20th-century Western painting modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. Initially influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and other late-19th-century innovators, Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907; see gallery) Picasso created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently
Pablo Picasso highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work. On 17 May 2017, "The Jerusalem Post" in an article titled "Picasso Work Stolen By Nazis Sells for $45 Million at Auction" reported the sale of a portrait painted by Picasso, the 1939 "Femme assise, robe bleu", which was previously misappropriated during the early years of WWII. The painting has changed hands several times since its recovery, most recently through auction in May 2017 at Christie's in New York City. In March 2018 his "Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée" (1937), a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for