Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, active in France, 1881–1973), Boisgeloup in the Rain, Boisgeloup, March 29, 1932, oil on canvas, 10 5/8 x 8 11/16 in. (27 x 22.1 cm), Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Madrid © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society, (ARS), New York, Courtesy American Federation of Arts
Verbal Description
Hello, I am Peter Jonathan Bell, the museum’s curator of European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. I will be reading a description of the painting Boisgeloup in the Rain in Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist who lived from 1881 to 1973, painted Boisgeloup in the Rain in oil on canvas on March 29, 1932, in Boisgeloup, France. It is in the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation for Art, Madrid.
Boisgeloup in the Rain is a vertically oriented painting measuring ten and five-eighths by eight and eleven-sixteenths inches or 27 by 22.1 centimeters. The picture is divided vertically by color into thirds. Moving left to right, the first section shows the steep-peaked rooftop of a church, complete with a rooster weathervane, set against a blue sky with airy white clouds. Green and black trees and foliage surround the church steeple. The center portion sees a continuation of the black trees with hints of green leaves. The background is dark grey. The artist includes a gate with urns in the lower portion of this section. The palette shifts from grey to light brown in the last section. Additional buildings appear, outlined in black, including, in the upper right corner, a structure that is likely a school due to the word “Ecole” on the front. Across the entirety of the picture, lashing from the upper left to the lower right, long diagonal lines in black and white indicate rainfall.
Label Text
Hello, I am Peter Jonathan Bell, the museum’s curator of European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings. I will be reading the label for Boisgeloup in the Rain in Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist who lived from 1881 to 1973, painted Boisgeloup in the Rain in oil on canvas on March 29, 1932, in Boisgeloup. It is in the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation for Art, Madrid.
Picasso creates a set of symbols in his paintings of Boisgeloup that seem to signify the village for him. In both his paintings and contemporary photographs we can pick out the pointed roof of the church’s bell tower at the entrance to the property, crowned with a rooster weathervane. The curved profile of the entry gate wall and its ornamental urns are also prominent.