Picasso, Pablo: Women Running on the Beach (1922)

Why is this scene like a picture?

It's partly because Mr Hackett is like a picture-viewer, intimately observing an intimate scene, without (it seems) any sense of intrusion or fear of detection. But it's also in how the two lovers are described. They are not presented as entire bodies. They are a series of isolated body parts: ears, hand, tongue, mouth, thigh, another hand. They appear in disconnected fragments and glimpses, which is how bodies often appear in pictures.

In pictures, things are always being obscured and interrupted by other things. Bodies disappear behind bodies and then reappear the other side. They exist, not whole, but as a series of emerging parts. It's for the viewer to make the relevant connections, to fill in the missing, unseen pieces.

And some pictures deliberately make this difficult. They make it hard to see how the parts of a body are supposed to connect up. Gustav Klimt, for example, scatters his bodies. He paints swathes of ornamental material, and then " here and there " there's a gap, and a bit of flesh appears. He does it in his famous Kiss, where you get the heads, hands, and feet of the lovers, but how these extremities join up into bodies behind their ornate robes is anyone's guess. It's a rather clammy effect. It can also be done with gusto, though. Take Picasso's Women Running on the Beach .

Picasso was strongly drawn to the seaside. It is his arcadia. Woods and fields and riverbanks hold nothing for him. It is on the beach, on the shores of the Med, among bathers and sunbathers and beach huts, that he finds his ideal world of love and pleasure and play. It is not always a happy world. There can be pain, cruelty and betrayal in it. But here it's at its most exuberant. The picture is like a beach postcard. Its red-white-blue scheme carries a subliminal feeling of a tricoleur flag flapping in the wind.

Things are not absolutely jolly. The two women are running together, hand in hand " but obviously racing too. Picasso doesn't have lesbian fantasies, women alone enjoying each other. He can't put two girls together without suggesting a catfight. The runners are competing, and one of them is dramatically out-running her rival. The dynamic of the picture is in the way each figure is in front of and behind the other one.

Picasso sometimes does elaborate and elusive variations on human bodies where you can hardly follow what's going on. Here the distortions are demonstratively clear. You have the two figures, heavy limbed and pelting forward, with a terrific momentum, but both have one head, two arms, two legs, in more or less the standard configuration. What is a bit surprising, given the situation, is that all of these body parts are visible. They're visible because in various ways they've been strategically disarranged.

Look at the scale. There's a paradox. The nearer figure is the smaller figure. She should really be further away, and this discrepancy makes the figures jostle against each other. Its aggravated by another spatial 'error' " the great left foot of the bigger figure hits the ground nearer the picture's front than the smaller woman's foot. In terms of distance, the bigger woman is both in front of and behind her rival.

It's the same when you see how they race across the picture. The larger figure is clearly miles ahead. Her giant left arm stretches out towards the picture's edge, as if it were gaining the winning post. But when you follow her body as it goes behind the smaller figure, you find a crucial disappearing-reappearing trick. Her right leg and foot emerge " suddenly, impossibly " miles behind the other woman, introducing a great jump into the image. And that right foot presses on the picture's other side, pushing off like a swimmer from the side of a pool.

No question who's the winner. The ambiguities of 'in front' and 'behind' don't make the race uncertain. They are not allotted equally. The big figure commands the whole width of the picture, the whole length of the race, both starting and finishing in a single leap. The small figure is left running in the middle, on the spot. The big figure encompasses her spatially too, being both further and nearer, running rings round her.

The only equalising tendency lies in the possibility of confusion. It's another use of body-fragmentation: the way, at a glance, you can't be sure which legs belong to which figure. In fact, at a glance " and the impression recurs every time you look at the picture " you may perceive no race at all, no clear distinction of figures. There is simply a centrifugal explosion of energy, rather like the domestic punch-ups in Andy Capp, where the isolated, battling hands and feet of Flo and Andy fly out at random from a swirling ball of dust.

THE ARTIST

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) needs no introduction. The Spanish painter became in his lifetime the most famous artist in the world, up there with Chaplin and Disney and Einstein and Hitler. It wasn't just a matter of talent. He lived in the 20th century, the first century of global mass publicity. But he had everything. He was a child prodigy. He worked in every medium. He invented or inspired most modern art " Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism. He had genius eyes, unflagging testosterone and political engagement " Guernica. But he was never a really popular artist, not like Van Gogh or Dali. In recent decades his art influence has run out, replaced by Marcel Duchamp's. What was he: the great revitaliser, or the great swan song, of the Western pictorial tradition?