Seated Nude, 1909 by Picasso

The final collapse of form into Cubism, from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) to Seated Nude, was gradual and Picasso was greatly influenced by what he called his 'marriage' with fellow experimenter, French artist Georges Braque. Braque's rigid disciplinarian approach helped to stabilize Picasso's development, which had gone astray after the Demoiselles masterpiece.

Seated Nude is part of a series from late 1909 to spring 1910, and a summation of earlier Cubist three-dimensional experimental work on still life and portraits. In fact, this time of experiment and research gives this period the title of Analytical Cubism, with its manipulation and fragmentation of space and multiple angles of vision. Picasso's whole preoccupation with the notion of vision, explored in the earlier blind man images, now finds its thematic challenge in Cubic.

In this picture, the female form is a blur; yet although the traditional representational form has collapsed we still discern its shape as Picasso studies the relationship of the figure to its surrounding space. The development of 'passages', connecting areas of spatial coherence, involves a remarkable complexity and balance between total abstraction of pictorial signs and recognisable features, especially with the return of an almost monochromatic palette similar to Girl in a Chemise (1905) from the late Blue Period