Full Description
The Mediterranean coast of France and Catalonia witnessed the rise and development of modern art over a century, from Cézanne in the 1860s to Matisse, Picasso and Klein in the 1950s and 1960s. These artists and the many more featured here discovered an inexhaustible source of inspiration in this storied region, whose glittering, languid sea stretches out towards the far horizon beneath brilliant azure skies. Indelibly associated with the classical past, this magical land of eternal spring and spiritual renewal came to signify a state of mind, and avant-garde artists sought to convey the vitality and élan it inspired in them through new paradigms of modernist invention.
Contents
Foreword by REBECCA SALTER CBE PRA and WILLIAM GRISWOLD
Sponsor's preface
Acknowledgements
Painting Paradise
KENNETH E. SILVER
Monet and the Mediterranean: 'a palette of diamonds and jewels'
RICHARD THOMSON
Henri Matisse and the Côte d'Azur: A Continent Without Borders
AYMERIC JEUDY
Pierre Bonnard and the Mediterranean
BELINDA THOMSON
Picasso's Mediterranean
MARILYN MCCULLY
'Brutal Sunshine': Writing on the French Riviera
HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN
Picasso's Meridian
JEAN-LOUIS ANDRAL
Cinema and the Côte d'Azur
WILLIAM H. ROBINSON
Catalogue plates, with section introductions by
ANN DUMAS AND HEATHER LEMONEDES BROWN
1 Cezanne and the Impressionists
2 Claude Monet
3 Neo-Impressionism on the Côte d'Azur
4 The Fauves
5 Pierre Bonnard
6 The 1920s
7 Pablo Picasso Prewar
8 Visitors to the Coast
9 Pablo Picasso Postwar
10 Nicolas de Staël
11 Yves Klein
Endnotes
Bibliography and sources
Lenders to the exhibition
Photographic acknowledgements
Index
