Paris in the Belle Époque arrived in Montmartre at the turn of the century. Drawn by the reputation of Paris as the world capital of art, Pablo Picasso came from Barcelona in 1900 to share an apartment with the poet Max Ernst and began by painting the cabarets and prostitutes of the neighborhood. Amedeo Modigliani and other artists lived and worked in a building called Le Bateau-Lavoir during the years 1904–1909. In 1909, Picasso painted one of his most important masterpieces, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", in Le Bateau-Lavoir. Led by Picasso and Georges Braque, the artistic movement cubism was born in Paris. Henri Matisse came to
Crystal Cubism clearest and most intelligible definition of Cubism. At the outset of the First World War many artists were mobilized: Metzinger, Gleizes, Braque, Léger, de La Fresnaye, and Duchamp-Villon. Despite the brutal interruption, each found the time to continue making art, sustaining differing types of Cubism. Yet they discovered a ubiquitous link between the Cubist syntax (beyond pre-war attitudes) and that of the anonymity and novelty of mechanized warfare. Cubism evolved as much a result of an "evasion" of the inconceivable atrocities of war as of nationalistic pressures. Along with the evasion came the need to diverge further and further away