Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds
Mint Museum Uptown
February 11 – May 21, 2023
Special exhibition ticket required
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds is the first museum exhibition to explore Pablo Picasso’s deep engagement with landscape subjects and his expansive approach to this traditional genre.
Through a selection of more than 40 works spanning Picasso’s full career, Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds, organized by American Federation of the Arts, is the first of only two venues in the United States — and the only venue on the East Coast — to feature this exceptional exhibition filled with works from private collections and international museums together. The dynamic grouping of works in the exhibition offers visitors an unparalleled window into the artist’s creative process, from his earliest days in art school (1896 when then artist was just 15 years old) to months before his passing in 1973.
Assembling some of Picasso’s greatest landscape compositions in one traveling exhibition, Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds is part of The Picasso Celebration 1973-2023, structured around some 50 exhibitions and events that are being held in renowned cultural institutions in Europe and North America to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The Mint’s ticketed exhibition is the only museum exhibition that is part of The Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 that will be on view April 8 — the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s passing — in the United States.
Picasso Landscapes Special Exhibition Hours
| Monday | CLOSED |
| Tuesday | 9-10 AM, Member Morning; 10 AM-6 PM |
| Wednesday | 1-9 PM |
| Thursday | 1-6 PM |
| Friday | 10 AM-9 PM |
| Saturday | 9 AM-10 AM, Member Morning; 10 AM-6 PM |
| Sunday | Noon-6 PM |
More about the exhibition
Organized by the American Federation of Arts with guest curator Laurence Madeline, Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds is organized into sections that address various phases, approaches, or themes in the artist’s landscape painting, which yield new insights into his creative production and broader involvement with the world of his time. Through this in-depth study of Picasso’s diverse landscapes, it becomes possible to reclaim the genre’s primacy in his work and to affirm his keen focus on the shifting 20th-century cultural backdrop.
Picasso was committed to depicting landscapes throughout his entire life. From his earliest days in art school until the year before his death, landscape remained the prime genre through which he mediated his perception of the world and which shaped his own creative evolution. Landscape served as a catalyst for his formal experimentation, including early Cubism, as a field in which to investigate urban modernity, as an interface between humanity and nature, as a ground for direct sculptural intervention, as a space of personal withdrawal, as an inviting terrain for elegiac scenes, and as a territory of resistance and flight.
Within Picasso’s vast oeuvre, landscapes have received the least scholarly attention. This art-historical dearth notwithstanding, to ignore Picasso’s landscapes is to miss a crucial dimension of his achievement. Landscapes offer the clearest lens for understanding Picasso’s attentiveness to his cultural milieu as well as to his ongoing engagement with art-historical traditions.
This examination of Picasso’s landscapes highlights the artist’s attention to tensions between humanity and nature, and to the changing countryside being reshaped by industrialization. Picasso expressed this awareness throughout his landscape production, beginning early in the 20th century in Spain, where powerful forces of nature met the excitement of urban growth in his paintings of Málaga, Gósol, Horta de Ebro, and Barcelona.
The systematic destruction wrought by World War II and years of occupation color the artist’s Paris cityscapes of the 1940s and the atmosphere of works such as Winter Landscape (1950). Picasso’s grand Côte d’Azur landscapes done at the end of his career show the urbanization of a region where, in earlier decades, he had captured the lives of peasants and laborers. The devastation of the Anthropocene and 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.
American Federation of Arts
The American Federation of Arts is the leader in traveling exhibitions internationally. A nonprofit organization founded in 1909, the AFA is dedicated to enriching the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts through organizing and touring art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishing exhibition catalogues featuring important scholarly research, and developing educational programs.
About the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023
April 8, 2023 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and thus the year will represent the celebration of his work and his artistic legacy in France, Spain and internationally. The commemoration, accompanied by official celebrations in France and Spain, will make it possible to take stock of the research and interpretations of the artist’s work, especially during an important international symposium in autumn 2023, which also coincides with the opening of the Center for Picasso Studies in Paris. The Musée national Picasso-Paris and the Spanish National Commission for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso are pleased to support this exceptional program.
PICASSO LANDSCAPES: OUT OF BOUNDS AT THE MINT MUSEUM IS GENEROUSLY PRESENTED BY:
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds and Bearden/Picasso: Rhythms and Reverberations is generously presented in Charlotte by Bank of America, the City of Charlotte, Duke Energy, Mecklenburg County, M.A. Rogers, Ann and Michael Tarwater, North Carolina Arts Council, and Moore & Van Allen. Additional generous support is provided by: Leigh-Ann and Martin Sprock; Robin and Bill Branstrom, Sally Cooper, Laura and Mike Grace, Marshelette and Milton Prime; Posey and Mark Mealy; Chandra and Jimmie Johnson; Marty and Weston Andress, Mary and Walt Beaver, Betsy and Alfred Brand; toni and Alfred Kendrick, Beth and Drew Quartapella, Rocky and Curtis Trenkelbach, Charlotte and John Wickham; Mary Lou and Jim Babb, and Jo Ann and Joddy Peer. The Mint Museum is supported, in part, by the Infusion Fund and its generous donors.
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds is organized by the American Federation of Arts with guest curator Laurence Madeline, with the exceptional support of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The exhibition is generously supported by Monique Schoen Warshaw. Additional support has been provided by Lee White Galvis, Clare E. McKeon, and Stephanie R. La Nasa. Support for the accompanying publication provided by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Picasso Celebration 1973-2023: 50 exhibitions and events to celebrate Picasso.
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