An invented paradise

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

In this context, "La Cote d'Azur et la modernite" -- with over 2,000 objects and documents on display -- was both a triumph in its own right and a sign of changing times. Recent years have seen the establishment in Nice of the Musee d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain and the renovation and expansion of the Musee Matisse; the reinvigoration, in Vallauris, of the hydra-headed institution with an impossible name: the Musee Magnelli/Musee de la Ceramique/Musee National Picasso La Guerre et la Paix (which I will henceforth refer to as the Musee de la Ceramique); the creation of the kunsthalle at Vence, the Chateau de Villeneuve-Fondation Emile Hugues; as well as the inauguration and refurbishing of numerous other art spaces (like the Espace de l'Art Concret at Mouans-Sartoux) and historical artistic sites (the Renoir House at Cagnes and the Villa Noailles, designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, at Hyeres; Eileen Gray's "E.1027" house at Roquebrune-Cap Martin, closed up behind chain-link fence, still awaits refurbishing). Considering the riches of the modernist past that have distinguished the Riviera for decades -- the Musee Picasso at Antibes, the Fondation Maeght at St. Paul de Vence, the Musee National Message Biblique-Marc Chagall at Nice, the Musee de l'Annonciade at St. Tropez, the Musee Leger at Biot, the Cocteau-designed Chapelle St. Pierre at Villefranche, and the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence by Matisse, not to mention many other municipal museums and sites -- one realizes that the Cote d'Azur has finally taken charge, with a high level of professionalism, of its own, incomparable, modernist past.

Classic Modern Moves South

The three major exhibitions which dealt with the history of modern painting and sculpture, and related mediums, were organized in Nice and Antibes. Together they provided a wide-ranging and thorough survey of most of the major and some of the minor figures who worked in the area; each show also had a distinct point of view.

Curated by Xavier Girard, with the assistance of Christian Arthaud, "Le Mythe mediterraneen," at the Musee Matisse, offered the strongest argument for its approach to the material: "The Cote d'Azur is not the Mediterannean," the introductory wall label provocatively announced, "the Cote d'Azur is a Mediterreanean dream, the catalyst of a myth of modern times, an ornament, a mirage.... It is for this imaginary territory that [this] exhibition makes room." It was an appropiate modus operandi for a museum otherwise largely devoted to the work of Matisse, who had imagined an orientalist fantasy of harem girls and Moorish tchothchkes behind the persiennes (the louvered shutters so typical of the region) of his various Nice lodgings. Fantasies and of earthly paradise -- many with a classicizing tendency -- were the unifying elements of all the work in the show. Dufy's Venuses, Amphitrites and various other seashell-borne nymphs; Matisse's odalisques; Picasso's fauns; Picabia's pseudo-heroic, hyperkitsch bathers; Masson's minotaurs and Pasiphaes; and Chagall's Daphnises and Chloes (in his goauches of 1956), were seen here alongside lesser-known mythological and oneiric images by Roger de la Fresnaye, Ker Xavier-Roussel, Amedee de la Patelliere (the largest group of works I've ever seen by this nearly forgotten painter), Leopold Survage and Graham Sutherland, among others. Both painting and ceramics were part of this rhapsodic suite of sunstruck hallucinations, a convincing manifestation of the Cote d'Azur as, above all, a mirage.