Picasso - Bathing

Probably executed in February 1937, the painting "La Baignade" was acquired by Peggy Guggenheim in New York from Mary Callery in 1947 and subsequently exhibited in the entrance hall of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. It is undoubtedly one of the icons of the Peggy Guggenheim collection. Painted in Tremblay-sur-Mauldre, it explicitly recalls several works executed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Picasso depicted bathers constructed from rigid, geometric forms. The two figures, whose attention is largely focused on playing with a boat, are at once graceful and "monstrous," almost sculptural in their physicality, three-dimensional and simplified in their volumetric relief. The pictorial space they occupy is, on the other hand, a beach landscape divided into three flat, two-dimensional chromatic bands (beach-sea-sky). The composition appears calm and relaxed, suspended in its subtle lyricism, while simultaneously conveying a veiled sense of menace through the sinister presence of the figure looming on the horizon. A sense of helpless voyeurism, suggested by the figure spying on the flowery and exaggeratedly sexual forms of the bathers, recalls the classic myth of Diana at her bath.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
© Picasso Administration