The Brooklyn Rail

In the summer of 1928, while vacationing in the seaside town of Dinard with his wife Olga Khoklova and their young son, Picasso painted a series of beach scenes featuring surrealistic bathers and shadowy cabanas. These works are often interpreted through the lens of his clandestine affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom he had lodged nearby in a pension de jeunes filles. Yet a more symbolic layer may be woven into the fabric of this biographical narrative: an artistic reimagining of the Edenic myth, complete with the archetypal figures of Adam and Eve, the serpent, and the tree of forbidden fruit.

Consider Bather (August 15, 1928), a small but striking painting at the Musée Picasso in Paris. Scholars often discuss works from the series alongside a 1932 black and white photograph of Marie-Thérèse standing in a swimsuit on the beach at Juan-les-Pins.¹ The resemblance in Bather is apparent—Marie-Thérèse’s body turns to the left in contrapposto, a beach ball poised in her raised right hand as she looks towards it—but the painting also engages in a deeper dialogue with an older visual tradition: Titian’s Adam and Eve (ca. 1550) and Peter Paul Rubens’s later copy (1628–29), two paintings that hang at the Prado—a collection Picasso knew very well—and were widely accessible through reproductions in the art historical literature of Picasso’s era.

Picasso’s Bather presents a tall, elongated female figure, with its limbs stretched across a rocky seaside backdrop as she reaches for the beach ball. The posture and anatomy suggest a composite identity drawn from both Adam and Eve. The figure’s diminutive head and reddened cheeks recall Titian’s depiction of Eve, while her serpentine torso—one arm thrust upward, the other extending downward—creates a gesture that transforms the suspended beach ball into a visual echo of the forbidden fruit hanging within Paradise.

The surrounding landscape reinforces the biblical resonances. The brown rock formation at the center left assumes the guise of the Tree of Knowledge, while the cloudy horizon and hazy blue sky recall the Edenic setting in Titian’s painting. Most remarkably, Picasso conflates multiple archetypal identities within his singular form. The bather’s upward-reaching arm simultaneously echoes Eve’s grasp for the forbidden fruit and Adam’s gesture toward Eve’s shoulder in Titian’s composition. Meanwhile, its sinuous, serpentine shape evokes the snake coiled between the couple in the original composition.

This synthesis continues in the figure’s legs. The right leg mirrors Eve’s extended stance, while the left leg becomes a complex hybrid—part Eve’s outstretched arm, part Adam’s bent knee, part serpent. Its forward thrust, directed toward a cabana with a prominently planted foot, echoes Adam’s movement toward Eve and the snake’s seductive advance with the forbidden fruit.

This analysis gains additional support from a modern visual precedent: Suzanne Valadon’s Adam and Eve (1909) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Valadon was exhibited at the 1920 Salon d’Automne—an event that Picasso presumably attended.

Though long marginalized in art historical narratives, Valadon was a pioneering painter: one of the few women in the Parisian avant-garde and the first admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Mentored by Edgar Degas and closely associated with Toulouse-Lautrec, she lived and worked in Montmartre near the Bateau-Lavoir, the creative hub of Picasso’s early career—a connection underscored by Picasso’s presence at her funeral years later, in 1938, alongside André Derain and Georges Braque.

Observe the formal parallels between Bather and Valadon’s Adam and Eve. The bather’s raised left arm, reaching toward the beach ball at the upper left, recalls Eve’s gesture as she plucks the forbidden fruit. Likewise, the bather’s extended right arm mirrors Adam’s protective reach across Eve’s body, his hand grasping her wrist in what appears to be an act of restraint. Even the bather’s foreshortened feet echo the visual rhyme of Eve’s and Adam’s crossed legs. These compositional similarities suggest Picasso’s engagement with Valadon’s iconography—especially notable given that her painting functions as a double portrait of herself and her younger lover, André Utter, a painter who was twenty-four years her junior.

This biographical reading situates Picasso within a broader art-historical tradition in which painters have used the Adam and Eve narrative to frame May-December relationships. As critic Martin Gayford recently observed, Rubens likely cast himself as Adam opposite his much younger second wife, Helena Fourment, as Eve, in his copy of Titian’s painting.² Picasso’s portrayal of Marie-Thérèse—then 19 and twenty-seven years his junior—extends this convention, deploying the Eden story to explore the charged dynamics of desire, transgression, and artistic collaboration between an older master and his young muse.

