Figures au bord de la mer I (Figures by the Sea I)

Bathers at the beach would be a recurring theme in the length and breadth of Pablo Picasso’s career, yet in the late 1920s the artist deployed it in his work with vigour. At a time of mounting interest in sculpture, Picasso developed monumental images, for instance rocks or bones eroded in the passage of time, and the wind and sea, integrating them into the surrounding landscape. Initially devised as a sculptural project for the Promenade de La Croisette in Cannes, they would ultimately not be realised, although he did continue to work on these ideas in other works in the years that followed.
These monstrous, fragmented and phallic yet asexual figures possess a significant erotic component, contiguous with the conception of eroticism of Georges Bataille, who in his articles for Documents highlighted aspects such as the mutilation of the body and the gaze’s fragmentation. In Figures au bord de la mer I (Figures by the Sea I), the heads, joined into one, bear teeth as they are on the verge of kissing or devouring one another, an ambivalence that typified the interests of the Surrealists. Further, their cyclopean quality become more pronounced as it sits atop a small construction with a door, bringing to mind a seaside cubicle.

Raúl Martínez Arranz