EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

This lithograph by Picasso is titled Women on the Beach  because of the horizon line and some similar scenes of bathers. However, that line is oddly short. Beware. The Spanish master, like other major artists, almost always makes two images in one (see other examples by Picasso).  

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His studio scenes sometimes include a painter holding a brush horizontally, as in the examples (far left). Thus, the horizon line in Women on the Beach can also be read as an artist's tool which makes the sleeping woman an "artist" (right). She not only touches the "horizon line" but has two right hands. A cursory viewer might think Picasso corrected the hand without erasing his first attempt. Not so. The two are intended to indicate the dual meaning of the short horizon. Artists often leave hints for the perceptive viewer; this is one of them.

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If we look at another print in the series (below center), the horizon is gone, but the same nude rests her head on a rectangular pillow resembling a canvas angled on an invisible easel. Her head is painted on it. This makes the other woman an "artist" too: the real or primary artist, a pattern in keeping with art's long tradition of reclining nudes. For comparable examples, see EPPH's interpretations of Manet's Olympia (1863), or Titian's Venuses and, of course, within Picasso's oeuvre too (bottom image).{ref1} There are hundreds of similar examples.

This means that the seated nudes in both scenes from 1947 (top and center) are also androgynous: "Picasso" painting or imagining his fertile imagination as a nubile woman. One dreams (on the left) while a contemplative one examines "her" handiwork (on the right). Two artists in one work because, as ever, even a painted artist must paint herself.