The Cincinnati Art Museum celebrates Pablo Picasso’s legacy with new exhibition

To celebrate the legacy of Pablo Picasso, the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) has welcomed a new exhibition, “Picasso Landscapes: Out of Bounds,” which will be at the museum through Oct. 15.

“Our hope is that we can provide a different look at an artist that a lot of us think that we know. Pablo Picasso is a name that almost everybody will recognize and with that kind of familiarity, comes a presumption of knowledge,” says Peter Bell, curator of European paintings, sculpture and drawings at CAM.

The exhibition is the first to explore Picasso’s prolific engagement with landscape over his 75-year career, featuring paintings and sculptures by the artist from 25 public and private collections across the United States and Europe.

“We have paintings spanning a period of 76 years in the show, from his teenage years to the year before he died. … This is a different side of Picasso, and it’s a really important one,” says Bell.

Bell has been part of the Cincinnati Art Museum for six years and four of those have been spent working on this exhibition. “For the Picasso exhibition, we’ve been working on this maybe four years,” says Bell.

The museum believes its audience counts on the museum to present exhibitions of a very high level of quality and significance of cultural production in a way that is accessible to a lot of people and is also informative, rich, evocative and beautiful.

“People keep coming back and attendance goes up year after year,” says Bell.

The institution tries to exhibit as many different kinds of artists as possible in terms of historical periods, cultures, nationalities and types of artworks ranging from works on paper to decorative arts.

In this case, it’s a good time to do an exhibition on Picasso because it is the 50th anniversary of his death. There are many projects happening across Europe and the United States focusing on examining Picasso, his legacy and why he was important.

“We want everybody to come away learning something and having their lives enriched, or developing a new appreciation for something,” says Darcy Schwass, the director of marketing and communications at CAM.

Besides the emotional aspect and introspective experience, the goal is also for visitors to enjoy the artwork.

“It’s a chance to see one of one of the most consequential artists of the 20th century in a completely different way,” says Bell.