"Chaos and Classicism" at the Guggenheim

The Source, Pablo Picasso, 1921
No artworld development was more surprising after World War I than the turn to classical figuration by Picasso, the co-creator, with Georges Braque, of Cubism, the most radical of all pre-war assaults on representational art. Never one to put constraints on himself, Picasso went on in the same years making Cubist-derived art as well. The Source is typical of his classical side — a nude in a Greek gown holds a flowing vase that symbolizes both the nourishing stream of civilization (source is the French word for a "stream" or "spring" —) and the role of woman as the source of life.

• Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art