AXA Gallery-Press Release

The Côte d’Azur, as the French refer to their southeast coast on the Mediterranean Sea, has long been noted for its splendid light and terrain. A scenic tourist spot, as well as an enclave for the glamorous and famous, the French Riviera embodies all that is pleasurable, beautiful, and luxurious. But for many of the twentieth century’s great painters, sculptors, photographers, and architects it also functioned as a site for extraordinary artistic innovation, comparable to the urban centers of Paris, Berlin and New York in the number of artists who worked there and the quality of the art they produced.

Raoul Dufy
Window on the Promenade des Anglais, Nice, 1938.
Oil on canvas, 18 ¼ x 14 ¾” Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Samuel S. White III and Vera White Collection

From April 27 - July 14, 2001, the AXA Gallery will present Côte d’Azur: Art, Modernity and the Myth of the French Riviera, an exhibition tracing the development of twentieth-century modernism on the French Riviera. Beginning with Fauve paintings by Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, and ending with works by contemporary artists Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, and Eric Fischl, the exhibition explores issues of pleasure and escape, work and leisure, beauty and desire, myth and reality. Comprising over 70 works by more than 40 artists—including Arman, Pierre Bonnard, Jean Cocteau, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Lisette Model, Gerald Murphy, and Pablo Picasso, among others—the exhibition offers a fresh look at the Côte d’Azur and its historical significance as a site for the development of modernism.

Côte d’Azur was guest-curated by Dr. Kenneth E. Silver, an art historian and professor at New York University, and organized by the AXA Gallery. The AXA Gallery is sponsored by AXA Financial, Inc. and its subsidiary The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. Additional assistance is provided by AXA Nordstern Art Insurance Corporation.

With Marseilles at its western end and Monte Carlo near the Italian border to the east, the French Riviera comprises a few cities, such as Marseilles and Nice; and several medium-sized towns, such as Toulon, Hyères, and Cannes; and an assortment of small communes, each with its own character. The coastline features navy ports and ports for commerce, fishing and pleasure. A series of capes and peninsulas make for exceptional residential areas and beach resorts, including St.-Tropez, Cap d’Antibes, and Cap Ferrat. In almost all of these places modern artists have lived and worked at one time or another.

Pioneers. Although van Gogh worked in Provence in the late-1880s, and Cézanne, a native of Aix-en-Provence, worked in the region for many years, neither ever ventured east, beyond the outskirts of Marseilles, to work on the Riviera. It was actually two members of an earlier generation of artists, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, who pioneered artistic tourism on the Mediterranean coast. The two made a whirlwind tour of the coast together in 1883, and, in 1884, Monet worked briefly on the Italian Riviera and at Menton. The coastline finally acquired a name in 1887 with the publication of Stephen Liégeard’s La Côte d’Azur, a comprehensive guide to this hitherto exclusive enclave. The next year, when Monet spent nearly four months working in Antibes, and a month later exhibited his Riviera paintings in Paris—the Côte d’Azur was thereafter on the artistic map.

Pablo Picasso
Three Bathers, 1920.
(Juan-les-Pins) Pastel with oil and pencil on laid paper, 19 x 25”
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978

Modernists. It was modern artists who transformed the Riviera from a physical place into a mythic site. A landscape of splendid beauty whose raison d’être was pleasure itself, the Côte d’Azur rapidly became a vast atelier for members of the artistic avant-garde. Twentieth-century art on the Côte d’Azur might be said to begin with Matisse’s Study for ‘Luxe, calme, et volupté’, 1904, which was probably painted in St.-Tropez, when the artist was visiting Paul Signac, the leader of the Neo-Impressionists. The idyllic beach scene expresses both a yearning for mythic innocence and the promise of modern resort life. Matisse returned to Nice during the last winter of World War I and would spend much of the rest of his life in the area.

Picasso went to Juan-les-Pins in the summer of 1920, where he made his neo-classical beach scene evoking the mythic Three Graces. Of the Côte d’Azur Picasso said, “It’s strange, in Paris I never draw fauns, centaurs or mythical heroes…They always seem to live in these parts.”

