The Brooklyn Rail

When Picasso died in 1973, he was buried beneath one of his own sculptures—Woman with Vase, a monumental bronze figure with her bent right arm extending a vessel. Originally made in plaster in 1933, the sculpture was cast in two bronzes nearly four decades later, in 1972. Picasso donated one to the people of the Spanish Republic, and it now belongs to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. He installed the other at his Château de Vauvenargues estate near Aix-en-Provence, to stand over his future grave.

While the exaggerated forms of Woman with Vase have drawn comparisons to Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines, the bent right arm and firm grip on the vessel recall the pose of the ancient Egyptian statuette Woman Carrying Offerings (c. 1950 BCE) in the Louvre.¹ The resemblance extends even to the design of the base. Picasso may have worked from a reproduction of the statuette that appeared in a catalogue published by the Louvre’s Egyptian Antiquities Department just one year earlier, in 1932. Regardless, he had been familiar with the work for years, having made drawing studies of it in sketchbooks for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907).²

The thematic link between Woman with Vase and the statuette—and the placement of Woman with Vase as a grave marker—may relate to the ancient mortuary practice of offering libations: the ritual pouring of liquid as a gift to the dead. In this article, I explore how the theme and practice of libation manifest in Woman with Vase, drawing connections to two earlier Picasso works: Three Women at the Spring (1921), a major painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Source (1921), a related painting at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

The libation rite in ancient Egypt has been interpreted in various ways, one of which connects closely to the myth of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. According to legend, Osiris was betrayed and murdered by his brother Seth, his body spilling a life-giving liquid from its wounds. His wife and sister, Isis, reassembled his scattered remains and wrapped them in linen, restoring him to life. As a deity of death and resurrection, Osiris came to symbolize the power to sustain life on earth. The liquid from his wounds was associated with the life-giving floods of the Nile, which nourished vegetation each year.

Agriculture and irrigation were central to the Egyptian understanding of renewal and cyclical time, with the new year marked by the Nile’s annual inundation. Egyptologist Jan Assmann emphasizes the symbolic importance of this flood, describing it as a phenomenon that “did not flow irreversibly toward a goal, but rather ran back into itself in a cycle,” thereby enabling “renewal, repetition, and regeneration.”³ In this context, water emerged as the most essential offering to the dead, embodying what Assmann calls “the power of return” and symbolizing the continuous cycle of life.

Picasso was likely aware of the symbolic significance of libations. Poet and close friend André Salmon noted that he studied Egyptian artifacts at the Louvre as early as 1903. The Italian painter and critic Ardengo Soffici similarly recalled seeing him in 1905, pacing the museum’s Phoenician and Egyptian galleries “like a hound in search of game.”⁴ Picasso may also have consulted Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie (1885) a seminal, lavishly illustrated publication based on the work of Jean-François Champollion, the Egyptologist who deciphered hieroglyphics and curated the Egyptian collection at the Louvre. One notable image from it, Plate 45, shows water being poured over a figure from vessels, with the liquid rendered as a chain of ankhs—the hieroglyph for life.⁵

He might also have encountered a red-figure vase (c. 380–370 BCE) in the Campana galleries of the Louvre. The vase depicts three figures—Orestes, Elektra, and Hermes—at the tomb of Agamemnon, illustrating a scene from Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, the central play in the Oresteia trilogy. In this moment, Elektra visits her father’s grave, offering prayers to Hermes, the spirit of the underworld, and Mother Earth, “who brings all things to birth,” affirming the cyclical nature of life and death. She then performs a libation, pouring the “lustra waters to the dead.”⁶ The vase shows the libation vessels resting on the steps of the tomb.

