Question: When did Picasso begin Les Demoiselles?
About the article "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", section "Influence of El Greco".

Candidate passages:
Jacques Doucet had seen the painting at the Salon d'Antin, yet remarkably seems to have purchased "Les Demoiselles" without asking Picasso to unroll it in his studio so that he could see it again.
André Breton later described the transaction:I remember the day he bought the painting from Picasso, who strange as it may seem, appeared to be intimidated by Doucet and even offered no resistance when the price was set at 25,000 francs: "Well then, it's agreed, M.
Picasso."
Doucet then saids: "You shall receive 2,000 francs per month, beginning next month, until the sum of 25,000 francs is reached.
John Richardson quotes Breton in a letter to Doucet about "Les Demoiselles" writing: through it one penetrates right into the core of Picasso's laboratory and because it is the crux of the drama, the center of all the conflicts that Picasso has given rise to and that will last forever...
It is a work which to my mind transcends painting; it is the theater of everything that has happened in the last 50 years.
Ultimately, it seems Doucet paid 30,000 francs rather than the agreed price.
A few months after the purchase Doucet had the painting appraised at between 250,000 and 300,000 francs.
Richardson speculates that Picasso, who by 1924 was on the top of the art world and didn't need to sell the painting to Doucet, did so and at that low price because Doucet promised "Les Demoiselles" would go to the Louvre in his will.
However after Doucet died in 1929 he did not leave the painting to the Louvre in his will, and it was sold like most of Doucet's collection through private dealers.
In November 1937 the Jacques Seligman & Co. art gallery in New York City held an exhibition titled "20 Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903–1923" that included "Les Demoiselles."
The Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting for $24,000.
The museum raised $18,000 toward the purchase price by selling a Degas painting and the rest came from donations from the co-owners of the gallery Germain Seligman and Cesar de Hauke.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition on November 15, 1939 that remained on view until January 7, 1940.
The exhibition entitled: "Picasso:40 Years of His Art," was organized by Alfred H. Barr (1902–1981), in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition contained 344 works, including the major and then newly painted "Guernica" and its studies, as well as "Les Demoiselles."
It has been suggested that the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" served as an inspiration for the early Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, especially "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", which mirrors the expressionistic angularity of the painting.
When Picasso was working on "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", he visited his friend Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's "Opening of the Fifth Seal".
The relation between "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs of both works were analysed.
Art historian Ron Johnson was the first to focus on the relationship between the two paintings.
According to John Richardson, a British art historian, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" "turns out to have a few more answers to give once we realize that the painting owes at least as much to El Greco as Cézanne".
Efi Foundoulaki insists on the "activity of the triangle Picasso-Cézanne-El Greco, which is established in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"".
Foundoulaki analyzes the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" and states that the clothed figure in the left part of the painting and the naked figures to the right showed the contradiction between profane and divine love.
According to Rolf Laesse, this may have been the original inspiration of Picasso who in a preliminary drawing of the "Demoiselles" depicted a medical student holding a skull or a book and entering a room where there is a sailor among nude women.
Richardson, however, conjectures that Picasso knew the interpretation by Cossio concerning the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" and based his theory extensively on this conjecture.
Richardson and Foundoulaki emphasize on the morphological parallels between the "Opening of the Fifth Seal" and "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", and explore the Picasso-Cézanne-El Greco relationship.
Foundoulaki asserts that there is a similarity of shape and that Picasso ingeniously repeated the game with the |V and the inverted triangles of El Greco, something he had already begun in "The Villagers".
According to Foundoulaki, "the dialogue Picasso inaugurated with El Greco in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", by means of Cézanne, is carried on in Cubism".
Richardson sees the Apocalypse in El Greco's "Opening of the Fifth Seal" as the catalyst which showed Picasso how to harness the spiritual energy of a great religious artist to his own demonic ends.
According to Richardson, Picasso followed this apocalyptic vision his whole life. 
From 16 to 31 July 1916 "Les Demoiselles" was exhibited to the public for the first time at the Salon d'Antin, an exhibition organized by André Salmon titled "L'Art moderne en France".
The exhibition space at 26 rue d'Antin was lent by the famous couturier and art collector Paul Poiret.
The larger Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants had been closed due to World War I, making this the only Cubists exhibition in France since 1914.
A review was published in "Le Cri de Paris": The Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense.
