By the 1960s, Picasso had reached a new echelon of artistic certitude. A rightful modern master and heir to the great painters before him, Picasso has long since necessitated the trappings of a typical studio. In Mougins, where he and his wife Jacqueline had relocated in 1961, the artist was free to unleash his creative fervor when and as he pleased, his privacy and focus devotedly guarded by Jacqueline. Unlike their previous villa in Cannes, which had become increasingly encroached upon with the rise of tourism and new developments, the estate at Mougins became an artistic refuge that gave rise to a wellspring of inventive ideas and the great series of Picasso’s late career.
Among the famed musketeers, matadors, painters and models created during this period, Picasso also executed a rare suite of landscapes throughout the month of May 1965. The present work belongs to this limited series of eight oils featuring the sweeping vistas of Mougins, two of which are now held in the collections of the Sprengel Museum, Hannover and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Each work in the series, some of which were completed in the same day, shows an evolution from one canvas to the next. No two oils are exactly the same size or format, displaying the artist’s inventive approach to an internalized and reimagined landscape.
As John Richardson describes, "Picasso invests the trees with his own life force, as if he were God reinventing the universe in his image.” Quoting the artist, Richardson continues: “'I want to see my branches grow... That's why I started to paint trees; yet I never paint them from nature. My trees are myself'" (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life, vol. II, New York, 1996, p. 93).
Picasso’s Paysages of 1965
As he proved with his radical Cubist compositions of the late 1900s and early 1910s, Picasso’s artworks probed the essential nature and concept of his subject, prioritizing the act of creation and interpretation over mere reproduction. Through his new visual idioms, Picasso conveyed his subjects’ essences in far truer modalities than realist interpretation—his paintings looked like paintings, free from the artifice of imitation.
Addressing the tradition of landscape painting, Picasso once stated, “I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art… Through art we express our conception of what nature is not… from the painters of the origins…down to those artists who, like David, Ingres, and even Bouguereau, believed in painting nature as it is, art has always been art and not nature” (Picasso quoted in “Picasso Speaks” from Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford, 2003, p. 216).
In Paysage, Picasso expands upon Paul Cézanne's radical reimagining of the picture plane. Like many modern and twentieth century artists, Picasso revered the elder artist for his groundbreaking techniques and ingenious departure from the stylistic norms of the day. During his lifetime, Picasso owned a few of Cézanne’s works, including La Mer à l'Estaque, which highlights the exemplary compression of space and the artist’s ingenious layering of pigment. As Cézanne did, Picasso here builds depth through abutting swathes of color. Subjects like buildings, trees and roads are collapsed within the plane, each fixed according to the artist’s pictorial proclivities. Like Cézanne, Picasso utilizes the faces of the landscape as a framing device for the view in the distance; in both La Mer à l'Estaque and Paysage each artist situates the hilly backdrop between trees on either side, almost as curtains frame a theater’s stage. In eschewing conventional perspective, Picasso channels the Cézanne and anticipates the electric Californian landscapes of David Hockney’s late career, which too features flat expanses delineated by bright color and pattern.
Among the largest of the works from Picasso’s series, Paysage features the evidence of man’s intervention into nature with the mosaic-like array of buildings and windows, while still retaining the unbothered quality of a landscape free from people. "I have not painted many landscapes in my life. But these came all by themselves... I have tried to reproduce their essence as much as possible... None of the pictures is "a piece of nature." None of them were made after sketches, with the motive before the eyes..." (Pablo Picasso quoted in Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Picasso: Letzte Bilder, Werke 1966–1972, 1993-94, p. 308; translated).
Characteristic of his late ‘Heroic Years,’ Paysage abounds in tones of peach, cerulean and celadon, and features a lush array of color not readily seen in his earlier works. Aided by the varied textures of the admixture of oil and Ripolin, the present work exhibits the greatest strengths of Picasso’s expressive and dynamic late oeuvre.
