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In the painting “Joie de Vivre (Antipolis),” fauns, satyrs, and a big-breasted woman (Picasso’s nubile girlfriend, French artist Françoise Gilot) cavort nude in nature. Some art critics say the painting represents not only Antibes’s classical roots, but also Picasso’s ebullience after WWII. Others say he intended to mock a painting of the same name created by his rival Matisse, who’d expressed the bourgeois attitude that art should be pure, serene, and “devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.”

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