The Bathers, by Picasso
Six paintings, One Concept
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We are in 1928 and 1929, on the beaches of Dinard. This Picasso’s stage is called "Surrealist", since he exhibited with the group in 1925, and experimented all the time far away from the real forms.
Picasso admired and intensely studied Cézanne, whose work was a crucial influence for Picasso to start with geometrization and Cubism at the beginning of the century. Cézanne used the subject of bathers for decades not to paint the bathers themselves, but to use them as volumes to compose his works and put space in order. Cézanne was interested in this case not in "representing nature" but in discovering how space is structured.
At that time, Picasso was very interested in sculpture, with which he also experimented, and he also made a series of bathers, but of flat, large, very synthetic bathers, with that presence and that strength that sculptures have. It is as if we were looking at sculptures in two dimensions.
Recommended links:
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso.
Fundamental Differences between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism.
The series of Picasso that continues the Guernica.
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