An invented paradise

Art in America, March, 1998 by Kenneth E. Silver

Last summer, 28 museums in 13 cities along the French Riviera collaborated to produce "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 one of the key sites for the creation of 20th-century art.

I first went to the French Riviera -- the Cote d'Azur -- long after the party had ended. Although I was only vaguely aware of how late in the game it was, I knew enough to find Nice, referred to in the 1920s as "the queen of the Riviera," depressingly unregal in 1969. True, I was delighted with the city's setting and its main thoroughfare, the Promenade des Anglais, which stretches for miles along the Mediterranean in a kind of urbanistic devolution from the modern Nice-Cote d'Azur Airport to the picturesque Old Port. But for a 19-year-old, in the midst of the "youth revolution," Nice was filled with far too many retirees, faded grand hotels, large apartment houses and bourgeois restaurants to be of much interest. Where was the Nice of Henri Matisse? I asked myself (little realizing then that the artist had, in fact, long 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 Club Nautique). Although I had been accepted to an art school there, I left without so much as stepping over its threshold.

But first impressions can be deceiving, not in the sense that things turn out to be different than they initially appeared, but in that our response to those impressions may be more complex 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 role in the history of modern 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 by an infirm artist 80 years old -- were simple mirrors of a place, rather than windows onto an invented paradise. Hadn't Matisse told us as much in the works he made there in the years after the First World War, when Nice and the gorgeous coast on which it sits were so often framed by the jambs of his hotel-room windows? Still, had I known enough to, I could have found comfort in the thought that it had taken him nearly three decades of staring out those windows to be convinced that what he was looking for would be found neither outside, on the Promenade des Anglais, nor inside his rooms, 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 subject of a huge consortium of exhibitions held this past summer on 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 essence, a rich collection of individually curated shows. 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 produced in, so 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 country to resemble). Even leaving aside the period which precedes the starting point of the exhibition -- which effectively excluded Claude Monet at Antibes in the 1880s, Edvard Munch in Nice in the early 1890s, Signac and the Neo-Impressionists, ca. 1890-1905, as well as Matisse, ca. 1905, at St. Tropez -- the roll call of major artists who worked on 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 Yves Klein, Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, Lartigue and Cartier-Bresson, to name only the best-known practitioners who sojourned at various places on the coast and in the hill towns just behind.

Why did it take till now, so long after the Riviera's heyday, for a major exhibition to be organized about a place which has been one of the key sites for the creation of 20th-century art? Part of the answer, surely, is a matter of the old French issue of centralisation: the Cote d'Azur is not Paris, and the tendency to privilege the capital in all matters cultural still works to the disadvantage of the rest of the Hexagon's regions, even one that for so long functioned as a second residence for the Parisian elite, including its artists, collectors and dealers. Although the Centre Pompidou has organized huge shows highlighting the artistic relationship between Paris and other important capitals, including New York, Moscow and Berlin, no one 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 some local responsibility for the Riviera's neglect as a site for the study of modernism. Its myriad cities, ports and hill towns, for all their proximity to one another, are quite distinct entities (often separated, even for localities within a few miles of each other, by daunting shifts in terrain that require arduous navigation). This leads, one assumes, to a certain amount of internecine cultural competition. Moreover, faced with the economic reality of the area's dependence on tourism, including the high-profit attraction of gambling at Monte Carlo and elsewhere, rarefied artistic matters must be fairly low down on a list of priorities.