BIELEFELD.- 1905 was a key year for Picasso. After his melancholy Blue Period, he began creating the brighter paintings of acrobats and circus artistes of his Pink Period at his studio in Montmartre. Picasso had, in the meantime, settled in the metropolis of Paris. He was now more fascinated by the antique-oriented paintings by French artist Puvis de Chavannes than by the work of Henri Toulouse-Lautrecs, his role model at the time of his first trip to Paris. Archaic-looking lads, monumental female bodies, and increasingly abstract, mask-like faces mark the development of a new concept of the body, which culminated in the famous Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. Picasso’s friends and his lover, Fernande Olivier, were portrayed as if on a wide stage, in countless drawings, paintings, and sculpture. With over one hundred loans from private and public collections around the world, the fifth Picasso exhibition in Bielefeld since 1984 deals with the artist’s breakthrough t