Bathers On The Beach Analysis

Two naked adult female figures shaped out of surrealist abstracted forms are portrayed in this Picasso 's 1937 painting. The figures seemed to be playing with a toy boat on the edge of the beach. A third figure, quite similar to the other two is rising above the horizon, watching the female figures in their act.
Picasso chooses to use straight geometric shapes and lines to portray the figures hands and legs, and rather curved and soft around the breasts and stomach areas. This gives the painting a more erotic, somewhat perplexing feeling as the observer might wonder why two full grown women are playing with a toy boat on the beach.
There is also the use of darker shapes conveying the sense of a shadow (which may remind one the way children fill in figures in a coloring book,

Picasso experimented with the theme of bathers from 1918 until 1971, with paintings such as "The Bathers" (1918), "Ballplayers on the beach" (1928), "Figures on a Beach" (1931) and a wood sculpture group "Bathers" cast in bronze (1956).
This theme was also common in the works of artists made around the same period, such as "Bathers with a turtle" (1908) and "Bathers by a river" (1909-1916) by Matisse, "Three bathers" by Cezanne (1879-1882).
In American art of the 20th century, the main trend was painting nude figures bathing in none idealized, realistic settings, such as Joan Sloan 's "South beach bathers" (1907-1908) and Gorge Bellow 's "Forty-two kids" which depicts boys bathing in a river.
The volumetric forms of the figures in the painting appear in many of Picasso 's later works, such as "Seated bather" (1930) which, like many other of his works, depicts a surrealist figure which is made up of many angular, hard