In 1907 Pablo Picasso unveiled a massive eight-by-eight-foot canvas to his closest circle and the room went silent. Matisse thought it was a prank, and Georges Braque said it felt like eating rope and drinking gasoline. This episode traces how Les Demoiselles d'Avignon grew out of Picasso's rivalry with Matisse at Gertrude and Leo Stein's salon and his decision that if he could not out-beautiful the king of the Fauves, he would build something deliberately shocking.

The conversation follows the strange mix of influences he absorbed between late 1906 and 1907, the disastrous reception that led him to roll the canvas up for nearly a decade, and how the painting ultimately gave Picasso and Braque the vocabulary to invent Cubism.

• El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal, Cezanne's geometric forms, Gauguin's Oviri, and ancient Iberian scu ...