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Lot Essay
Baigneuse et cabine de bains was executed on 8 September 1938, towards the end of Picasso's second stay at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon in Mougins in the South of France. Picasso had been introduced to this spot by his friends Paul and Nusch Eluard, who also joined him this summer, as did Dora Maar. The previous year, Dora had been captured in several iconic photographs on the beach with Picasso, among them those by Roland Penrose, who had also been there with his wife, Lee Miller.
Dora was one of Picasso's great Muses, especially during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. Dark and intellectual, she appeared in his works in guises more suited to the atmosphere of foreboding that had enveloped Europe in the prelude to the Second World War, especially during the Civil War that had torn apart Picasso's native Spain. She was at his side while he created a string of masterpieces, above all the epic Guernica, and his series of 'Weeping Women', which she directly inspired.
It is to these latter pictures that Baigneuse et cabine de bains relates: its jutting angularity and the framing device of the beach hut, which provides a substitute for the chairs that so often imprisoned the seated Dora in other works, both invoke the artist's angst and anxiety. Absent are the fluid, sensual curves of Picasso's pictures of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young blond beauty he had sent far away to Royan on the Atlantic coast. Curves and curlicues are here replaced with points, corners, twists and sharp lines. Thus, even in this picture dating from a period of holiday, from a beachside idyll, Picasso has managed to present Dora as his intense, mysterious muse. 'For me she's the weeping woman,' he explained. 'For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one' (Picasso, quoted in B. Léal, ''For Charming Dora': Portraits of Dora Maar', pp. 384-407, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, London, 1996, p. 395). The 'deep reality' of Dora's character had already seen her act as a Muse to the Surrealist movement of which she was one of the main protagonists since its inception in the early 1920s. Her powerful, attractive psychological tenor matched Picasso's own troubled state of mind during this period of personal and political turbulence, resulting in some of his most inspired pictures.
Dora was one of Picasso's great Muses, especially during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. Dark and intellectual, she appeared in his works in guises more suited to the atmosphere of foreboding that had enveloped Europe in the prelude to the Second World War, especially during the Civil War that had torn apart Picasso's native Spain. She was at his side while he created a string of masterpieces, above all the epic Guernica, and his series of 'Weeping Women', which she directly inspired.
It is to these latter pictures that Baigneuse et cabine de bains relates: its jutting angularity and the framing device of the beach hut, which provides a substitute for the chairs that so often imprisoned the seated Dora in other works, both invoke the artist's angst and anxiety. Absent are the fluid, sensual curves of Picasso's pictures of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young blond beauty he had sent far away to Royan on the Atlantic coast. Curves and curlicues are here replaced with points, corners, twists and sharp lines. Thus, even in this picture dating from a period of holiday, from a beachside idyll, Picasso has managed to present Dora as his intense, mysterious muse. 'For me she's the weeping woman,' he explained. 'For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me. It was the deep reality, not the superficial one' (Picasso, quoted in B. Léal, ''For Charming Dora': Portraits of Dora Maar', pp. 384-407, Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, London, 1996, p. 395). The 'deep reality' of Dora's character had already seen her act as a Muse to the Surrealist movement of which she was one of the main protagonists since its inception in the early 1920s. Her powerful, attractive psychological tenor matched Picasso's own troubled state of mind during this period of personal and political turbulence, resulting in some of his most inspired pictures.