Look into my eyes

By the early 20th century, the young painter Pablo Picasso already had a characteristic painting style. Nevertheless, he continued to work on developing new ways to depict figures. Influenced by the works of Paul Cézanne and the indigenous art of Africa and Oceania, Picasso gradually moved away from realistic representation. With the completion of his painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", between 1907 and 1908, he set entirely new standards for the visual understanding of figures and space.

The "Head Of A Woman" held by the Mainz State Museum also belongs to the collection of works of 1908.Shortly afterwards, in 1909, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles used the word "cubisme" to refer to the new style of the group around Picasso and Braque. Despite the general assumption that Cubism is solely and merely the simplification of form, more than 809 preliminary studies on the subject of "Demoiselles" testify to the labour-intensive development process of the Cubist idea.