Gerald Murphy
The Cocktail, 1927.
Oil on canvas, 29 1/16 x 29 7/8”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase with funds from Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Thomas H. Lee and the Modern Painting and Sculpture Committee

High Life on the Riviera. As in all resorts, the main business of the Côte d’Azur was pleasure. Two groups—one at leisure, the other working to profit from that leisure—constituted the Riviera’s populations. Monte Carlo boomed, as its casinos became the most famous in the world. From 1911, it was home to Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the place where Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and others came to execute their ballet designs. Parties—at municipal casinos, hotels, restaurants, private clubs—were a regular element of the Riviera season. Private homes, such as the Villa America, at Cap d’Antibes, owned by the Americans Sara and Gerald Murphy, afforded opportunities for residents to socialize with artists.

Until the 1920s, winter was the preferred season for visitors. But then, following the lead of artists who for decades had been traveling south in the summer, tourism shifted toward the warmer months. In the beach towns developing along the coast—many of them formerly devoted to fishing—swimming and sunbathing were now prime activities. Forecasting the Art Brut of which he would be the post-War master, Jean Dubuffet’s bathers in wartime Cassis reject the entire tradition of arcadian bathing images.

Jean Dubuffet
The Beach at Cassis, 1944.
Ink on paper, 12 5/8 x 9 5/8”
Collection of Richard L. Feigen, New York

From Postwar to Postmodern Côte d’Azur. The Riviera had long functioned as a place of escape from the rigors of everyday life. In June 1940, when the French signed an armistice with the victorious German forces, it became a refuge in a far more crucial way. The Free Zone, or Zone Libre, comprised most of the south from Vichy down, including the entire Mediterranean coastline. Jewish artists Sophie Tauber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay, and Charlotte Salomon were among the artists who took refuge in the Côte d’Azur where they continued to work. Jean Arp later wrote, “In the unreal years of darkness, 1941 and 1942, the reality of beauty was the sole consolation…”

After World War II, the grand old men of modern art—Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Léger and Matisse—became a kind of artistic royalty in the region, and in the postwar years they sought to leave more permanent legacies. Picasso, Matisse and Cocteau all designed chapels on the Riviera; Picasso facilitated the establishment of the Musée Picasso at Antibes; and Chagall designed a mosaic for the baptistery of Vence cathedral.

In the shadow of these giants, a group of young locals were coming of age. Collectively referred to as the Ecole de Nice or as New Realists, they represented the first indigenous avant-garde in the Riviera’s history. These Azuréens came to public attention in the early 1960s with their iconoclastic and provocative works. For some, such as Arman and Martial Raysse, the demystification of the Côte d’Azur—which had been so brilliantly mythologized by their predecessors—meant an ironic embrace of the consumer and the tourist; for others, including Yves Klein, it was time to inaugurate a new mystique. “Although we of the Ecole de Nice are always on vacation,” Klein said, “we’re not tourists….Tourists on vacation come to where we live, we inhabit the land of vacation, which gives us this feeling for doing idiotic things.”

Outsiders continue to play a role on the Riviera: the American Ellsworth Kelly created important early paintings in the small fishing port of Sanary in the early 1950s. Even now, long after the heyday of modernism on the Côte d’Azur, American artists—Eric Fischl, Jane Kaplowitz, Faith Ringgold, and Donald Sultan, among them—are drawn to the landscape, light and mythic power of the place and have invented a Côte d’Azur of their own.

The exhibition Côte d’Azur is accompanied by a catalogue to be published by MIT Press, entitled Making Paradise: Art, Modernity, and the Myth of the French Riviera, with essays by the exhibition’s curator, Dr. Silver.

The AXA Gallery presents works from all fields of the visual arts, with a special emphasis placed on exhibitions that would not otherwise have a presence in the city. The AXA Gallery is located in the atrium lobby of Equitable Tower, 787 Seventh Avenue at 51^st Street, in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Sundays. Admission is free.