Private collection
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art, Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Glancing at the Century, 28 June - 20 September 1998, pp. 46-47, ill. p. 47
From 1918 onwards, bathers are numbered among Picasso’s favourite themes. Over the years, this simple theme which also carries multiple metaphors will continue to be repeated, revealing all of Picasso’s quest for form, volume and colour. It is the period during which, while he was continuing creating works in complete rupture with the laws of perspective and representation, he also signed works praising a much more traditional painting, somewhere between ancient art and Ingres. Frequently working based on photographs, he reconnected with realism, combined with dream and melancholy. His return to a kind of classicism led him both to refine his drawing and to conceive a new feminine ideal, robust, statuary but also tender and maternal.
What mattered for Picasso was to set his imagination free, even if that meant exploring an entire area of art from which he had distanced himself for many years. He never ceased to experiment with form, sometimes making it undergo brutal transformations and others lifting it into the heaven, sometimes to the limits of beauty.
The drawing under the simple title Bathers is dated on April 23, 1921 and is part of a set of works on paper carried out in pencil, ink or pastel, depicting naked women in an archaic enclosure, vaguely reminiscent that of thermae. The setting, although plain, forms a broad perspective, underlying thus the impressive presence of the four female figures that bring it to life. They all have a robust body, reminiscent of the ancient statuary, and an elusive look that conveys a sense of voyeurism to the viewer standing in front of the scene. Of the four women, it is undoubtedly the right one, with the long, curly, loose hair and the fine Greek profile that mostly attracts our attention. The melancholic expression, the relaxed posture and the distant beauty remind us of other female forms that the painter carried out at the same time. We are in front of the representation of a female ideal, with a sweetness and grace that cannot conceal a certain sorrow and distancing from the pleasures of the flesh. It is either an idealization of motherhood or a modern rendering of the ancient kore, the female counterpart of kouros.
.
