Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/169626
Pablo Picasso 1881 - 1973 Le Bain, 1968 Signed, dated and numbered 'Picasso vendredi 16.2.68. III' lower right Pencil on paper Provenance Waddington Galleries, Ltd, London Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc, New York (by 1988) James Goodman Gallery, Inc, New York Acquired from the above by the late owner, March 1998 Exhibitions New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc, Picasso, The Late Drawings, January-February 1988, no. 19 (illustrated in color) Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Aquarelle, Gouachen, Zeichnungen, October-December 1988, no. 92 Literature C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1973, vol. 27, no. 231 (illustrated, pl. 91). The Picasso Project, ed, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties III, 1968-1969, San Francisco, 2003, p. 19, no. 68-061 (illustrated) This sketch belongs to a series of drawings and etchings from early 1968 entitled A La Piscine. Bathers had been a theme in Picasso's work since the summer of 1928, when he created numerous beach scenes in which he overtly explored sexuality. Having worked alongside the Surrealists in Paris, including Miró, Man Ray and Delvaux, his work began to betray their obsession with emphasising the sensuality of women and, in many cases, their own lovers. In Le Bain Picasso has skilfully reworked Ingres' painting Le Bain Turc, combining elements of the modern with the classical. The central bather wears a modern-day swimming cap and reaches for a ladder. However, three oriental arches appear in the background, recalling the architecture of Turkish baths, as depicted by Ingres. During the nineteenth century artists began to use the exotic setting of the East in order to depict scenes of eroticism. Picasso has appropriated the voyeuristic character of Ingres' Orientalist painting; his nude bathers openly lie, sit and pose around the side of the pool. Picasso has used a continuous line to emphasise and explore the feminine curves and inflections of the nude. This series of drawings culminated in a large, elaborate line-drawing entitled Le Bain Turc in which the female figures have become more voluptuous, described through sweeping lines and curves. Similarly, Miró would often use flowing lines and arches to express the female figure in his drawings, paintings and sculpture. Picasso continued to rework the theme of the female nude throughout his career. By the 1980s he had replaced the traditional idea of beauty, as pictured here, with raw, sexualised arrangements of limbs and breasts. In contrast, Miró moved further towards abstraction and began to develop his system of signs and symbols in which eyes and eggs came to represent male and female genitalia.