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In 1907, Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Figure 1) and initiated a radical break with many of the fundamental premises of the Western pictorial tradition. The work stands at the threshold of Cubism, a pictorial style characterized by the ever-increasing fragmentation of objects and the erosion of boundaries between figure and ground, mass and space. As Picasso himself put it: “A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions” (in Ashton, 1972, p. 8).
How is Cubism to be accounted for? The psychoanalytic biographer proceeds from this axiom: personal conflicts and