Many of Russell’s later canvases were of male nudes, and he considered these figure paintings to be his most significant work after the synchromies. Sometimes the nudes were depicted in a mythological guise but often they were bathers, as in Piscine. Russell was preoccupied with the heroic form of the human figure from his earliest days as an artist, when, inspired by Michelangelo, he sculpted a nude male; even the synchromies were based on the movement of the human form. In his late paintings Russell stressed the solidity of the nude’s body as would a sculptor. Piscine reveals the artist’s fascination with the human physique. The lack of interaction between the figures would suggest that Russell explored different aspects of the body by painting one model in four different poses and from four different angles. Russell knew that a rich palette would distract from the figures, which he intended to be the primary expressive element, and consequently Piscine is limited to dull tones of gold and bluish purples. Color was always important to Russell, however, and in his late figure painting he based his palette on what he considered to be classic colors. As do the figures in his late religious paintings, the nudes in Piscine seem to float rather than to stand solidly at the edge of the pool. Piscine was one of several paintings that the artist asked Frank L. Stevens to store for him. Unknown to Russell, Stevens buried the paintings. After Stevens’s death the paintings were disinterred, and Macdonald-Wright obtained some of them, including Piscine.

The beginning of every century inspires a general sentiment of endless possibilities, and the twentieth century was no exception. A modern age marked by technological wonders had begun, and the United States was to be its focal point. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s most brilliant thinkers, explained that, unlike Europe, “the New World expanded the human imagination.” Young American students still traveled to Europe, especially Paris, for their initiation to art, but the progressive new ideas of cubism, futurism, and surrealism that they imbibed only found their true home in the United States.
As demonstrated by the first generation of modernists in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, American artists rarely abandoned referential ties to the physical world completely. The simplification of form, multiple perspectives, and ideas about the fourth dimension that radical proponents of cubism espoused would find their most compelling American expressions in the fishermen of Marsden Hartley, and the animal bones and skulls of Georgia O’Keeffe. To these artists, abstraction meant the synthesis of personal experience.
The introduction of psychological ideas, first in the form of Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and later in the writings and art of the surrealists, found an enthusiastic audience in America. Such new concepts not only expanded ideas about the human mind but also encouraged the liberation of social conduct, in particular, sexual mores. Women increasingly became involved in creative aspects of the new modern age. In 1934 the Los Angeles artists Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson issued the only surrealist manifesto to appear in the United States, thereby demonstrating that in a relatively short time California had seriously challenged New York as the leader of the brave new world.