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Lot Essay
Pablo Picasso was born and raised by the sea, in Málaga, La Coruña, and Barcelona. Once he had attained success and the means, the opportunity for an annual summer holiday invariably meant for the artist a welcome break from sophisticated Paris and a return to the primal elements—water, sand, and sky—of the coastal environment. Having vacationed the previous year in Cannes, Picasso chose Dinard, near St. Mâlo in Brittany, as his destination in the summer of 1928. His wife Olga was ill and needed rest. From an earlier stay in 1922, Picasso remembered Dinard to be a family-friendly resort, suitable for his young son Paulo and the boy’s governess.
Foremost on his mind, however, Picasso desired to have Marie-Thérèse Walter, his secret, youthful mistress, close by, while being careful to keep her and Olga apart. Arriving in Dinard on 27 July, he rented the Villa des Roches, north of town, as quarters for his family and himself—they would use the beach at Saint-Enogat. When Marie-Thérèse appeared in early August, Picasso set her up in a pension de jeunes filles across town—he required a respectable, well-supervised establishment to prevent young men from harassing her. Picasso and Marie-Thérèse would meet daily, at the Plage de l’Ecluse on the harbor side of Dinard, well outside any vicinity where they and Olga might cross paths.
Prior to his girlfriend’s arrival, Picasso commenced his Carnet Dinard, in which he created volumetric studies in hatched pen and black ink that depict one or two bathers with ball shapes, taking inspiration from sea-worn driftwood, pebbles, and bones he had found along the shore (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 194, 200-205, 208 et al; Glimcher carnet, no. 96). Together with the sculpturesque drawings Picasso had done in Cannes the previous summer (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 84-88, 90-109, and 112; Glimcher carnets, nos. 94 and 95), these bather studies are among the most formally inventive and beautifully rendered works on paper of his entire career.
By 9 August, Picasso began to paint bather scenes as well, on small canvases, usually one or two each day, until the end of the month, nearly thirty in all. He completed the present painting on 20 August, together with another (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 234; Musée Picasso, Paris). Pierre Daix called these canvases “a breathtaking series…whose vehement, angular disproportions achieve the boldest remodelings of the female body he had done to this point. Women bathers playing with a ball or fitting their keys into a bathhouse lock compose a dynamic scene which Pierre de Champris has rightly compared to Mycenaean idols on display in the Louvre. But the touch of Freudianism, and the renewal of sexual exuberance in the boldness of reconstructions and dissociations of form, are illuminated this time by the presence of Marie-Thérèse” (Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, pp. 208-209).
“They are crammed with action, imbued with the cult of sun, sea and sand, and they crackle with sexual energy,” John Richardson declared. “Sometimes he adopts the viewpoint of someone lying on the beach. As they burst out of their tiny formats these figures appear all the taller and turn into flat, pinheaded cutouts in striped bathing suits like the Douanier Rousseau’s Football Players. The girls’ sticklike limbs rhyme with rickety wooden frames of the deck chairs on the beach… Note how Picasso sets up the pictorial rhymes between the jagged silhouettes of the offshore rocks and the jagged cutouts of the girls’ breasts and buttocks and straddled limbs. Note, too, how alert he is to changes in the weather and light… Picasso was justifiably proud of having caught the light of Dinard in these paintings” (A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, p. 361).
Foremost on his mind, however, Picasso desired to have Marie-Thérèse Walter, his secret, youthful mistress, close by, while being careful to keep her and Olga apart. Arriving in Dinard on 27 July, he rented the Villa des Roches, north of town, as quarters for his family and himself—they would use the beach at Saint-Enogat. When Marie-Thérèse appeared in early August, Picasso set her up in a pension de jeunes filles across town—he required a respectable, well-supervised establishment to prevent young men from harassing her. Picasso and Marie-Thérèse would meet daily, at the Plage de l’Ecluse on the harbor side of Dinard, well outside any vicinity where they and Olga might cross paths.
Prior to his girlfriend’s arrival, Picasso commenced his Carnet Dinard, in which he created volumetric studies in hatched pen and black ink that depict one or two bathers with ball shapes, taking inspiration from sea-worn driftwood, pebbles, and bones he had found along the shore (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 194, 200-205, 208 et al; Glimcher carnet, no. 96). Together with the sculpturesque drawings Picasso had done in Cannes the previous summer (Zervos, vol. 7, nos. 84-88, 90-109, and 112; Glimcher carnets, nos. 94 and 95), these bather studies are among the most formally inventive and beautifully rendered works on paper of his entire career.
By 9 August, Picasso began to paint bather scenes as well, on small canvases, usually one or two each day, until the end of the month, nearly thirty in all. He completed the present painting on 20 August, together with another (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 234; Musée Picasso, Paris). Pierre Daix called these canvases “a breathtaking series…whose vehement, angular disproportions achieve the boldest remodelings of the female body he had done to this point. Women bathers playing with a ball or fitting their keys into a bathhouse lock compose a dynamic scene which Pierre de Champris has rightly compared to Mycenaean idols on display in the Louvre. But the touch of Freudianism, and the renewal of sexual exuberance in the boldness of reconstructions and dissociations of form, are illuminated this time by the presence of Marie-Thérèse” (Picasso: Life and Art, New York, 1993, pp. 208-209).
“They are crammed with action, imbued with the cult of sun, sea and sand, and they crackle with sexual energy,” John Richardson declared. “Sometimes he adopts the viewpoint of someone lying on the beach. As they burst out of their tiny formats these figures appear all the taller and turn into flat, pinheaded cutouts in striped bathing suits like the Douanier Rousseau’s Football Players. The girls’ sticklike limbs rhyme with rickety wooden frames of the deck chairs on the beach… Note how Picasso sets up the pictorial rhymes between the jagged silhouettes of the offshore rocks and the jagged cutouts of the girls’ breasts and buttocks and straddled limbs. Note, too, how alert he is to changes in the weather and light… Picasso was justifiably proud of having caught the light of Dinard in these paintings” (A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, p. 361).