Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
Mougins
Hello, I am Brad Hawse, the museum’s associate director of philanthropy. I will be reading an introduction to the “Mougins” section of Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
In 1961 Picasso moved to Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, several miles outside the city of Cannes. He spent the last 12 years of his life here as he sought refuge from the overcrowding and urban development that encroached on his Cannes villa, La Californie.
The French Impressionist Auguste Renoir (1841–919) lived in nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer also for the last 12 years of his life. He made numerous paintings of the landscape, which profoundly influenced Picasso in his prolific final decade.
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, active in France, 1881–1973), Landscape, Mougins, 22 February 1965, oil on canvas, Bridget R. Koch Collection © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society, (ARS), New York, Courtesy American Federation of Arts
Verbal Description
Hello, I am Brad Hawse, the museum’s associate director of philanthropy. I will be reading a description of the painting entitled Landscape in Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist who lived from 1881 to 1973, painted Landscape in oil on canvas on February 22, 1965, in Mougins, France. It is in the Bridget R. Koch collection.
Landscape, a horizontally oriented painting, measures 21 and one-quarter by 25 and a half inches or 54 x 65 centimeters. In this lush picture, the artist captures a snowy mountain landscape in the background in shades of medium and dark blue, black, grey, and white. The largest of the peaks is to the right of the scene’s center. Above it, he includes a light blue-grey sky with swipes of a darker blue to hint at moving clouds. A green expanse, created with swirls of green, grey, and white, slopes down from the mountains and populates the picture’s foreground. A large green leafy tree with a curved black trunk occupies the space to the left of the center of the painting. In the lower right corner, a grey structure with a red, perhaps terracotta, roof completes the scene. The artist adds his name in red in the lower left corner.