Pablo Picasso - Landscapes

As a man who was endlessly fascinated by figures and forms - the art of pure landscape painting was never really a priority for Pablo Picasso.

And yet still, on the rare occasions where he did stray into this genre, he demonstrates all the same inventiveness that we would expect from arguably the greatest artist of the 20th century

Of course, most of these works have almost nothing in common with the likes of John Constable, JMW Turner, Caspar Friedrich, Canaletto, or countless other masters of the landscape genre.

In fact, at first glance, many of them can seem really rather chaotic - or as if the artist has just painted a few squiggles without much care at all.

But as always with Picasso, the spontaneity is a very intentional quality, rather than a sign of any kind of lack in skill.

And the trick to appreciating many of these paintings is no necessarily to look at them . . . but, rather, imagine trying to look through them.

Then, the longer we stop and stare, the more we notice how Picasso’s landscapes are changing right before our eyes - almost as if they are moving images, slowly revealing their secrets to us.

And from abstract impressions, we start to notice the appearance of rolling hills, or buildings, or distant mountains, or seascapes and so on . . . as if the 2 dimensional “chaos” is actually giving birth to an extraordinary sense of multi dimensional order.

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