Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Audio Exhibition
Vauvenargues
Hello, I am Emma Hensley, the museum’s tour coordinator. I will be reading an introduction to the “Vauvenargues” section of Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Picasso purchased the Château de Vauvenargues at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire in the south of France in September 1958. Unlike Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne, who depicted the grand mountain numerous times, Picasso focused on the opposite viewpoint, devoting his canvases to the neighboring town of Vauvenargues. The two paintings hanging to the right, both made in late April 1959, take the same view of the village church and houses—one bathed in a golden Mediterranean light, the other muted by grey sky and rain. Like Cézanne before him, Picasso employed swaths of sage and emerald-colored paint to convey the depth and richness of the landscape. Unlike his predecessor’s paintings, however, Picasso’s views of Vauvenargues read less like formal nature studies and more like dedications to a bucolic life spent in the French countryside.
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, active in France, 1881–1973), The Village of Vauvenargues, Vauvenargues, April 29–30th, 1959, oil on canvas, 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 Emma Hensley, the museum’s tour coordinator. I will be reading a description of the painting The Village of Vauvenargues in Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds.
Pablo Picasso, a Spanish artist who lived from 1881 to 1973, painted The Village of Vauvenargues in oil on canvas on April 29th and 30, 1959. It is in the collection of the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation for Art, Madrid.
The horizontally oriented painting, The Village of Vauvenargues, measures about 21 and a third by 25 and a half inches or 54 by 65 centimeters. Painted on April 29th and 30th, 1959, this scene is lush with spring colors. Shades of green, from light to dark, stretch across the canvas indicating verdant slopes and fields in the background and foreground. Spanning the entirety of the midground, the village is represented by a series of red terracotta tile-roofed stucco buildings in shades of ochre, pale pink, white, and pale green.