Betsy Bradley, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, is from Greenville. She attended Millsaps College receiving a degree in English and then went on to graduate school at Vanderbilt University with a master’s degree in literature. She has been the MMA director for more than 20 years. Prior to her time at the museum, she was the executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission. Sun Staff Writer Olivia Mars White recently spoke with her about the upcoming Picasso exhibit.
When will Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds be shown at the museum?
It opens here on November 11th, and it will be up through early March.
What will the exhibit feature?
This is an exhibition of Picasso’s landscape paintings. The exhibition will explore the artist’s lifelong fascination with landscape by spotlighting his innovative reimagination of this traditional genre. It includes 30 paintings and sculptures spanning Picasso’s full career. From his earliest days in art school until the year before his death, landscape meditated his perception of the world and jump-started his creative evolution. So, it’s a little unusual in that these paintings have not been shown together as a group and explored this particular style of his paintings ever before. We’re really excited to share a hidden love of Picasso’s, which is the painting of landscapes, with our audience.
What additional background should people know about the show?
As early as 1900, his canvases began telegraphing the powerful forces of nature in contrast with urban growth across Spain, particularly in Málaga, Madrid, Barcelona, and Horta de Ebro. The destruction and endurance of French culture define the artist’s cityscapes of Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II. Picasso’s grand Côte d’Azur landscapes, completed at the end of his career, reveal the rapid buildout of a region where, a few decades earlier, he had captured the lives of peasants and laborers. The devastation of the Anthropocene in 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.
Classical landscapes of the seventeenth century were important touchstones for Picasso; his ambitious, large-scale canvases adopted the formal structure of the ideal vista articulated by Claude Lorrain, and Nicholas Poussin. Picasso often used landscape painting to interrogate the work of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, and Vincent van Gogh, who were the most celebrated artists at the time of his 1901 arrival in Paris.
Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds will be accompanied by a catalog that is co-published by the American Federation of Arts and DeMonico Books and present a focused study of Picasso’s landscapes. The book features an enriching overview of Picasso’s lifelong work within the genre authored by the guest curator, as well as essays by Jacques Rancière and Peter Jonathan Bell. Together they address such topics as Picasso’s views on nature, encroaching industrialization, Picasso’s relationship to landscape as an established genre, and Picasso’s last landscape painting. The catalog can be purchased in The Museum Store.
What do you think are some things that people can learn from the exhibit?
I think that we’ll learn that, even though Picasso was really famous for still life and Cubism and portraits of women, he returned again and again to the land as a way to experiment with different styles. So, you will see a Cubist landscape and you will see a more representational street scene, for example. You will really get to this little-known passion of his, which is the land, and Mississippians, of all people, know what it’s like to be tied to the land and to have that connection with the natural outdoors. I’m hoping that people will really enjoy seeing these beautiful paintings.
Are there any unique aspects of this exhibit compared to some others that are in the museum?
Well, this is the first time an exhibition purely of Picasso’s works has come to Mississippi. So, it’s a big deal to have these 30 Picasso paintings all together for people to see. Usually there are one or two in a bigger exhibition. This is the first really exclusive Picasso exhibition to come here, and it’s only gone to two other venues in the United States. So, it’s a real privilege for us to have this here.
Why is it a big deal for the museum to have this exhibit on display?
It’s the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, and as you may know, Picasso lived to be 92. So, he lived through much of the 20th century and saw so many changes in Europe where he lived but also across the world. The Picasso Foundation is celebrating the anniversary of his death all over Europe and in major American cities like New York and San Francisco, so having Jackson, Mississippi be part of this international celebration is a big deal for us.
Do you have anything else going on at the museum right now that you would want to highlight?
We’re in the final weeks of the Mississippi Invitational Exhibition, which is a wonderful survey of working Mississippi artists, and with the Picasso exhibition, we will also have a beautiful exhibition of works by Romare Bearden, who was the probably most important African American painter in the United States during the 20th century. He was very much influenced by Picasso and traveled to France to meet him. You can see that in his style of painting, and so it’s gonna be really interesting to see this southern American artist and Picasso in the same museum at the same time where they’re reflecting each other’s styles and interests.
Is there anything else that you would want to include about the Picasso exhibit?
We just hope that people will come and bring their families and out of town guests. It’s a really rare opportunity to see these original paintings by arguably the world’s greatest 20th century artist here at home in Jackson.
