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His metamorphic sculptures of Marie-Thérèse from the early '30s, involutes of swollen dreaming bronze in which cheek is conflated with buttock, mouth with vagina, have a wonderful tenderness and power as plastic surfaces. Even the plumpness of the bronze cast provides the suggestion of skin, while the slightly fuzzy texture of the metal further equivocates, not with the look, but with the feel of flesh. In some ways, the shapes of Marie-Thérèse, smooth and closed, are like the totemic bone forms of Picasso's grotesque anatomies of the '30s, the projects for immense figure-based sculptures that he fantasized building along the Côte d'Azur. But their whole import is different. There is no dislocation or fear in them: they are, as William Blake put it, "the lineaments of gratified desire." The climate of sexual politics has changed so irreversibly in the past 50 years that one cannot imagine a painter trying such images today. In that sense, Picasso closed another tradition in the act of reinventing it. The same applies to his visions of the classical Mediterranean from the 1930s. Picasso felt the Greeks in the ground and was the last modern artist to raise them.
The river gods, nymphs, Minotaurs and classical heads that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification. Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols of that once Arcadian coast.
Picasso's climactic work of the '30s was Guernica, 1937. In its way it is a classicizing painting, not only in its friezelike effect, but also in its details. The only modern image in it is a light bulb; but for its presence, the mural would scarcely seem to belong in the world of Heinkel bombers and incendiary bombs. Yet its black, white and gray palette also suggests the documentary photo, while the texture of strokes on the horse's body is more like collaged newsprint than hair.