In the summer of 1928, while vacationing in the Breton 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.

Picasso created Woman with Vase in 1933, a monumental plaster sculpture of a female figure with her bent right arm extended to hold forth a vessel.

This article draws from a chapter of my new book on Pablo Picasso, which endeavors to offer a fresh perspective on the artist’s oeuvre. I trace the emergence and continuous recurrence of a theme—the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as a metaphor for creation in artistic, spiritual, and other contexts—throughout the entire body of work, including his most iconic paintings.