Descripción
Neither this poster nor its motif has been reproduced in other posters. In a style that owes much to the idioms of Cubism and Expressionism, Picasso painted this composition showing a view of Mougins, which was the last landscape he painted before his death. With urgent strokes, as rapid as the fervent imagination that guided his brush, he revealed on the canvas everything that his perceptions retained from the time of “Notre-Dame-de-Vie.” This painting recalls the end of the line “8.1.59” with which his book of poetry “Piece of Skin” begins.
Picasso said the same thing in an interview (The Arts, New York, May 1923): “They speak of naturalism as opposed to modern painting. […] Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.” An idea that could be complemented with this other: “Any image of complex structure can, with a certain effort of imagination, be compared with the familiar images of nature” proposed by Paul Klee, the great German painter (whom Picasso defined as “Pascal-Napoleon” and whom he visited in Switzerland in 1937, where he had to travel to solve the problem of a robbery in a jewelry store committed by his son, who was then sixteen years old).
