It is a dream of paradise, one of those Arcadias we long for – timeless, perfect worlds saturated with light. In the modern age, artists found theirs in the south of France. Yet this exhibition misses the point entirely.
Instead of the modern myth of the Med, what we get here is a pedantic obsession with the geography of France’s southern coast. Artists get rewarded for which bit of it they painted. This leads to some serious distortions.
The neo-impressionists – the dot-fixated movement led by Paul Signac – and their paintings of the Côte d’Azur get a grand, spacious setting. That’s OK; though when you’ve seen one pixelated shoreline, you’ve seen them all. What’s baffling is that Henri Matisse and the Fauves have been squeezed into a smaller, less weighty adjoining display.
The revolution that Matisse and his friends enacted at the seaside town of Collioure, replacing nature with the colours in their heads, was far more radical, exciting and visually brilliant than Signac and co. Collioure is on the far west of Mediterranean France, close to the Pyrenees. The Côte d’Azur to the east is the Riviera proper, including all your favourites: Nice, Cannes, Antibes, Saint-Tropez.
The Fauves are punished for straying from it. In fact there seems to be a grudge against poor Matisse. A mere handful of his 1920s paintings that linger adoringly on women in Nice hotel rooms have to share space with cosy Raoul Dufy who was at best a Matisse imitator.
Then at the end a single late Matisse cut-out, a serpentine white line through aquatic blue called The Wave, is juxtaposed with a lot of blue imprints of bare-naked ladies by the showboating 1960s artist Yves Klein. Yet it is Matisse who defines with one captivating work what Painting the French Riviera should have been about. His 1904 Study for Luxe, calme et volupté, in the little Fauve room, depicts a seaside Eden with unfettered passion and hedonism.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
