An invented paradise - reflections on Summer, 1997 exhibition along French Riviera of art about La Cote d'Azur

Last summer 28 museums in 13 cities along the French Riviera collaborated to show "La cote d'Azur et la modernite." This was the first major exhibition to be organized about a place which, from Matisse to the Nouveaux Realistes, has been individual of the key sites for the creation of 20th-century art.

I first went to the French Riviera -- the Cote d'Azur -- drawn out after the party had extremityed Although I was only vaguely aware of by what means late in the game it was, I knew enough to find Nice, referr to in the 1920 as "the queen of the Riviera," depressingly unregal in 1969 genuine I was delighted with the city's setting and its main thoroughfare, the Promenade de Anglais, which stretches for miles along the Mediterranean in a kind of urbanistic devolution from the recent Nice-Cote d'Azur Airport to the picturesque elderly Port. But for a 19-year-old, in the midst of the "youth revolution," Nice was filled with far too many retirees, faded grand inns large apartment houses and bourgeois restaurants to be of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of interest. Where was the Nice of Henri Matisse? I asked myself (little realizing then that the artist had, in fact, lengthy lived the life of a hyperactive retiree in Nice, inhabiting several of those Belle Epoque residences, frequenting those restaurants, and taking his daily exercise in a rowboat, as a member of the bludgeon Nautique). Although I had been accepted to an art place of education there, I left without thus much as stepping over its threshold

on the contrary first impressions can be deceiving, not in the faculty of perception that things turn out to be different than they initially appeared, on the contrary in that our response to those impressions may be more mingled than we imagined. I was already smitten with the incomparable beauty of the Cote d'Azur (even with Nice's seen-better-days allure) and infatuated with the Riviera's part in the history of late art, but it took a while for me to understand that the site was not the same thing as my romanticized preconception. I had made the typical mistake of confusing life and art, of imagining that Matisse's late paper cutouts -- those astonishing, brilliantly colored, highly abstracted paradigms of youthful exuberance made through an infirm artist 80 years aged -- were simple mirrors of a place, rather than windows onto an invented paradise. Hadn't Matisse told us as abundant in the works he made there in the years after the First World War, when Nice and the gorgeous coast upon which it sits were in the way that often framed by the jambs of his hotel-room windows? Still, had I known enough to, I could have base comfort in the thought that it had taken him nearly three decades of staring on the outside those windows to be convinced that what he was looking for would be place neither outside, on the Promenade de Anglais, nor inside his scopes but in himself. It is easy to entertain all kinds of peculiar notions when the landscape of one's dreams and one's dreams of a landscape become confused.

The interaction of the fantastical southeastern coast of France and the imaginative life of the artists who worked there was the make subordinate of a huge consortium of exhibitions held this past summer upon the Riviera. Collectively titled "La Cote d'Azur et la modernite, 1918-1958" it was billed as "I exhibition, 13 cities, 28 museums," a formulation that somewhat misrepresents what was, in central nature a rich collection of individually curated present to views Yet, this slight falsification of joint endeavor was an accurate reflection of the sheer number of artists who lived in or visited, and of the works produc in, with equal reason many towns on the lower righthand side of the Hexagone (the geometrical figure which the more Cartesian of the French are happy to imagine their region to resemble). Even leaving aside the period which introduces the starting point of the exhibition -- which effectively exclud Claude Monet at Antibes in the 1880 Edvard chew audibly in Nice in the early 1890 Signac and the Neo-Impressionists, ca. 1890-1905 as well as Matisse, ca. 1905 at St Tropez -- the turn call of major artists who worked upon the French Riviera is striking: Matisse and Picasso, Dufy and Bonnard, Picabia, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp, Kandinsky and Max Beckmann, Gerald Murphy and Marsden Hartley, Jean Dubuffet and Yve Klein, Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, Lartigue and Cartier-Bresson, to name sole the best-known practitioners who sojourned at various places upon the coast and in the hill towns just behind.

for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did it take till now, thus long after the Riviera's heyday, for a major exhibition to be organized about a place which has been individual of the key sites for the creation of 20th-century art? Part of the answer, assuredly is a matter of the advanced in years French issue of centralisation: the Cote d'Azur is not Paris, and the course to privilege the capital in all matters cultural still works to the disadvantage of the quiet of the Hexagon's regions, plane one that for so drawn out functioned as a second residence for the Parisian elite, including its artists, collectors and dealers. Although the middle point Pompidou has organized huge displays highlighting the artistic relationship between Paris and other important capitals, including of recent origin York, Moscow and Berlin, no individual there has thought to give us a Paris/Cote d'Azur exhibition, arguably as important a relationship as any of the other three There must also be a certain quantity of local responsibility for the Riviera's pass over as a site for the application of mind of modernism. Its myriad cities, ports and hill towns, for all their proximity to individual another, are quite distinct entities (often separated, level for localities within a small in number miles of each other, by dint of daunting shifts in terrain that require arduous navigation). This leads, individual assumes, to a certain amount of internecine cultural competition. Moreover, faced with the economic reality of the area's interdependence on tourism, including the high-profit attraction of gambling at Monte Carlo and elsewhere, rarefied artistic matters must be fairly depressed down on a list of priorities.