How did picasso shift from rose period to cubism in les demoiselles d'avignon?

[Avery.W]

I’ve been trying to understand the shift in Picasso’s work from his Rose Period into early Cubism, but I keep getting stuck on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I see the Iberian and African sculptural influences in the faces, but the fractured space and multiple viewpoints feel so abrupt compared to everything just a year or two before. Was this painting truly that radical of a departure, or am I missing a smoother transition in his earlier sketches and studies?

[JosephL]

I started from the Rose stuff too. In some 1906 drawings Picasso still keeps a sense of rounded faces and group balance, but you can feel the edge tightening, lines pressing in, space getting chopped. The Iberian and African cues show up in the faces, but the composition still has a kind of painterly stage setting. Les Demoiselles lands as a jolt because the single view falls away and planes begin to interlock, yet you can catch the slow breadcrumb trail in the studies if you look for it.

[Zachary_H]

I tried sketching quick thumbnails to bridge the leap. Some of my roughs show the faces tilting, noses flattening, and the space around them loosening into flat, overlapping planes. I scrapped most of them, but the urge to fragment space and push the form away from the usual volume is clearly there even in the roughs.

[VictoriaPM]

Could the problem be that we want a neat arc and Picasso was really testing something new in a handful of works from 1906 07 rather than giving us a tidy transition?

[JoshuaIG]

I've heard a guide mention the canvases were heavily revised in studio, with layers scraped and reworked. That aside, the shift might feel abrupt because it moves away from narrative to a problem of seeing, but maybe the longer thread is buried in the earlier works' experiments with form and space.