In this context, we can turn to Three Women at the Spring (1921), a large canvas at MoMA that was featured in the museum’s 2023 exhibition Picasso in Fontainebleau. The work belongs to a series depicting neoclassical female figures in flowing drapery, shown alone or gathered around water sources. Scholars have connected Three Women at the Spring—along with related works such as Mother and Child (1921) at the Art Institute of Chicago—to the birth of Picasso’s son Paulo with Olga Khokhlova in 1921. More broadly, it has been interpreted as a meditation on themes of motherhood and renewal, coinciding with Picasso’s approach to his fortieth birthday in October of that year.

Building on these interpretations, we can examine how Picasso engages a more universal theme, one that links nature’s renewal to mourning and artistic inspiration. This analysis expands on my earlier article on Picasso’s 1932 Marie-Thérèse portraits and the legend of Mary Magdalene. There, I argued that Le Sommeil (January 23, 1932) evokes Artemisia Gentileschi’s Penitent Mary Magdalene (c. 1625–26), itself steeped in Christian imagery of death and rebirth. Gentileschi’s Magdalene also echoes Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia (1514), functioning as a meditation on the nature of artistic inspiration.

In Three Women at the Spring, the sculptural monumentality of the figures is striking. While scholars often trace this quality in general to Picasso’s 1917 visit to the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where he encountered Greco-Roman statuary, the arrangement of the three women also evokes a specific type of ancient funerary relief. One such example is the Funerary Stele of Bako, Sokrates, and Aristonike (c. 340 BCE) in the Louvre, which may have served as a compositional and thematic influence.

In the ancient world, steles functioned as commemorative grave markers, often portraying the deceased in scenes from daily life to signal continuity beyond death. According to the Louvre’s placard, the Funerary Stele of Bako, Sokrates, and Aristonike presents a farewell scene: on the right, a seated mother clasps the hand of the deceased Bako, a gesture known as dexiosis, symbolizing parting. At the center, a grieving servant rests her head on her hand, while beside Bako, a small child, likely her own, stands nearby. An infant in the arms of another servant on the far right suggests that Bako may have died in childbirth.

The juxtaposition of Three Women at the Spring with two of its possible influences—namely, the red-figure vase of Orestes, Elektra, and Hermes and the Greek funerary stele—highlights an underlying theme of death and birth, suggesting a meditation on the creative forces that sustain both biological and artistic life. The libation vessels placed on the hewn rocks recall those depicted on Agamemnon’s tomb. Their diagonal arrangement, descending from upper right to lower left, evokes a flowing spring, seemingly guided by the lowered hand of the central woman. At the painting’s left, another woman pours water onto the soil, symbolizing a libation that returns the life-giving liquid to the earth.

Another possible reference is La Toille (The Star), a card from the Tarot de Marseille. Picasso encountered tarot imagery as early as 1902 through his friendship with the poet Max Jacob, and tarot-based divination was popular in early twentieth-century Paris. The Tarot de Marseille deck by Jean Dodal (c. 1760) is particularly notable, having been widely known and admired among followers of tarot design.⁷

The Star card depicts a nude woman kneeling by a stream, pouring water from two vessels. In his influential 1926 book Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen Âge (The Tarot of the Magicians), Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth interprets the card as a symbol of fertility and regeneration, linking it to the myth of Osiris and the life-giving floods of the Nile.⁸ This symbolism resonates with the iconography of Three Women at the Spring, where Picasso’s central figure mirrors the tarot woman in her act of tilting vessels to empty water. The pleats of her pale blue gown echo the muted blue grooves in the woodcut’s depiction of water spilling at the front foot, while the folds of the fabric visually link her exposed breast to the vessel she lowers—fusing maternal nourishment with libation and completing a symbolic cycle of birth and rebirth.

Picasso’s Source offers another opportunity to trace the motif of libation through classical and mythological painting. The canvas depicts a woman reclining on a rock in a coastal landscape. She wears a blue Grecian gown that slips from one shoulder to reveal a breast as she pours water from a large vessel onto the sand—as if returning water to its source. While Picasso in Fontainebleau associates the work with The Nymph of Fontainebleau, a decorative wall painting from the Château de Fontainebleau,⁹ Picasso may also have drawn from mythological paintings by Nicolas Poussin as a more thematically resonant precedent.

