The two nudes from Friendship, with some slight adjustments to the poses and grouping, and the three nudes from Three Women were brought together in a series of drawings and watercolors depicting five bathers in a dense forest in Bathers in a Forest, 1908.
Had Picasso translated this into a major oil painting it would have constituted the perfect pendant-cum-alternative to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. In deciding not to do so he acted in a manner consistent with his reductionist tactics in 1905-6 when he extracted motifs from the Family of Saltimbanques compositions and developed them as monumental, independent images. On this occasion, he may have had another reason for self-censorship, for in the wake of Cezanne's death and the memorial exhibition of autumn 1907 there was something of a fashion for painting bather scenes with life-size figures.
Nevertheless, Picasso was profoundly affected by the compositions of The Large Bathers by Paul Cezanne, and his Bathers in a Forest and other monumental, primitivist works in the same vein are unthinkable without them.
Comments