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

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

Gerald and Sarah Murphy, the expatriate American couple who spent much of their time in Cap d'Antibes hosting friends like Picasso and Fernand Leger, embodied most completely the freedom and privilege that characterized the Riviera lifestyle. Gerald Murphy's Cocktail (1927) is an ode to the high life, complete with cocktail shaker, martini glasses and Cuban cigars. Some years later, when hometown boys Yves Klein, Arman and Martial Raysse--the so-called Ecole de Nice--began their artistic activities, this type of tourist-artist became the target of their ironic barbs. Explained Raysse: "It's important to keep in mind that we are not artists. We're on vacation, we've never worked in our lives." And Klein: "Although we're always on vacation, we of the Ecole de Nice, we're not tourists. That's the essential point. Tourists on vacation come to where we live, we inhabit the land of the vacation, which gives us this feeling for doing idiotic things. We have a good time, without thinking of religion, or art, or science."(1)

It was precisely this ambiguity between leisure and work, between production and consumption, that the work of the Ecole de Nice mined, from Klein's act of "signing" the blue sky of the Riviera to Arman's boxed accumulations, which attempted to revalue garbage as art. In the words of these young smart alecks, the correspondences between an artist's search for material and a tourist's search for leisure--which constitute another site of the meeting of modern art and modern life--is brought to the fore: what, in the end, distinguishes artistic work from bourgeois play?

(1.) Cited in Kenneth E. Silver, Making Paradise: Art, Modernity, and the Myth of the French Riviera, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, p. 172.

"Cote d'Azur: Art, Modernity, and the Myth of the French Riviera," curated by Kenneth E. Silver, is on view at the AXA Gallery (formerly the Equitable Gallery) in New York from Apr. 27 to July 14. The accompanying 191-page catalogue, Making Paradise, is published by MIT Press.

Author: Aruna D'Souza is assistant professor of art history at Purchase College, State University of New York.