Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Galerie Alex Maguy, Paris

Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Picasso, Works of 1932-65, 1967, no. 61
Seoul, National Museum of Modern Art, Picasso, 1974

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1965-67, vol. 25, Paris, 1970, no. 126, illustrated pl. 72
Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso 1945-1973, Seoul, 1985, no. 64
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties II, 1964-1967, San Francisco, 2002, no. 65-132, illustrated p. 199
Carsten-Peter Warncke, Picasso, vol. II, Cologne, 1994, illustrated on p. 634

Work is in very good condition. Artist's tackholes visible in all four corners. Small flattened crease across lower left corner. Tiny piece of top layer of cardboard is loose in extreme lower right corner. Board is slightly t.mes darkened and is visible in a few areas where the artist has left it exposed. Colors are more vibrant and luminous than they appear in catalogue. Under UV light: no apparent inpainting.
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On March 2nd, 1961 Picasso married Jacqueline Hutin 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 d'Esterel evinces some of the traits and preoccupations of Picasso's late work.

This landscape is the culmination of a series of six consecutive horizontal canvases depicting Mougins from different perspectives. These unpopulated views are a continuation of the pastoral theme that dominated Picasso's oeuvre between 1966 and 1968. Whilst 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 disporting themselves in the landscape. The pastoral form is defined by its antithesis, and these late visions of Arcadian harmony are indicative of the ageing artist's desire to retreat from civilization towards a rural idyll which mingled both classical Greece and the artist's childhood memories of rural Spain.

However, Picasso's Arcadia was not a simple vision of innocence but contains a darker undercurrent. Indeed, as in so many of the works from his late period, there is another artist personality in the background, 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 this landscape gives the paint surface a freedom and looseness that certainly suggests a debt the expressive fervour of Van Gogh's technique. However the connection between the two artist's 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" (John Richardson, "L'Epoque Jacqueline," Late Picasso, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972 (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 34).