At the start of the 20th century, Picasso was already living in Paris. The city had established itself as the center of international art at a time when the new machines that had been invented the century before, such as the automobile, the camera and the airplane, were starting to become democratized and to have an effect on lifestyles in the modern metropolis. Film made it possible for the first time to record and reproduce moving images. The speed of movement of people, goods and images had an impact on both life and the worldview, with movement becoming the protagonist and cultural episodes taking place in sequences that were as intense as they were brief. The Avant-gardes appeared as rapidly as they were soon to vanish.
Well aware of the revolutionary spirit of this time of change, Pablo Picasso employed highly unusual formal effects in his painting. With this tactic of transgression, he was able to bring inharmonious elements together in the same picture, in such a way that the resulting work destabilized the notion of static meaning.
