early foray into what we now call Cubism, a style he developed with Georges Braque that deconstructs objects into geometric shapes and various perspectives.

This painting was never finished, but Picasso kept it preciously close to him until his death.

To learn more about Picasso’s breakthrough, please watch the video in the room behind you about his early Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

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