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
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion canvasses before they were completed. He abandoned the Crucifixion theme, then largely withdrew from painting in frustration, instead immersing himself in love affairs, drinking and gambling. When he returned to the topic of the Crucifixion eleven years later, he retained some of the stylistic elements he had developed earlier, such as the elongated and dislocated organic forms that he now based on "Oresteia". He continued to incorporate the spatial device he was to use many times throughout his career—three lines radiating from this central figure, which was first seen in "Crucifixion, 1933". "Three Studies" was painted over the course of