Night Fishing As Picasso Sees It

The colorful and fanciful painting on the right, Pablo Picasso 's Night Fishing at Antibes , is one of the artist's most winsome oils of the outdoor scene. Painted in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, it then represented a new line for Picasso , whose abstract techniques have done more to influence 20th century painting than that of any other artist.

The scene was one well familiar to Picasso , and he translated it with exuberance and vivid color into his own personal and stylized painting. He shows the spear fishermen of Antibes , in the south of France , working close to the shore, luring the fish to the surface with a lamp. Their activities have stopped some interested bystanders on the quay, two girls who pause in the languid evening to watch the outcome. One (at the right) holds a bicycle and licks at a double-dip ice cream cone. In the background on the left is the blocky form of the old castle of Grimaldi which, since the time of the painting, has become a Picasso museum.

Today, of course, practically every major museum in the world boasts at least one Picasso , for whether one looks in amusement, confusion or admiration, one is compelled to look.