For example, the woman in Source echoes a reclining nymph in Poussin’s Nurture of Jupiter (c. 1636–37) at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a painting that Picasso might have seen during his approximately six-week trip to London to work on the production of Le Tricorne (The Three-Cornered Hat) ballet in 1919, or otherwise in the Poussin catalogue raisonné published by G. Van Oest & Cie in Paris in 1914.¹⁰ Notably, the Poussin nymph reinforces the theme in Nurture of Jupiter  of poured water as a symbol for nourishment and new life.

The subject of the Poussin picture is Jupiter as an infant. According to the myth, Jupiter was taken to Mount Ida on Crete by his mother and entrusted to nymphs, to hide him from his father, Saturn, who had devoured his previous children to avert a prophecy that one would grow up to overthrow him. Poussin portrays Jupiter as an infant at the center, cradled in a nymph’s lap and suckled by a she-goat. At the far right, the nymph reclines on a rock, in a three-quarter pose, gazing at the scene as she pours water from a vessel onto the ground.

Two specific details might lead us to identify the Poussin nymph as a source. The Picasso woman wears a powder blue gown that drapes over the shoulder, echoing the nymph’s tunic that drapes over the waist. And the Picasso woman reclines from left to right on a rock platform, with her torso turned towards the viewer, like the portrayal of the nymph.

In a similar vein, Source and Three Women at the Spring together echo Poussin’s Parnassus (1630–31) at the Prado. Parnassus portrays Mount Parnassus, the sacred dwelling of Apollo and the Muses, symbols of artistic inspiration in Greek mythology. In the foreground, the Castalian Spring is personified as a nude reclining nymph with her attribute—a vase—pouring water, symbolizing the source of inspiration. Above her, Apollo sits on a platform receiving the nectar of the gods, a metaphor for inspiration flowing from the spring. A poet, either Homer or Giambattista Marino, kneels before Apollo, paying homage to him as the god of poetry.

Parnassus offers an intriguing connection beyond the portrayal of the water nymph as the Castalian Spring. As explored in the Picasso in Fontainebleau exhibition, Picasso made Three Women at the Spring alongside the The Three Musicians in the same studio at the same time, and the paintings share the same dimensions despite representing different styles, Neoclassical and Synthetic Cubist, respectively. Art scholar Theodore Reff, in a celebrated article, interprets the three figures in Three Musicians as Picasso himself flanked by two poet friends Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire.¹¹ He further argues Three Musicians is a funerary tribute, marking Jacob’s retreat to a monastery and Apollinaire’s death from the Spanish flu.

Did Picasso reference Parnassus as an homage, in a companion funerary painting? His interest in Poussin is generally dated to 1918, when Apollinaire urged him to “paint big pictures like Poussin.”¹² And Picasso frequently borrowed common or overlapping poses and scenes—like the mother saying farewell in the Greek funerary stele—as an archetype based on different but thematically related sources. Here, the seated woman in Three Women at the Spring does not merely echo the Greek mother, but also Poussin’s Apollo, Apollinaire's namesake, the god of poetry. She sits in a similar rocky, stage-like set, the right arm bent and extended, hand placed in front of a vessel like a goblet receiving the nectar, with the lower body similar as well, one leg extended with the gown’s hem draping over the ankle.

Either way, Picasso likely synthesizes multiple traditions of water ritual—Egyptian libations, Greek funerary monuments, and the classical spring of inspiration—into a meditation on the cycles of loss and renewal. This confluence of sources transforms what might appear as a simple scene into a profound statement about artistic creation itself: like water returning to earth only to spring forth again, the act of artistic creation draws from deep cultural wellsprings, making the ancient new again through cycles of artistic rebirth.