Apple, Google, and Hewlett-Packard all began in garages. Another product of the 20th century can be said to have been incubated in one, too — Cubism. For a portrait of the young artist as an innovator, head to “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” at the Museum of Modern Art through the middle of February. The show offers the artistic fruits of a long-ago summer, achieved in 1921. Picasso died an old man, but this work of his youth has aged well. 

Picasso fell in love with Olga Khoklova in 1917, when she was dancing in the Ballet Russe, under Sergei Diaghilev. Picasso was designing the costumes and sets for the Russian master. They married the next year, and three years later moved into a rented villa at 33 Boulevard Gambetta, at Fountainebleau. The garage was his studio, and there, in cramped conditions, as a new father, he painted “Three Musicians” and “Three Women at the Spring.”

The garage yield comprises two versions of each of these paintings, which the show surrounds with the equivalent of backup dancers at a Beyoncé concert — preparatory sketches, related works, rough drafts. The exhibition’s heart, though, is also its hinge. The “Three Women” paintings, while recognizably Picassan, are indebted to the classical tradition. The “Three Musicians” ones, though, are fully on the far side of Cubism. 

The show thrums with the jagged juxtapositions of these two sensibilities. That they were neighbors in a 20- by 10-foot space brings to a boil the question of Picasso’s relationship to art’s ancien régime, which he broke down into planes, lines, and arcs — symbolic, savage, and surreal. The memory of Château de Fontainebleau, a site of  French artistic respectability that thrived in the 16th century, was practically next door. 

The show’s curator, Anne Umland, tells the Sun that what happened in that garage was “shape-shifting” artistic practice. She likens Picasso’s painting at Fountainbleu to the eclecticism of the musician David Bowie, another “stylistic magpie” who assimilated influences. In 1921, Picasso was 15 years past “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” and the same span shy of “Guernica.” It is a moment to take stock, a hinge of art history at the heart of Picasso’s practice.

“Three Women at a Spring,” which comes in red chalk and oil versions, both convey an ambiance of dryness, a parched landscape crammed with gargantuan women in an animated conversation of gesture. Two accompanying studies zoom in on how Picasso shaped the women’s fingers, thick as sausages, anticipating something of the anatomy of Fernando Botero. There is a pitcher in the painting but no water, sending a sense of surreality to the spring. 

The lack of water rhymes with the feeling that this tableaux seems sculptural, with the women emerging from the rock itself. The same year Picasso painted these works, the poet T.S. Eliot would write in “The Wasteland” that “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief / And the dry stone no sound of water. Only / There is shadow under this red rock.” The painter and poet were both attuned to the arid in art.

Picasso’s practice, though, moved beyond painting in the shadow of Greek and Roman examples. “Three Musicians,” in its two versions, stretches more than two meters in length and width. It bears the fingerprints of not only Cubism, but also Commedia dell’arte, an Italian creation from the 16th century that traded in stock characters and social types. Here, Picasso’s work in the theater with Diaghilev bore painterly fruit. 

“Three Musicians” stars a guitar player, a clarinet player, and a singing friar holding music sheets. They are hybrids of shapes and people, lines and arcs and personalities built from an overlapping geometry that conveys the sense of a band, in all its mergings and medleys. One can imagine the music, but the chorus of colors is what really pops — an ocean blue shared between clarinet and guitar, and the latter’s orange and yellow diamond-patterned pants.

MoMa explains that the three musicians were drawn from those long-ago Italian thespians. Picasso, though, saw his intimates in these types. The clarinet player is “Pierrot” and also Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet and playwright who had plied the antebellum artistic circuit with Picasso. Apollinaire died of the Spanish flu in 1918. The friar is Max Jacob, who was Jewish by birth and converted to Catholicism but perished at Drancy, en route to Auschwitz.

Picasso himself is “Harlequin,” the guitar player in those striped orange and diamond pants. He is a trickster, a mischief maker, and a jester. His remote antecedents include the devil figure in medieval passion plays. The guitar, along with the fractured female form, would become Cubism’s subject and its muse, a touchstone for a jazzy time of crackling chords.

Picasso emerged from that garage with more than 50 years of painting ahead. He was just getting starting on his set.