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Lot Essay
Painted in July 1957, Le Baigneur forms part of Pablo Picasso’s career-long engagement with the theme of the bather. As with so many motifs, Picasso would reincarnate these figures in countless guises. In the present work, a man wades into a placid, steel blue sea, his fingertips just grazing the top of the water. While much of his body has been painted in peach tones, the man’s ribs are lighter, represented by only a few horizontal marks. Short, staccato brushwork defines his hair while his face is composed of crisp, efficient lines.
Picasso’s interest in the subject of the bather can be traced back to when he was first living in Paris, where he moved in 1904. The following year, he went to visit Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ retrospective at the Salon d’Automne and, although previously dismissive of the French painter, found himself “overwhelmed” by what he saw (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso: 1881-1906, London, 1991, vol. 1, p. 421). Picasso was captivated by Ingres’ draftsmanship, formal innovation, and, above all, his masterpiece, Le bain turc, which, up until then, had not been seen in public for many years. Ingres’ large canvas depicts a group of nude women at a harem, and their various postures and poses provided the young artist with a wellspring of inspiration. Long before his neoclassical period, Picasso looked to Le bain turc while painting the seminal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and he later returned to the nineteenth century composition when creating his surrealist bathers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Beyond Ingres, however, the theme of the bathers is one with a long art historical precedent. The subject’s mythological and romantic associations appealed to artists including Titian, François Boucher, Camille Corot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, allowing them to paint female nudes in a natural, albeit erotic, fashion. Many modern artists, however, took a more naturalistic approach to the subject, seen, for example, in Paul Cezanne’s series of baigneurs. These works, notes Jack Flam, are “rife with contradictions”: most obviously in “the contrast between the sensuality of the nominal subject and the austerity in the way the figures are treated in the landscape” (“Bathers but not Beauties” in ARTnews, 24 May 2012, online).
Picasso’s bathers, too, were not romanticized, and to this theme, he brought his own perspective on figuration. He often worked on related scenes during seaside holidays, quickly filling sketchbooks with studies of bathers, only to expand upon the images once back in his studio. Within his oeuvre, the beach serves as a stage of sorts, composed of simple bands of sky, sea, and sand, against which his figures pose in outlandish and exaggerated ways. Painted in Dinard, Baigneuses jouant au ballon, 1928 (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 234; Musée national Picasso, Paris) shows three women tossing a ball, each body composed of a series of angular lines and planar forms. The colors employed are unmodulated, a treatment seen in the present work, which was painted almost three decades later.
Following the end of the Second World War, Picasso began to spend more and more time in the region colloquially known as Le Midi. He vacationed in Antibes and Golfe-Juan, and, in 1955, purchased the villa La Californie overlooking Cannes. Perhaps inspired by his time in the sun and seeing himself in these figures, Picasso returned to the theme of the bathers in 1956, completing the large canvas Deux femmes sur la plage in February (Zervos, vol. 17, no. 36; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). He continued to explore the subject in a number of drawings, paintings, and several sculptures, first constructed out of scrap wood and later cast in bronze. Elements from Le Baigneur are evident as well in the contemporaneous Baigneurs sur la plage à la Garoupe,1957 (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva), particularly in the representation of the swimmers’ torsos and the graphic simplicity of the background.
During this period, Picasso was also working on La chute d’Icare, his grand mural for the headquarters of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. The Greek myth tells of Icarus, who fell to his death after the sun melted the wax that held together his wings. While Picasso’s first ideas for the mural were interior scenes, set in an artist’s studio, he soon transposed the story, and “the world of the beach… eventually came to dominate” (T.J. Clark, “Picasso and the Fall of Europe” in London Review of Books, vol. 38, no. 11, 2 June 2016, online). The final composition draws from the myriad bathing imagery that Picasso was creating during this period. As the artist told Pierre Daix, “First, I painted [the bathers], then I sculpted them, and then I painted them again in a picture of the sculptures. Painting and sculpture truly talked together” (quoted in M.L. Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 423).
Picasso’s interest in the subject of the bather can be traced back to when he was first living in Paris, where he moved in 1904. The following year, he went to visit Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ retrospective at the Salon d’Automne and, although previously dismissive of the French painter, found himself “overwhelmed” by what he saw (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso: 1881-1906, London, 1991, vol. 1, p. 421). Picasso was captivated by Ingres’ draftsmanship, formal innovation, and, above all, his masterpiece, Le bain turc, which, up until then, had not been seen in public for many years. Ingres’ large canvas depicts a group of nude women at a harem, and their various postures and poses provided the young artist with a wellspring of inspiration. Long before his neoclassical period, Picasso looked to Le bain turc while painting the seminal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and he later returned to the nineteenth century composition when creating his surrealist bathers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Beyond Ingres, however, the theme of the bathers is one with a long art historical precedent. The subject’s mythological and romantic associations appealed to artists including Titian, François Boucher, Camille Corot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, allowing them to paint female nudes in a natural, albeit erotic, fashion. Many modern artists, however, took a more naturalistic approach to the subject, seen, for example, in Paul Cezanne’s series of baigneurs. These works, notes Jack Flam, are “rife with contradictions”: most obviously in “the contrast between the sensuality of the nominal subject and the austerity in the way the figures are treated in the landscape” (“Bathers but not Beauties” in ARTnews, 24 May 2012, online).
Picasso’s bathers, too, were not romanticized, and to this theme, he brought his own perspective on figuration. He often worked on related scenes during seaside holidays, quickly filling sketchbooks with studies of bathers, only to expand upon the images once back in his studio. Within his oeuvre, the beach serves as a stage of sorts, composed of simple bands of sky, sea, and sand, against which his figures pose in outlandish and exaggerated ways. Painted in Dinard, Baigneuses jouant au ballon, 1928 (Zervos, vol. 7, no. 234; Musée national Picasso, Paris) shows three women tossing a ball, each body composed of a series of angular lines and planar forms. The colors employed are unmodulated, a treatment seen in the present work, which was painted almost three decades later.
Following the end of the Second World War, Picasso began to spend more and more time in the region colloquially known as Le Midi. He vacationed in Antibes and Golfe-Juan, and, in 1955, purchased the villa La Californie overlooking Cannes. Perhaps inspired by his time in the sun and seeing himself in these figures, Picasso returned to the theme of the bathers in 1956, completing the large canvas Deux femmes sur la plage in February (Zervos, vol. 17, no. 36; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). He continued to explore the subject in a number of drawings, paintings, and several sculptures, first constructed out of scrap wood and later cast in bronze. Elements from Le Baigneur are evident as well in the contemporaneous Baigneurs sur la plage à la Garoupe,1957 (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva), particularly in the representation of the swimmers’ torsos and the graphic simplicity of the background.
During this period, Picasso was also working on La chute d’Icare, his grand mural for the headquarters of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. The Greek myth tells of Icarus, who fell to his death after the sun melted the wax that held together his wings. While Picasso’s first ideas for the mural were interior scenes, set in an artist’s studio, he soon transposed the story, and “the world of the beach… eventually came to dominate” (T.J. Clark, “Picasso and the Fall of Europe” in London Review of Books, vol. 38, no. 11, 2 June 2016, online). The final composition draws from the myriad bathing imagery that Picasso was creating during this period. As the artist told Pierre Daix, “First, I painted [the bathers], then I sculpted them, and then I painted them again in a picture of the sculptures. Painting and sculpture truly talked together” (quoted in M.L. Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, p. 423).