During the early months of 1907, just before he created the groundbreaking painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Pablo Picasso's art entered a phase of austere and monumental classicism, stripped of sentiment or narrative expression. This large, highly finished charcoal drawing epitomizes that moment, during which Picasso was inspired by two powerful, ancient sculptural styles: The masklike faces of the squat yet statuesque women, with their heavy eyelids and stylized, arched brows, find their origin in the Iberian sculptures that Picasso had seen in an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris in 1906, while their severe planar poses and hieratic gestures recall archaic and classical Greek sculptures, which the artist would also have seen in the Louvre, particularly the mourners in Greek grave reliefs who similarly stand or sit in shallow, curtained spaces. Innis Howe Shoemaker, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 236.