Landscape, 1972 by Pablo Picasso

Picasso painted few landscapes. His subject for reflection was not nature but environment, spectacle and, above all, forms. When he represents nature, it is domesticated nature. He outlines her in black and subjugates her exuberance, as we see in this Landscape done at Mougins. Only the shape of the palm-trees and the hill side are recognizable. The other motifs are difficult to identify. Everything is in the treatment; the thick streaks of dripping paint, the brush-marks, the transparency of superimposed layers. Dots, black and white spots, and zig-zag lines are interwoven to suggest the lines of force which give the composition its structure. The greenish tone of the whole gives it a dramatic effect and there is, in this landscape painted when Picasso was 91 years old, an almost original power. At the end of his life, the artist who had been able at the age of 12 to paint like Raphael, had rediscovered the spontaneity and freshness of childhood.