Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque had established a body of work that divorced the painting from reality, emphasizing geometric form, the flatness of the canvas, and overlapping perspectives in what is now known today as Cubism.

Their work also gave rise to the collage as an art form, but the question of who of the two created the first one is still argued today among art critics.

Before 1912, the works more or less resembled a recognizable, but funky version of the still life subjects Picasso and Braque painted. The pair thought “screw that” and did the painterly version of a collage, tearing up their subjects and rearranging them into shapes and pieces unrecognizable from the original. Sometimes they would add letters or newspaper clippings.

You would think Picasso and Braque had to take drugs to make work that looked like an out-of-body experience but nope, it was all deliberate, carefully planned, and “Analytic,” as this brand of Cubism would later on be called. Picasso did, in fact, partake in opiates two to three times a week, but only between 1904-1908, ending abruptly not only due to his innate restlessness and the suicide of a friend, an event for which he was made scapegoat.

The town where the pair dwelled, Ceret, was a quaint town much with a much warmer, amicable climate than Picasso’s studio in Montmartre, where he had to burn his sketches just to stay warm. His arrival birthed a small, but tightly knit artist community that turned Ceret into the “Mecca of the Cubists.”

Around the same time, the Titanic left its shores, made its last call, hit an iceberg and became the most monumental fender bender of the 20th century, all within the span of the month of April. One can only imagine if a Cubist painting was in that safe instead of Rose’s nudes.