As several writers have pointed out Model with Surrealist Sculpture depicts a standing nude observing a seated figure made up of a surreal mixture of fabric and furniture-like objects. The standing nude is clearly Marie-Thérèse and the seated figure, which Richardson described as “a surrealistic mirror image of herself”, also bares many of the hallmark objects associated with the anatomy drawings, such as a V-shaped water channel and balls that ambiguously signify a vagina, buttocks or a penis. Other motifs such as hanging balls and anthropomorphised fabric and furniture also echo the shapes found in the Une Anatomie series. Clearly, the contrasting figures amusingly highlight the difference between classical and surrealist figuration, which may have been Picasso’s way of subtly poking fun at the surrealists who only a few years earlier had expelled and denigrated the proto-surrealist Giorgio de Chirico because of his ‘return to classicism’. As Cowling has suggested the etching may also signify an act of “self-deprecating humour ” aimed at a “Surrealist assemblage which appears to be the materialization of a stream-of-consciousness.” (Cowling 2002: 546-547)
The Beach Hut and Une Anatomie’s Title Page
Picasso was not a card-carrying Surrealist and could afford to make fun of the movement’s ideological strictness. But that does not alter the fact that the Une Anatomie drawings employ surreal tropes. There is also a surrealist dimension evident in the near subliminal presence of the beach hut on the title page. (Fig.14, page 6). The beach hut possesses distinctly Freudian connotations that resonate with the ethos of surrealism. In her epic 1981 dissertation, cited above, Gasman consistently acknowledged the sexual connotations associated with the cabana or beach hut, before tenaciously expanding on its more nuanced meanings, which invariably signified different aspects of Picasso's psyche or acted as a metonym for his physical presence. In conjunction with a somewhat exaggerated key (see Fig.11, page 5) the beach hut invariably signified a hidden meaning relating to either violence, when under attack by a tongue-lashing monster; or sexual as in a place where unrestrained sexual fantasies could be acted out.*
The depiction of the beach hut and the family on the beach that became the title page was produced on the 22 February 1933, three days before the first of the Une Anatomie drawings. As noted earlier, the beach scene appears to focus on and celebrate female fecundity with archaic unrestraint, unlike the previously discussed 1923 painting Family on a Beach that focused on a forlorn or dying male. The woman’s fulsome sculptural form dramatically contrasts with the purely linear reclining male and child and her curvaceous pregnant form may well signify Marie-Thérèse’s recuperation prefacing the skeletal ex-voto figures that memorialise the effects of the illness. All the other standing figures in the anatomy series were produced in groups of three on the 26, 27, 28 of February and the 1st of March. When the pages are illustrated separately they are usually captioned Une Anatomie : Trois Femmes, and this is even true of the group that contains the ithyphallic male who also has a vagina (Figs. 3-4, page 2). Unlike the bulbous woman on the title page, the remaining figures are primarily skeletal thus acknowledging the effects of the spirochete bacteria (Figs. 2, page 1)
