Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
The Last Landscape
Picasso’s first posthumous show opened in the prestigious Palais des Papes in Avignon, four weeks after his death on April 8th, 1973. All over the high walls, it is a flood of the latest paintings, meaning over 201 works, achieved between 1970 and 1972. 200 paintings with men, naked women, putti, musketeers and one landscape. Just one to express the long-lasting interest of Picasso for a “genre” considered obsolete since the 1950s. Clement Greenberg, for example, found in 1956, Picasso’s landscapes of this period, “pretty ridiculous”.
Paysage in Mougins was signed on March 31rst 1972. One of the first things you’ll notice about this incredible landscape is the size of the piece. The scale is what painters call “Paysage 100” (130 x 160 cm or 51 x 67 inches). It is the largest size of the rank of frames. Picasso asserts, with this large canvas, that landscape is as important as human figure.
It is hard to say what was the actual inspiration for the painting.
Picasso never painted “sur le motif,” or “in nature”, he painted from his studio, so it could be anywhere. That said, he often painted specific places with precision – streets of Montmartre, the village and harbor in Spain, Vert-Galant, and Notre-Dame-de-Paris. He also painted moments like the snowstorm in 1924. He would often take walks around his property. One particularly snowy day in the middle December 1962, he and his wife Jacqueline took a long walk among the hills. Coming back from his journey, he painted a snowy landscape.
So, we might have here the remembrance of a specific place or moment Picasso spent around his property.
At the bottom of the hill from his home in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, there was a water treatment plant. It appears the concrete structures of the Nartassier factory appear in the piece, though we are not sure. But this has thematic parallels with his first cubist landscape, The Reservoir. This painting depicted a place that’s purpose was to keep water safe and clean. This provides us a very interesting loop in time linking the Picasso of young to the Picasso reaching his final years of old age.
Cubist forever, even in the fifties,’ Louis Aragon observes for example, in landscapes of 1954, that Picasso remains a cubist painter.
Horta forever: Picasso would have declared: “All I know, I learnt in Horta.” Either he was thinking about his first stay in the Catalan village in 1896, where he enjoyed living outside, hunting, painting “sur le motif”; or to the second one when he created cubism.