Although largely abstract, the faceted technique still produces a recognizable image of the subject. Many paintings of analytical cubism are faceted (see for instance Georges Braque's "Mandola", below), a technique that allows the artist to disect and reconstruct his subject in a way that depicts its essence rather than its appearance. Analytical cubism lasted until 1911 and is characterized by monochrome, relatively unemotional paintings that depict rather uneventful subjects, such as still lives. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon represents Picasso's époque negre which was inspired by African art and overlaps the first phase in cubism, which is called analytical cubism.
Arriving at the concept of depicting an object as seen from different viewpoints independently, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque soon became good friends and went on to develop the visual language of cubism in close cooperation, an alliance that Picasso would sometimes call a marriage. In this painting Picasso depicts human figures by making use of several viewpoints, which became one of the characteristic features of cubism. Braque had studied Cézanne's method of representing three dimensions as seen from several viewpoints, in the same year (1907) that Picasso created his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Now we know that he has to share to honor with Georges Braque. During the early days of cubism historians attributed the creation of cubism to one man: Pablo Picasso.