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Lot Essay
This exquisite and masterly drawing manifests all the signature qualities of Picasso's neo-classicism. Setting a group of four nude female bathers in a beachscape ambience, Picasso has created a timeless aura of absolute serenity and repose. While making manifold allusions to the grand classical tradition in painting, he has personalized this subject with his most consummate handling of line, in which the diverse figural forms have been rendered with perfect precision and clarity, producing on the sheet a complex and delicately balanced filigree of arabesque and open space.
Picasso had been making classical drawings since 1914, while simultaneously working in the newly clarified forms of synthetic Cubism. This strange and unexpected stylistic turn proved to be a major catalyst in the rappel à l'ordre -- the 'call to order' -- by which Jean Cocteau, in the wake of the First World War, summoned artists to emphasize classical, humanist values, which he thought should be expressed through the reclamation of traditional forms in European art. A renewed interest in the figure was central to this program. The ultimate destination, at which Picasso arrived first and then defined for all subsequent comers, was the creation of a idyllic world, an Arcadia that existed in our universal mythic memory, outside of real time and space, and as removed as one could get from the bustle and mutability of modern urban living.
The wide open space and distant horizon of the beach was the appropriate setting for this idealized world, as Picasso discovered in 1918 when he visited the coast for the first time since the beginning of war. He and his new wife Olga spent their honeymoon in Biarritz, and there he made his first classical bather paintings and drawings. He returned to the seaside, most frequently the Côte d'Azur, almost every summer thereafter, as he did in 1920. The ancient, sun-drenched world of the Mediterranean normally stimulated Picasso's interest in classical mythology and themes. Before long he did not need the sand beneath his feet to feel the power of this attraction; he executed the present drawing, as well as numerous other works of this kind, in his Paris studio.
Quatre baigneuses is one of two bather drawings that Picasso executed in pencil on 1 May 1921; the other is Zervos, vol. 4, no. 244. He clustered the nudes on and around a large draped rock, as if the group were a constellation of nymphs imagined and outlined in a starry night sky. Picasso had done a multi-figure female bather scene on 29 April (Z., vol. 4, no. 243) and a beach scene with male figures on the following day (Picasso Project, no. 21-175). His third and final effort on 1 May was a pastel executed on a sheet the same size as the present drawing (Z., vol. 4, no. 281; fig. 1). He used this pastel several weeks later to illustrate the cover of the program for Diaghilev's Spanish folk ballet Cuadro flamenco. Picasso drew a second bathers pastel on 4 May (Z., vol. 4, no. 280; Staatsgallerie Stuttgart), and thereafter turned his attention to a series on the theme of a mother and child, to celebrate the recent birth of his son Paulo.
These bather scenes recall the Arcadian glow of Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre, his famous Fauve painting shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 (The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, Pennsylvania), to which Picasso had frequent access in Gertrude Stein's collection. Picasso first saw Ingres' Le bain turc, 1859-1862, at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 and thereafter in the Louvre (see note to lots 137 and 138). He admired Ingres' skill at grouping female figures, and the linear mastery in Ingres' drawings. Renoir's buxom late nudes also appealed to Picasso. The flatness of the composition in this drawing points to Picasso's interest in the Roman wall paintings and sculptural reliefs that he saw during his trip to Italy in 1917. Picasso, the master appropriator, forged his classicism from these many diverse sources. He told Marius de Zayas in a 1923 interview: 'If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was' (in D. Ashton, Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, p. 4).
Picasso had been making classical drawings since 1914, while simultaneously working in the newly clarified forms of synthetic Cubism. This strange and unexpected stylistic turn proved to be a major catalyst in the rappel à l'ordre -- the 'call to order' -- by which Jean Cocteau, in the wake of the First World War, summoned artists to emphasize classical, humanist values, which he thought should be expressed through the reclamation of traditional forms in European art. A renewed interest in the figure was central to this program. The ultimate destination, at which Picasso arrived first and then defined for all subsequent comers, was the creation of a idyllic world, an Arcadia that existed in our universal mythic memory, outside of real time and space, and as removed as one could get from the bustle and mutability of modern urban living.
The wide open space and distant horizon of the beach was the appropriate setting for this idealized world, as Picasso discovered in 1918 when he visited the coast for the first time since the beginning of war. He and his new wife Olga spent their honeymoon in Biarritz, and there he made his first classical bather paintings and drawings. He returned to the seaside, most frequently the Côte d'Azur, almost every summer thereafter, as he did in 1920. The ancient, sun-drenched world of the Mediterranean normally stimulated Picasso's interest in classical mythology and themes. Before long he did not need the sand beneath his feet to feel the power of this attraction; he executed the present drawing, as well as numerous other works of this kind, in his Paris studio.
Quatre baigneuses is one of two bather drawings that Picasso executed in pencil on 1 May 1921; the other is Zervos, vol. 4, no. 244. He clustered the nudes on and around a large draped rock, as if the group were a constellation of nymphs imagined and outlined in a starry night sky. Picasso had done a multi-figure female bather scene on 29 April (Z., vol. 4, no. 243) and a beach scene with male figures on the following day (Picasso Project, no. 21-175). His third and final effort on 1 May was a pastel executed on a sheet the same size as the present drawing (Z., vol. 4, no. 281; fig. 1). He used this pastel several weeks later to illustrate the cover of the program for Diaghilev's Spanish folk ballet Cuadro flamenco. Picasso drew a second bathers pastel on 4 May (Z., vol. 4, no. 280; Staatsgallerie Stuttgart), and thereafter turned his attention to a series on the theme of a mother and child, to celebrate the recent birth of his son Paulo.
These bather scenes recall the Arcadian glow of Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre, his famous Fauve painting shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 (The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, Pennsylvania), to which Picasso had frequent access in Gertrude Stein's collection. Picasso first saw Ingres' Le bain turc, 1859-1862, at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 and thereafter in the Louvre (see note to lots 137 and 138). He admired Ingres' skill at grouping female figures, and the linear mastery in Ingres' drawings. Renoir's buxom late nudes also appealed to Picasso. The flatness of the composition in this drawing points to Picasso's interest in the Roman wall paintings and sculptural reliefs that he saw during his trip to Italy in 1917. Picasso, the master appropriator, forged his classicism from these many diverse sources. He told Marius de Zayas in a 1923 interview: 'If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was' (in D. Ashton, Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, p. 4).