They are exhibiting at the Galerie Poiret naked women whose scattered parts are represented in all four corners of the canvas: here an eye, there an ear, over there a hand, a foot on top, a mouth below.
M. Picasso, their leader, is possibly the least disheveled of the lot.
He has painted, or rather daubed, five women who are, if the truth be told, all hacked up, and yet their limbs somehow manage to hold together.
They have, moreover, piggish faces with eyes wandering negligently above their ears.
An enthusiastic art-lover offered the artist 20,000 francs for this masterpiece.
M. Picasso wanted more.
The art-lover did not insist.
Picasso referred to his only entry at the Salon d'Antin as his Brothel painting calling it "Le Bordel d'Avignon" but André Salmon retitled it "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" so as to lessen its scandalous impact on the public.
Picasso never liked the title, however, preferring "las chicas de Avignon," but Salmon's title stuck.
The only other time the painting might have been exhibited to the public prior to a 1937 showing in New York was in 1918, in an exhibition dedicated to Picasso and Matisse at Galerie Paul Guillaume in Paris, though very little information exists about this exhibition or the presence (if at all) of "Les Demoiselles".
Afterwards, the painting was rolled up and remained with Picasso until 1924 when, with urging and help from Breton and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), he sold it to designer Jacques Doucet (1853–1929), for 25,000 francs.  
Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a play written by Steve Martin in 1993.
It features the characters of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, who meet at a bar called the Lapin Agile (Nimble Rabbit) in Montmartre, Paris.
It is set on October 8, 1904, and both men are on the verge of an amazing idea (Einstein will publish his special theory of relativity in 1905 and Picasso will paint "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1907) when they find themselves at the Lapin Agile, where they have a lengthy debate about the value of genius and talent while interacting with a host of other characters. 
Although "Les Demoiselles" had an enormous and profound influence on modern art, its impact was not immediate, and the painting stayed in Picasso's studio for many years.
At first, only Picasso's intimate circle of artists, dealers, collectors and friends were aware of the work.
While many were shocked and some outraged, influential people such as Georges Braque and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were supportive.
Soon after the late summer of 1907, Picasso and his long-time lover Fernande Olivier (1881–1966) had a parting of the ways.
The re-painting of the two heads on the far right of "Les Demoiselles" fueled speculation that it was an indication of the split between Picasso and Olivier.
Although they later reunited for a period, the relationship ended in 1912.
"Les Demoiselles" would not be exhibited until 1916, and not widely recognized as a revolutionary achievement until the early 1920s, when André Breton (1896–1966) published the work.
Richardson goes on to say that Henri Matisse was fighting mad upon seeing the "Demoiselles" at Picasso's studio.
He let it be known that he regarded the painting as an attempt to ridicule the modern movement; he was outraged to find his sensational "Blue Nude," not to speak of "Bonheur de vivre," overtaken by Picasso's "hideous" whores.
He vowed to get even and make Picasso beg for mercy.
Just as the "Bonheur de vivre" had fueled Picasso's competitiveness, "Les Demoiselles" now fueled Matisse's.
Among Picasso's closed circle of friends and colleagues there was a mixture of opinions about "Les Demoiselles".
Georges Braque and André Derain were both initially troubled by it although they were supportive of Picasso.
According to William Rubin, two of Picasso's friends, the art critic André Salmon and the painter Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), were enthusiastic about it while Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) wasn't.
Both the art dealer-collector Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), and art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler were more enthusiastic about the painting however.
According to Kahnweiler "Les Demoiselles" was the beginning of Cubism.
He writes:Early in 1907 Picasso began a strange large painting depicting women, fruit and drapery, which he left unfinished.
It cannot be called other than unfinished, even though it represents a long period of work.
Begun in the spirit of the works of 1906, it contains in one section the endeavors of 1907 and thus never constitutes a unified whole.<br>The nudes, with large, quiet eyes, stand rigid, like mannequins.
Their stiff, round bodies are flesh-colored, black and white.
That is the style of 1906.<br>In the foreground, however, alien to the style of the rest of the painting, appear a crouching figure and a bowl of fruit.
These forms are drawn angularly, not roundly modeled in chiaroscuro.
The colors are luscious blue, strident yellow, next to pure black and white.
This is the beginning of Cubism, the first upsurge, a desperate titanic clash with all of the problems at once.
(Kahweiler, 1920)