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Lot Essay
Paysage de Juan-les-Pins is a landscape by Pablo Picasso showing the fashionable beach-side town in the South of France where Picasso spent the Summers of 1924 and 1925. He had already visited Juan-les-Pins in 1920 with Olga, only a couple of years after their marriage; by the time he returned in 1924, he was also accompanied by their son, Paolo. Various factors, including his friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy and his involvement with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, had led Picasso to the South of France. As a part of the beau monde, Picasso was a fashionable presence there, visiting Monte Carlo for the ballet and revelling in a return to the Mediterranean, such a touchstone of his years in Spain. Picasso had become increasingly drawn to the South of France in the years following the First World War, marking the beginning of a relationship that would come to its climax in the later decades of his life when he spent most of his days there, basking in the territory formerly inhabited by heroes such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne.
Picasso's love of the life, light and landscape there is already visible in Paysage de Juan-les-Pins, which has been rendered with a playful calligraphy. Picasso has shown the pine trees as ciphers of darkness and lush green at the edge of the canvas which resemble the glyphs of his compatriot Joan Miró's pictures; meanwhile, he has presented the Mediterranean with a deep lapis that is made all the more intense by the contrast with the areas of the canvas that have been left almost in reserve, adding a vignette feel to the picture. The blue is also heightened by the flash of orange by the tower. Likewise, the sense of the expanse of the landscape is accentuated by the bold horizontal format: the elongated canvas adds a panoramic feel to the work as with two of its fellows, also ascribed 1925 dates, both of which had remained in Picasso's own collection until his death. By contrast, Paysage de Juan-les-Pins already belonged to G. David Thompson, the Pittsburgh magnate and philanthropist, many of whose pictures and sculptures now form the backbones of international museum collections.
Picasso's love of the life, light and landscape there is already visible in Paysage de Juan-les-Pins, which has been rendered with a playful calligraphy. Picasso has shown the pine trees as ciphers of darkness and lush green at the edge of the canvas which resemble the glyphs of his compatriot Joan Miró's pictures; meanwhile, he has presented the Mediterranean with a deep lapis that is made all the more intense by the contrast with the areas of the canvas that have been left almost in reserve, adding a vignette feel to the picture. The blue is also heightened by the flash of orange by the tower. Likewise, the sense of the expanse of the landscape is accentuated by the bold horizontal format: the elongated canvas adds a panoramic feel to the work as with two of its fellows, also ascribed 1925 dates, both of which had remained in Picasso's own collection until his death. By contrast, Paysage de Juan-les-Pins already belonged to G. David Thompson, the Pittsburgh magnate and philanthropist, many of whose pictures and sculptures now form the backbones of international museum collections.