Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
The Cubist Landscape
Hello, I am Elza Corrill, a gallery attendant at the museum. I will be reading an introduction to “The Cubist Landscape” section of Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
For much of his career, Picasso spent winters in town, painting in his studio, and summers in the countryside, where he could paint the sea or the mountains en plein air (outside). In this, Picasso followed a seasonal rhythm adhered to by many nineteenth-century painters, even as his style diverged, sometimes radically, from those of his predecessors.
As he developed Cubism alongside Georges Braque (1882–1963), Picasso made many compositional innovations during his sojourns away from Paris. He took notable trips during the summer of 1908 to the Île-de-France region, especially the village of La Rue-des-Bois, and in the following summer to the hill town Horta de Ebro (now called Horta de Sant Joan) in southern Catalonia, Spain.
Made in those two formative years, the five paintings in this section are characterized by simplified forms and experiments with depth and planar elements. These qualities would become hallmarks of Cubism and represent a radical break with the history of representation. However, the new style also drew on the work of modernists from Picasso’s father’s generation, especially Henri Rousseau and Paul Cézanne.