Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Sale: Christie's, London, November 27, 1989, lot 64A

Acquired at the above sale

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Paris, 1972, vol. XXV, no. 135, illustrated pl. 76

On March 2, 1961 Pablo Picasso married Jacqueline Roque following a prolonged courtship that had begun in the summer of 1952. Tired of the constant invasion of their privacy at the Villa La Californie in Cannes, the couple retreated to a handsome, well-protected villa situated on a terraced hillside near Mougins. The artist was to spend the last twelve years of his life here, and Paysage evinces some of the traits and preoccupations of Picasso's late work. In the first months of 1965, Picasso embarked on a painting campaign of the landscape that surrounded him in Mougins. He completed five canvases (Zervos XXV nos. 32-36) in February and returned to the landscape again three months later in May (Zervos XXV nos. 121-126 and the present work no. 135). Paysage depicts Mougins in swirling strokes of blue, green, yellow and pink pigment. Like many of Picasso's unpopulated views of the town, this canvas is a continuation of the pastoral theme that dominated his oeuvre between 1966 and 1968. While there are no figures in these works, they share to some extent the bucolic feel that characterizes Picasso's paintings of couples, nudes and fauns comporting themselves in the landscape. These late visions of Arcadian harmony are indicative of the ageing artist's desire to retreat from civilization and towards a rural idyll which mingled both classical Greece and the artist's childhood memories from rustic Spain.

Picasso's Arcadia, however, was not a simple vision of innocence but contains a darker undercurrent. As in so many of the works from Picasso's late period, there is another artist persona present, in this case, Van Gogh. For Picasso, the Dutch artist exemplified artistic sincerity; Van Gogh's psychological intensity and spiritual tumult effectively isolated him from contamination by the pressures of commerce and fame. Thus, as  Picasso sought to distance himself from his own celebrity, he turned towards the convulsive landscapes of his predecessor. The kinetic brushwork of Paysage gives the paint surface a freedom and spontaneity that certainly suggests a debt to the expressive fervor of Van Gogh's technique. However, the connection between the two artists at this point in Picasso's life went deeper than a mere artistic identification. As John Richardson observed, "The more one studies these late paintings, the more one realizes that they are, like Van Gogh's terminal landscapes, a supreme affirmation of life in the teeth of death" (J. Richardson, Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings Prints 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 34).