The Pipes of Pan belongs to an element in the classical tradition that has always had a surprising appeal for European poets and artists. This is the pastoral, Mediterranean world of simple, sunlit pleasures and amorous shepherds and shepherdesses; its music, equally simple and uncomplicated, is that of the pan pipes. Civilized people turn to pastoral when they are tired of sophistication and complexity; in other words, pastoral is a form of classical primitivism, gentler in mood than the primitivism that looks to non-European cultures.
Picasso has expressed all this in modern terms in a canvas of great poetic simplicity. The human figures are no longer shepherds but young men in bathing trunks. A horizion distinguishes between sea and sky as schematically as the rectangular blocks which form the rest of the background, much in the style of a theatre set. If the boy on the right has been playing, he has now stopped, and the scene is filled with a great calm and a great silence.
