For centuries, painters worked like a camera. They picked one spot and painted only what could be seen from there.
That single viewpoint is called perspective, and it makes a flat canvas look deep.
Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque dropped it before World War I. A Cubist painting shows an object as if the painter had walked around it, broken into flat, angled planes.
The subject is still there, but you have to piece it back together.
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How These Were Chosen
Each pick had to pass at least one of two tests. It is one of the pictures museums and historians use to date a stage of Cubism, from the first break with perspective in 1907 to the flat colors of 1921.
Or it shows what painters other than Picasso and Braque did with the method.
12. Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921)
Three masked performers sit side by side behind a brown table, in a bare room painted in dark browns. On the left, a Pierrot in white plays a clarinet. In the middle, a Harlequin in a red and yellow diamond costume strums a guitar.
On the right, a monk in a black robe holds up a sheet of music. Pablo Picasso painted them in the summer of 1921 at Fontainebleau, a town southeast of Paris. His studio that summer was the garage of a villa his family had rented from early July to late September.
Photographs of the garage show two of his huge canvases tacked straight onto one wall, their lower edges a few inches above the floor. Three Musicians hung on the wall opposite.
The room is still a box, with a floor that runs back and a ceiling that closes it in. Everything inside the box is flat. Each figure is built from pieces of unshaded color that fit together like cut paper.
MoMA reads the whole picture as a painted memory of collage. Picasso had helped invent that technique in 1912, gluing newspaper and wallpaper onto his pictures. The monk's sheet music is painted, but it recalls the printed music Picasso used to paste in.
The pieces also refuse to stay with their owners. The blue patch that forms Harlequin's face, with its two dark eyes, runs down into Pierrot's chest. The hands are tiny brown shapes with jagged fingers, far too small for the instruments they hold.
The dog under the table takes hunting for. Picasso painted its head halfway up the left side, in almost the same brown as the wall. The way in is the tail that sticks up between Harlequin's legs.
Harlequin had stood in for Picasso in his pictures for years, and MoMA's label says so plainly. The best-known reading goes further. It makes the Pierrot the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died of the Spanish flu in November 1918.
The monk, in this reading, is the poet Max Jacob. In 1921 Jacob left Paris to live in the presbytery of a village church on the Loire. The Philadelphia Museum of Art states this reading as fact in a teaching sheet on its own version of Three Musicians.
MoMA commits only to the Harlequin. Anne Umland, the MoMA curator who organized the 2023 exhibition Picasso in Fontainebleau, describes the interpretations of the painting as at times contradictory.
Within weeks, Picasso painted a second version in the same garage. It now belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Philadelphia canvas is upright, while the MoMA one is broader than it is high.
Harlequin and Pierrot swap places and instruments, so Harlequin plays a violin at left. The monk there wears the brown robe of a Franciscan, and holds an accordion and a glass instead of music. There is no dog.
At a Glance
Artist: Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973)
Painted: Summer 1921, Fontainebleau
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 200.7 x 222.9 cm (79 x 87 3/4 in)
Where to see it: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (listed on view in Gallery 513 in September 2026)
About This Painting
Who bought Three Musicians from Picasso?
Paul Rosenberg, Picasso's Paris dealer, bought Three Musicians in the fall of 1921. It stayed in the Rosenberg family until 1949, when MoMA bought it with the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.
What else did Picasso paint in the Fontainebleau garage?
Picasso also painted Three Women at the Spring there, three massive women in Greek tunics drawn in a classical style. He made two large versions of it that summer: an oil now at MoMA and a red-chalk version at the Musée National Picasso in Paris.
How often have Picasso's four big Fontainebleau canvases been shown together?
The four Fontainebleau canvases have been shown together twice since they left the studio. MoMA hung them in its Picasso retrospective of 1980, then reunited them in Picasso in Fontainebleau, from October 2023 to February 2024.
Was Picasso working for the theater in 1921?
Yes. In May 1921, a few weeks before Picasso left for Fontainebleau, the Ballets Russes staged Cuadro Flamenco at the Gaîté-Lyrique in Paris. The sets and costumes were his.
11. Fernand Léger, The City (1919)
A thick purple column runs from the top of the canvas to the bottom, just right of center. Around it are stenciled letters, a staircase with a railing, black lattice pylons in the top corners and a framed poster with a green silhouette. Blocks of red, yellow, blue, black and white fill every gap.
At the bottom, two gray men made of tubes stand on the stairs. Fernand Léger painted the picture in Paris in 1919, the year after the First World War ended.
He signed it at lower right with his name, the word PARIS and the year. The Philadelphia Museum of Art compares its size to a billboard or a movie screen.