The inspirational French Riviera

Contemporary paintings, sculptures, ceramics are at home on the French Riviera, in its particular natural scenery of light, water, and greenery, enhanced by architecture and cosmopolitan lifestyle. Influential historical visual artists loved these surroundings, not only ideal for keeping and showing larger or smaller private art collections, but for producing art. A cultural flow that continues to this day.

HENRI MATISSE

Known for his joyful and soothing use of color, line, and form, and, as an avid traveler, for his openness to non-Western civilizations, the leading fauvist figure Henri Matisse (1869-1954) accomplished most of his works in Nice, where he spent seasons at seaside hotels and old town apartments before purchasing a workshop at the former spectacular Régina hotel on the Cimiez hill. Indebted to the Aix-en-Provence master Paul Cezanne, and, as a student in Paris, to the Belle-Île-based Australian impressionist painter John Russell (a fellow pupil of Van Gogh), Matisse has instilled awe and stimulation to contemporary painters such as David Hockney, one of the most recognized living artists, or Tom Wesselmann, one of the main figures of American pop art, in addition to many others who have delved into and cited his deep ultramarine blue, poetic colorism, or techniques.

Given the range of his oeuvre and his lasting influence, Henri Matisse is viewed as the giant of modern art, alongside his friend and rival who had also moved to the French Riviera, Pablo Picasso. As a prolific painter, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor for over five decades, Matisse effectively challenged conventions with the vivid colors and flat shapes of his spirited nudes, dancers, odalisques, still lives, interior scenes, and in later semi-abstract and poetic cut-outs. Singularly, Matisse spent four years decorating in situ the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, which despite its scale as “a flower” (his word) he viewed as his masterwork; he rendered balance, purity, and serenity on architecture, stained-glass windows, and murals on ceramic.  

Matisse’s works are displayed in the world’s major public collections, mainly in the United States, where most of his collectors lived. His son, Pierre Matisse, had accordingly settled as an art dealer in New York City, operating a gallery for over five decades. The most comprehensive collection is held by the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, with over 1200 pieces following a bequest, and acquisitions from Matisse’s family. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris features over 50 works, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg 100. Two museums in France are dedicated to his oeuvre and contemporary interactions, in his birth town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis in the North, and in Nice, where he rests.

PABLO PICASSO

The other innovative visual colossus of the 20^th century, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), settled on the French Riviera in the last third of his productive life after spending seasons in the region as early as in the 1920s. Like Matisse, he was galvanized by the Southern light, yet also enjoyed the Mediterranean lifestyle, reminiscent of his native Costa del Sol and study years in Barcelona, leading to an enormous and multifaceted oeuvre over the decades. From antique mythology or abstract drawings to family portrait paintings, Picasso was imbued by an emulative atmosphere conducive to creativity. After Paris, he first set up his workshop at the Grimaldi Castle in Antibes, where he produced 70 paintings and drawings in two months. In Vallauris, where he volunteered for a monumental war and peace fresco in the castle chapel, he explored ceramics and traditional pottery, going on to produce 4,000 pieces in eight years, before moving to his villa-cum-atelier in Cannes, and lastly to Mougins.

As a painter, draftsman, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, theater set designer of over 20,000 works, Pablo Picasso contributed groundbreaking changes to visual culture. He created masterpieces of modernism, dived into cubism together with Georges Braque, further deconstructed conventional perspective, and expanded assemblages, while making original, evolving uses of color. His art is often defined by experimental aesthetics, yet drawing from people and events in his life, from affairs to tragedies, and Spanish cultural traditions. Civil and world conflicts left their mark on his work, but Picasso also transmitted hope for peace and a youthful sense of life through café culture, performance, music, or his notorious pet goat. His nudes, both male and female, denote sexual freedom as well as classicist references.

Picasso’s works are shown in major public collections around the world, and in the museums devoted to his oeuvre, often in dialogue with other artists, in particular the Musée national Picasso in Paris, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the Musée Picasso in Antibes, and the Picasso Museum in Malaga, his birth town.

MARC CHAGALL

The Russian-born surrealist painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) spent most of the second half of his long life on the French Riviera, in Vence and St. Paul de Vence, and contributed to found the museum in Nice honoring his oeuvre. His romantic and dreamlike work is imbued by the Russian-Jewish folklore of his youth as well as biblical mysticism, which he tended to use to advance universalist understanding among religious faiths: Although most artists would view religion as a poor substitute for philosophy, Chagall considered the bible as a great source of poetry, especially for its messages of love and benevolence.

