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Two women running on the beach (Curtain for the ballet "Blue Express")
Pablo Picasso • Painting, 1924, 1020×1170 cm
Description of the artwork «Two women running on the beach (Curtain for the ballet "Blue Express")»
After the end of the First World War, Picasso’s paintings changed again. There is the impression that having played enough with Cubism, having explored it up and down, the artist returned to figurative painting and turned to neoclassical techniques and subjects. In the early 1920s, monumental figures began to appear on his canvases, which Gertrude Stein jokingly called “big women” (1, 2, 3, 4). The Two Women Running on the Beach painting may be called the most famous work in this series.
Picasso did not abandon his favourite technique of distorting the human body proportions, but it was taking on other forms. His new female subjects do not resemble the tortured and withered sufferers of his Blue period, or the translucent and airy comedians of his Pink period, or the stone heap of geometric figures, or fluid surrealistic form. If we use the analogy with the elements, then the “big women” are the Earth in its purest form. Despite the feeling of complete freedom and emancipation, the heroines of this picture do not look soaring above the ground. They seem to stand on it as firmly as possible, although in reality they barely touch it. The bright blue shades of the sea and the sky, the flowing hair of the women, their tight, elastic, surprisingly material bodies — all this gives a feeling of the maximum possible life fullness that a person can experience. According to some art critics, this is the main message of most of Picasso’s post-war paintings: this is how you must live, this is how you must feel, there is no place for military horrors.
It is believed that events from his personal life had a serious impact on the work of Picasso during this period. The “big women” appeared in his paintings at the time when the artist’s wife, Olga Khokhlova was pregnant with his first child. Researchers believe that the impressive female bodies were a kind of celebration of motherhood and fertility.
In 1924, the Two Women Running on the Beach painting enlarged almost 30 times, was used in the design of the Blue Express staging of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. The copy was made by Russian theatre artist Alexander Shervashidze, and it impressed Picasso so much with its accuracy that he signed it with his name.
Written by Yevgheniia Sidelnikova
Picasso did not abandon his favourite technique of distorting the human body proportions, but it was taking on other forms. His new female subjects do not resemble the tortured and withered sufferers of his Blue period, or the translucent and airy comedians of his Pink period, or the stone heap of geometric figures, or fluid surrealistic form. If we use the analogy with the elements, then the “big women” are the Earth in its purest form. Despite the feeling of complete freedom and emancipation, the heroines of this picture do not look soaring above the ground. They seem to stand on it as firmly as possible, although in reality they barely touch it. The bright blue shades of the sea and the sky, the flowing hair of the women, their tight, elastic, surprisingly material bodies — all this gives a feeling of the maximum possible life fullness that a person can experience. According to some art critics, this is the main message of most of Picasso’s post-war paintings: this is how you must live, this is how you must feel, there is no place for military horrors.
It is believed that events from his personal life had a serious impact on the work of Picasso during this period. The “big women” appeared in his paintings at the time when the artist’s wife, Olga Khokhlova was pregnant with his first child. Researchers believe that the impressive female bodies were a kind of celebration of motherhood and fertility.
In 1924, the Two Women Running on the Beach painting enlarged almost 30 times, was used in the design of the Blue Express staging of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. The copy was made by Russian theatre artist Alexander Shervashidze, and it impressed Picasso so much with its accuracy that he signed it with his name.
Written by Yevgheniia Sidelnikova
