Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
Introduction
Hello, I am Peter Jonathan Bell, curator of European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum. I am leading the presentation of Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds here in Cincinnati and will be reading the exhibition’s introduction.
Throughout his 75-year career, Pablo Picasso (who was born in 1881 and died in 1973) chose landscape and cityscape subjects to establish himself in his environment, whether it was the busy streets of Paris when he arrived there as a young man in 1900, or the airy hills and seaside towns of le Midi—the south of France—that he would call home for the last quarter century of his life. Picasso turned to landscape at key moments in his artistic practice to push forward into uncharted territory, as he did while wrestling Cubism into being. Through the eyes and hands of the twentieth century’s most influential “painter of humanity,” bodies morphed into mountains or trees and back again. Through landscape Picasso embedded himself within the European painting tradition—confronting influential predecessors from Nicolas Poussin to Paul Cézanne—all the while insisting on a status apart.
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds is a pioneering look at this important but often overlooked genre in Picasso’s monumental body of work. It brings together more than 40 artworks from private and public collections across Europe and North America to trace the elemental role of place, environment, and interface between humanity and the natural world in the artist’s work. Film clips, archival photographs, and documents provide context for these artworks, allowing us to follow Picasso through his life and career—through the physical and artistic landscapes he constructed and inhabited.
Conceived by leading Picasso scholar Laurence Madeline, organized by the American Federation of Arts, and presented at The Mint Museum (in Charlotte, North Carolina) and the Cincinnati Art Museum, this is the first exhibition to comprehensively present Picasso’s approach to the genre, as again and again he took landscape to new places, painting in and out of bounds.
Edward Quinn (Irish, 1920–1997), A charcoal drawing of the view from Le Fournas on the easel at Pablo Picasso’s studio, La Fournas, 1953, Photo Edward Quinn, © edwardquinn.com