Marc Chagall’s evocative and highly symbolic works are characterized by their surreal quality, expressionist perspective, and the use of bold color across whole surfaces. Liaising with Matisse and Picasso in Paris and on the French Riviera, Chagall tried different styles, and avoided categorization. He used diverse mediums by emulation, such as ceramics or stained-glass windows. His uniqueness in representing magical compositions with people, animals, and objects defying gravity have had a lasting appeal through their imaginative narrative of social peace and harmony.

Beyond the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice, based on initial donations by the artist, many sites around the world feature monumental commissions. These include stained-glass windows at the cathedrals of Metz and Reims, at a synagogue in Jerusalem, at a church in Zurich, and at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (where Chagall had lived in exile in the 1940s), painted ceilings and murals at the Opéra national de Paris and the New York Metropolitan Opera, mosaics, tapestries, and theatre set design and costumes. Chagall’s works are part of the major public collections of modern art, mainly in the United States and France.

JEAN COCTEAU

Well-known as a towering literary and cinematic figure of the Parisian scene, the multifaceted artist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), a close friend and ally of many leading visual artists, the promoter and companion of actor Jean Marais, and an avowed model for the equally wide-ranging American experimental artist Andy Warhol, left a significant legacy on the French Riviera. Aside from counselling and stimulating other artists, Cocteau was an exceptionally sensitive draftsman, notably illustrating with his powerful line, among other books, the transgressive novel Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, with 29 explicit homoerotic drawings. Cocteau made caricatures, self-portraits, and other seductive classics. He was also a poetic ceramicist.

In Villefranche-sur-Mer, where Cocteau spent seasons, he redesigned and decorated the small fishermen’s chapel St. Pierre with Mediterranean symbolics and biblical inspirations, echoing Matisse’s, Picasso’s, and Chagall’s spiritual ventures. At his friend and patron Francine Weisweiller’s Villa Santo Sospir in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, where he was initially invited for a week with his then-companion Edouard Dermit, he went on to “tag” with frescos every wall, ceiling, and door of the house during well over a decade, encouraged by Matisse in the comprehensiveness of the work.

Menton would nevertheless become his showcase town, where he first attended a painting biennale under Matisse’s honorary chair. Following a music festival, of which Cocteau had drawn the poster, he was commissioned to redecorate the townhall wedding room, which he took two years to complete with stunning frescos. He subsequently embraced an abandoned fort near the port as an arthouse that would become his dedicated museum, starting with 102 pieces and completed with donations and acquisitions. More recently, the Belgian-born American entrepreneur and collector Séverin Wunderman donated to Menton a collection of over 1,800 pieces, more than half of which by Cocteau, in order to build the new, spectacular Musée Jean Cocteau inaugurated in 2011. After severe flooding following a sea storm in 2018, the collection is being progressively restored. Major public institutions hold Cocteau’s works, mostly in France and the United States, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris (with over 250 pieces) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The French Riviera’s attraction does not end here. Other twentieth-century artists such as Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Fernand Léger, Nicolas de Staël, Hans Hartung, Francis Bacon, Yves Klein, and others were inspired by its setting and dynamics. Today, alongside the museums revolving around Matisse and Chagall in Nice, Picasso in Antibes, and Cocteau in Menton, the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (MAMAC), the Musée de la photographie Charles Nègre, Le 109, the Espace Lympia, the Musée des arts asiatiques, the Villa Arson art school in Nice, the Fondation Maeght, the Fondation CAB in St. Paul de Vence, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), the Grimaldi Forum, the Pavillon Bosio art school in Monaco, La Citadelle in Villefranche sur Mer, the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans Sartoux, the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (FAMM), the Centre d’art and the Centre de la photographie in Mougins, the Centre international d’art contemporain (CIAC) in Carros, La Malmaison, the Suquet des Artistes in Cannes, or La Napoule Art Foundation in Mandelieu la Napoule are some further hotspots where legacy meets with current trends and new avenues in art.

In open public spaces, the Catalan-born contemporary artist Jaume Plensa’s Nomade overlooking the harbor in Antibes, made of white steel letters, and his Conversation à Nice of seven lighted statues in polyester resin on the emblematic Place Masséna in the capital stress the universalist approach to art and culture on the French Riviera. With eased communication and mobility, physical locations matter even less, and the French Riviera remains a favored spot for art lovers.