Riviera Dreamin' - tourist artist helped create image of French Riviera

Art in America, July, 2001 by Aruna D'Souza

Playground and inspiration, the Riviera attracted avant-gardists along with more conventional tourists throughout the 20th century. A current exhibition showcases artists who helped create the image of an earthly paradise on the Cote d'Azur.

Few tourist destinations have elicited such vivid artistic interpretations as the Cote d'Azur, that stretch of the French Mediterranean coast running from Marseilles to Monaco. Since the late 19th century, travelers have flocked to its beaches and casinos, soaking up its sunlight and basking in its hedonistic ambiance, changing what was once a quiet corner of France into a playground for a moneyed, cosmopolitan elite. An exhibition at the AXA Gallery in Manhattan, "Cote d'Azur: Art, Modernity, and the Myth of the French Riviera," curated by Kenneth E. Silver, raises the question of how to deal with the vast range of images created by tourists who were also some of the most important artists of their day. Bringing together over 70 works made between 1904 and 2000 by some 40 artists, Silver examines the way this region came to define modern notions of leisure and escape.

Our visual understanding of the Riviera is shaped by images such as Raoul Dufy's Golfe-Juan (1927), a color-saturated view from a hillside terrace toward a sun-baked town and the curving bay beyond. But one of the virtues of this exhibition is its insistence that the artists who depicted such views were not just producers of a mythical image of the Mediterranean, but consumers of it as well. For example, Pablo Picasso's 1919 sketch, rendered on the back of a postcard, of an open window looking out onto the sea reflects the impact on the artist's own view of his subject both of tourist-industry photography and of Henri Matisse's Nice-period paintings, which had been exhibited in Paris only two months before.

Clearly there came to be a number of visual tropes of the Riviera landscape. One of these is the bright and vibrant color which typifies works from Andre Derain's Landscape at Cassis (1907) to Eric Fischl's Close-Up (1982)--colors Silver interprets as almost abstracted signs for luminosity, compensation for (rather than transcription of) the bleached, dazzlingly bright surfaces the painters actually saw. (Such is the association in our visual imaginations between these keyed-up, overflowing colors and this geographical site that the inclusion of Ellsworth Kelly's Mediterranee, one of his first pure abstractions, produced during his stay in Sanary, a small Riviera fishing port, in 1952, seems rather fitting.) Others are the ubiquitous palm tree--itself imported into the region as part of its touristic transformation in the early 20th century--as seen in Dufy's Window on the Promenade des Anglais (1938), and the sandy beaches, which even appear as material constituent in Andre Masson's Battle of the Fishes, done while the artist was on vacation in 1926.

These artists accepted, and helped to create, fictions of place beyond the merely visual. Picasso, for example, said that "in Paris, I never draw fauns, centaurs, or mythical heroes ... [yet] they always seem to live in these parts," and surely that classicizing impulse subtends such images of languid pleasure as Three Bathers (1920), with its terra-cotta bodies and azure sea. For Jean Dubuffet, the modernist search for originary myth takes him not to any classical arcadia, but to the site of the primitive and childlike: in the remarkable ink drawing The Beach at Cassis (1944), naive, flattened-out figures appear as if scratched, graffiti-like, into a plaster wall.

While Silver links these regressions to, among other things, a new cult of the natural that guided vacationers' notions of leisure from the 1920s forward, it is curious, given the curator's groundbreaking work on art and politics in France between the wars, that there is little mention of the fact that both of these mythic constructions partake of diverse discourses of nationalism. The creation of any sort of classicizing, Mediterranean mythos--Picasso's included--cannot be considered outside the political and cultural "retour a l'ordre" of the interwar period, and Dubuffet's primitivism, likewise, has complicated links to French attempts to come to terms with its wartime complicities. The moments in the exhibition when political realities break through the escapist desires are poignant: Lisette Model's harsh portraits of well-heeled cafe patrons in Nice from 1934, which subsequently accompanied a magazine article condemning, in Marxist terms, the "utter depravity" of the bourgeois tourist, or Charlotte Salomon's untitled landscape of ca. 1939-43, whose banality belies the fact that, as a German Jew, her presence in the south of France was part of a desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to escape Nazi persecution.

Although the Cote d'Azur may well have been a lightning rod for fantasies of the exotic and the primitive, of the natural and the authentic, it was never free from the incursions of modernity, whose realities are celebrated in many of the pictures on view. Most striking is Jacques-Henri Lartigue's black-and-white photograph Mediterranean (1927), a panoramic view of the sea near Cannes with the photographer's car parked on a narrow, cliffside road above. As Silver points out, the proliferation of automobiles changed the landscape dramatically while making it accessible--in effect, the car was no intruder into the pristine Cote d'Azur but part of its very invention. Likewise the show's architectural artifacts (by Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, and Roger Mallet-Steven) were both decidedly up-to-date and yet comfortably at home in their Mediterranean environment, partaking at once of a vernacular tone and a rigorous, pristine modernism.