User:Finlayjo/sandbox

In a Europe devastated by war, Picasso’s idea of tradition in the 1920s, rather than falling in line with a doctrine of wartime ‘order’, blended alternatively his very personal concept of the past. Following the events of World War I, Picasso began littering his paintings with images from antiquity, with Roman-Greco art, with theatrical subjects, archetypes from myth (the bull-man), eroticism, irony and lament. He made allusion to not only ancient mythology, to contemporary, war-times issues, but biography and commemorative ideas and, subsequently, making his so-called “classical” period – his “rappel à l’ordre” – very difficult to define. The Bathers (1918), despite being painted during the wartime period, does not ascribe to the “call to order” idioms or post-war propaganda and codes rejecting irrationality, sexuality, excess and disharmony. Trying to classify Picasso’s painting at this time is almost impossible given that the artist employed neo-classical, naturalist, realist and Cubist styles (often simultaneously). For more detail on the subject, see John Finlay, Picasso's World, Goodman Books, 2011, Chapters 11 and 13.