Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

The origins of cubism date to Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), according to many art historians. The 1907 painting depicts five women in a brothel. The artist distorted the women's anatomy and facial features into broken planes. Masks from Africa and Oceania may have influenced Picasso in his treatment of the womens' faces.

The futurists, a group of Italian artists working between 1909 and 1916, shared Lé ger's enthusiasm for technology, but pushed it even further. As their name suggests, the futurists embraced all that glorified new technology and mechanization and decried anything that had to do with tradition. They declared a speeding automobile to be more beautiful than an ancient Greek statue.

In combining Picasso's fragmentation of form with Seurat's pointillist painting technique, Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) by Umberto Boccioni is typical of futurism. But the most noticeable feature of Boccioni’s many-legged soccer player is its depiction of motion. To achieve this sense of motion, the futurists drew upon sequential photographs of human movement by photographer Eadweard Muybridge and scientist Etienne-Jules Marey. " A galloping horse, " the futurists proclaimed, " has not four legs but twenty." Like Lé ger, the futurists believed that a new society could be built only if citizens sacrificed their individuality for the good of the larger group. The new ideal human being suggested in Boccioni's painting would be more machine than man: strong, energetic, impersonal, even violent. Other futurist painters are Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini.