Deux baigneuses

Picasso's bather scenes recall the blissful domain of Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre, the 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 admired Ingres' Le bain turc, 1859-1862, which he first saw at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 and thereafter in the Louvre. He emulated Ingres' skill at grouping female figures, and the linear mastery in his drawings. 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).