Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, active in France, 1881–1973), Clichy Boulevard, Paris, early summer 1901, oil on canvas, Hasso Plattner Collection, Museum Barberini, MB-Pic-01 © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society, (ARS), New York, Courtesy American Federation of Arts
Verbal Description
Hello, I am Will Kendrick, a gallery attendant at the museum. I will be reading a description of the painting Clichy Boulevard in Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist who lived from 1881 to 1973, painted Clichy Boulevard in oil on canvas, in Paris in the early summer of 1901. It is in the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, where its reference number is MB-Pic-01.
A vertically oriented painting, Clichy Boulevard measures 24 and one-quarter by 18 and one-quarter inches or 61.6 by 46.4 centimeters. In this early summer picture, the artist captures a busy, tree-lined Paris street. In the background is a block of white multistoried buildings with grey mansard roofs and an array of chimneys. They appear to be residential structures from the many gray and orange windows on each floor. A line of green trees with thin brown trunks fills the midground. The artist uses orange and yellow to indicate that these trees are in bloom. Interspersed among the tree trunks are various figures strolling along the boulevard. In the lower right corner, the artist includes another structure similar to the others represented in the painting. All that is visible is the top of the roof and the chimney. Picasso’s signature appears in black script at the lower right.
Label Text
Hello, I am Will Kendrick, a gallery attendant at the museum. I will be reading the label for the painting Clichy Boulevard in Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist who lived from 1881 to 1973, painted Clichy Boulevard in oil on canvas in Paris in the early summer of 1901. It is in the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, where its reference number is MB-Pic-01.
In early 1901, Picasso shared a studio that looked down on the grand Boulevard de Clichy with a close friend from Barcelona, painter and poet Carlos Casagemas. In this canvas, Picasso captures the dusty atmosphere and hectic motion that defined the heavily populated streets of Paris in the early twentieth century. Boulevard de Clichy reveals the inspiration Picasso drew from Impressionism, particularly Camille Pissarro’s compositions of Clichy and other Parisian boulevards dating to the 1880s and 1890s. Featured in Picasso’s first exhibition in France later that year, put on by avant-garde dealer Ambroise Vollard, Boulevard de Clichy was one of several paintings that inspired the prominent critic Gustave Coquiot to pronounce Picasso a "landscape painter."