Picasso’s Bather and Cabin (August 9, 1928) at MoMA in New York reveals additional layers to this imagery. The nude figure positioned between two cabanas can once again be associated with Titian’s Adam and Eve. The bather’s pose—moving leftward while inserting a key into a cabana door—echoes Eve’s twisting gesture as she reaches for the apple. In this work, however, the serpent appears to be the central reference.

The bather’s chest, hip, and back leg form a peculiar, surrealistic shape that distinctly evokes a kind of serpent’s head and neck. The breasts suggest serpentine eyes, while the thin arms recall a forked tongue. Furthering this metaphor, the snake-like form appears to emerge phallically from the groin of a male figure in the cabana, extending toward the bather’s backside. Here, it is the figure's orb-like head that recalls the apple, as if the bather itself embodies Eve and the serpent together presenting the fruit.

Within this framework, the two figures emerging from the cabana can be viewed as Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden. For example, the composition calls to mind Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (ca. 1425) at the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, which Picasso may have encountered during his 1917 visit to the city. The positioning of the figures—one stepping before the other in synchronized strides—recalls Masaccio’s Adam and Eve. The cabana, standing tall behind them, serves as a symbol of Eden itself, while the bather's foot, lingering at the threshold, mirrors Adam's foot hesitating at paradise’s edge.

Notably, the Florentine painter and writer Ardengo Soffici recalled a conversation with Picasso that occurred around the time of the Gósol period in 1906, in which they discussed early Florentine painters—specifically Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto, and Masaccio.³ Soffici even suggested that Picasso’s early work from Gósol was influenced by these artists.

A related visual motif appears in Michelangelo’s iconic fresco panel The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (ca. 1509–10) from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo fuses two moments: the serpent’s temptation on the left and the angel's expulsion on the right. Within this context, the bather's backward glance in Picasso's work can be interpreted as an echo of Eve’s gesture, capturing the impulse to look back at the moment of exile.

While the Dinard bathers may represent Picasso’s most overtly psychological engagement with the Adam and Eve narrative, the underlying iconography had likely been simmering in his work for years. One early clue appears in Still Life with Pitcher and Apples (1919) at Musée Picasso in Paris. Often noted for its formal affinities with Cézanne’s modern studies of apples, the painting also invites comparison with the still lifes of Francisco Zurbarán—where humble domestic objects are imbued with spiritual gravitas and quiet devotional force.

Picasso’s admiration for Zurbarán, a leading Spanish Baroque painter, is well documented. Françoise Gilot recounts the “Louvre test” of the 1940s, when Picasso placed his La Casserole Emaillée (1947) beside Zurbarán’s Saint Bonaventure’s Body Lying in State (1629) for comparison.⁴ Art historian Gertje R. Utley sees this event as evidence of “the deeper quasi-religious significance those still lifes carried for him.”⁵ And Picasso himself allowed for this type of interpretation, explaining: “I want to tell something by means of the most common object ... For me it is a vessel in the metaphorical sense, just like Christ's use of parables.”⁶

Viewed through this lens, Still Life with Pitcher and Apples acquires iconographic depth. The composition subtly echoes Marcantonio Raimondi’s Adam and Eve (ca. 1512–14), an engraving after Raphael’s The Fall of Man. The peculiar positioning of the two apples on a plate atop a pitcher suggests an allegorical rather than naturalistic arrangement, and the composition evokes Raphael’s Adam holding forth the fruit to Eve on a platter-like opened palm. The vessel’s bell-shaped body echoes the contour of Adam’s extended forearm, while the curved handle, angled away from the viewer, suggests the positioning of his other arm.

At the same time, the pitcher evokes the form of Eve. The two apples resemble her breasts shown from a frontal perspective, while the vessel’s voluptuous curves recall feminine hips and buttocks, its darkened bell alluding to a rounded belly. Even the pitcher’s slight three-quarter turn mirrors Eve’s twist toward Adam. More striking still, the vessel assumes serpentine characteristics as well: the apples become eyes, the shadowed opening a mouth, and the elongated neck and bell form a sinuous body with the handle curling into a tail.

Ultimately, the Dinard series demonstrates how Picasso transformed a deeply personal moment—his clandestine romance with Marie-Thérèse—into a meditation on temptation, desire, and transgression, and perhaps even shame. By drawing on sources that appear to span from the old masters to the contemporary avant-garde, he shows that the Eden narrative remains a vessel for modern expression. Beyond the technical virtuosity of synthesizing multiple figures into singular, morphing forms lies a sophisticated understanding of how religious narratives can illuminate contemporary experience, proving that the theme of the original sin can still resonate in the vocabulary of modern art.