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the face of the crouching fisherman.

Thus, "The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus" throws much light on the

submarine theme of "Night Fishing at Antibes."

Hilton commented on the significance of this work “"Night Fishing" is a pretty big picture, nearly seven feet high and eleven feet across. More or less tripartite, as was "Guernica," it has the same tendency to subdivide into large triangular areas, but these gores are a great deal more flexible-fluid-than in the previous picture: and it is in that fluidity, considered literally, as well as metaphorically that we find a significant thing about the painting, its location within a discernible type of modern art which had importance in Paris and, later in New York: a peculiar development of painting with submarine connotations. This is not an eccentric observation: There was such a trend with firm ichnographical and formal reasons for the theme; that is, the theme imposed formal changes, or marked with formal changes. Underwater art comes from Miro, from Leger, perhaps Kandinsky, and from Klee (whom Picasso had been to visit in the autumn of the previous year). It gave the opportunity for associated but not linked forms-as they would have tended to be locked around an armature in Cubism-and allowed these forms to be freely and lyrically placed in a flat surface that still allowed some vague recession” (Hilton 250).Sam Hunter's remarks are relevant. He said “The constant metamorphosis of forms gives the impression that in this topsy-turvy pictorial world figures, sky and water may be reversed and change places at any moment. The landscape treatment suggests the Byzantine and early Renaissance convention of the "paysage moralise," the shrunken moral landscape of faceted rocks through which saints and sinners gingerly walked, as on a bed of cut glass, in their search for heavenly consolation. The labyrinthine confusion of the locale and the facility with which human figures assume the shape of monstrous grotesques also suggests the more modern religious fables of Franz Kafka. Picasso's extreme macabre humor has definite Kafkan overtones of desperate gaiety; it makes a mockery of normal vision, and fumbles man's identity. There is no overt "religious" content in this humor or in atavistic and grotesque deformations of the human form. The violence of our era has, metaphorically, split the human image asunder. Picasso faithfully registers this fact, shows no signs of patching up the damage, at least in his lifetime, and makes this situation an occasion for a Dionysiac revel in this handsome nocturne” (Hunter 151-152).

Hilton also commented on Picasso's references to previous art “It is a

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