JACKSON, MS.- The Mississippi Museum of Art is showing Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds, an exhibition that will explore the artist’s lifelong fascination with landscape by spotlighting his innovative reimagination of this traditional genre.

Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds, features 30 paintings and sculptures spanning Picasso’s full career. From his earliest days in art school until the year before his death, landscape meditated his perception of the world and jump-started his creative evolution.

Within Picasso’s vast oeuvre, landscapes have received the least scholarly attention. Yet to ignore Picasso’s landscapes is to omit a crucial dimension of his achievement. Landscapes afforded Picasso the opportunity to reflect upon his personal and cultural milieu while also engaging with art historical traditions. This exhibition will position the genre of landscape as a creative lodestar in his life, inspiring major breakthroughs in his oeuvre and seismic shifts in the painting canon. Picasso Landscapes also charts the artist’s changing sense of place over decades of travel and relocation, spotlighting Picasso’s reactions to the modern city, wartime occupation, and the industrialization of rural France.

Betsy Bradley, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, said, “MMA is proud to join in on the commemoration of Pablo Picasso’s death fifty years ago. This is the first solo Picasso exhibition to come to our state. We are thrilled by the opportunity to share these masterpieces with Jackson and visitors from around the world.”

As early as 1900, his canvases began telegraphing the powerful forces of nature in contrast with urban growth across Spain, particularly in Málaga, Madrid, Barcelona, and Horta de Ebro (pictured above). The destruction and endurance of French culture define the artist’s cityscapes of Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II. Picasso’s grand Côte d’Azur landscapes, completed at the end of his career, reveal the rapid buildout of a region where, a few decades earlier, he had captured the lives of peasants and laborers. The devastation of the Anthropocene in the political rise of the ecological movement in France coincided with Picasso’s last landscape of 1972, an immense work that reads like an epitaph to both his creative and social life.

Classical landscapes of the seventeenth century were important touchstones for Picasso; his ambitious, large-scale canvases adopted the formal structure of the ideal vista articulated by Claude Lorrain, and Nicholas Poussin. Picasso often used landscape painting to interrogate the work of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent van Gogh, who were the most celebrated artists at the time of his 1901 arrival in Paris.

Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds will be accompanied by a catalog that is co-published by the American Federation of Arts and DeMonico Books • D.A.P. and present a focused study of Picasso’s landscapes. The book features an enriching overview of Picasso’s lifelong work within the genre authored by the guest curator, as well as essays by Jacques Rancière and Peter Jonathan Bell. Together they address such topics as Picasso’s views on nature, encroaching industrialization, Picasso’s relationship to landscape as an established genre, and Picasso’s last landscape painting. The catalog can be purchased in The Museum Store.

Mississippi Museum of Art
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
November 11th, 2023 - March 3rd, 2024