1907
Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
In a Montmartre studio Pablo Picasso turned five brothel women into angular shards of African mask and pink flesh. His friends were horrified. He rolled the canvas up and left it in a corner for years. When it emerged, painting in the West had been cracked open and scattered into cubes.
Picasso begins cubism
In his Montmartre studio, Pablo Picasso, only twenty-six, absorbed influences from African masks and Iberian sculpture and began painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He showed the canvas only to friends; most of them hated it. Within a few years he and Braque had invented cubism, and Western painting had fractured into its modern forms.
Rasputin enters the Romanov court
A Siberian holy man with piercing eyes and strange habits began appearing at the Alexander Palace to ease the suffering of the hemophiliac heir Alexei. The empress Alexandra came to regard him as a messenger of God. His influence over the royal family would help poison the Romanovs in the eyes of Russian society by 1917.
Second Hague Peace Conference
Forty-four nations met at The Hague to lay down rules of war: treatment of prisoners, neutral shipping, arbitration of disputes. The conventions would be flouted within a decade across every front of the Great War. Still, they established a baseline of legal expectations about conduct between states that outlived the failure.