Nice Is A City With A Fine Art Heritage

Posted on July 27, 2008 - Filed Under Great travel deal online |

John Richardson, in his monumental three volume biography of Picasso, claims that it was the artist, and his rich American friends, the Murphy’s, who started the trend of visiting the French Riviera in summer. Until then, the vacationing classes from Paris had spent their summers at Normandy seaside towns like Deauville or, even more popularly, the great Basque resort of Biarritz.

From the early 1920s onwards, after Picasso and his family started spending their summers in Antibes and Juan les Pins, the delights of the Mediterranean coast in summer became all the rage. From an almost exclusively winter refuge from the north European climate, particularly popular with wealthy English and Russian visitors, Nice attracted an ever-larger summer clientele. It’s rare that one artist can change so many people’s lifestyles, but Picasso’s liking of beaches, which inspired many of his most famous works, has had a lasting impact on the lives of millions and the economy of Mediterranean cities like Nice. Curiously, despite the importance of beaches in his life and work, Picasso never learnt to swim, although he could pretend, propelling himself along to great effect, but with one leg still on solid ground.

Of course, art has had its impact on Nice in more conventional ways. With artists of the stature of Matisse living there, and many others regular visitors to the city or surrounding countryside, the city now boasts more art museums than any other in France outside Paris. The Matisse Museum, just outside Nice in the affluent suburb of Cimiez, is a striking house with almost three hundred of his works, including paintings from his early days, a fine collection of statues, and paintings from his famous ‘Fauves’, or ‘Wild Beast’ period. That was when he had first moved to the south of France in 1905 and bright and expressive colour became a feature of his work. He was then to attract much criticism - famously, his painting ‘Woman with a Hat’ was described by one leading critic as: “A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public”. Fortunately, it also attracted favourable attention and was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein.

Matisse and André Derain were the leaders of the Fauvist movement which included Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Kees Van Dongen and Maurice Vlaminck. In 1917 Matisse moved to Cimiez where he produced his famous orientalist odalisque paintings and later his cut out paper collages, some of which are now on display at the Matisse Museum. His most famous work, La Danse, was inspired by the Mediterranean colours, albei from another part of the French coast, the Catalan resort of Collioure, near the Spanish border. The painting is now housed in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, with a second commissioned version by the artist in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Matisse died following a heart attack in 1954, aged 84. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near to the Matisse Museum. Just down the road is the Marc-Chagall museum, in a building designed to display the artist’s work in the bright Mediterranean light with large windows and recessed walls. Seventeen canvasses were painted by Marc-Chagall from 1954 to 1967 making up the Biblical Message. A

Russian of Jewish descent, , he died in St-Paul in 1985. The Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice’s Fine Arts museum, is dedicated to Jules Cheret, said to be the inventor of the modern poster, and who died in Nice in 1932. There’s a large collection of his pastels on display. Van Dongen, a leading light of the Fauvist movement in the early 20th Century, makes quite an impact too at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules-Cheret with two of his most famous works - ‘Pious Dreams’ and ‘Dance of the Archangel’. A Dutchman, who became a French citizen in the 1920s, his bold erotic studies made him both popular and successful, so much so that he eventually moved to nearby Monaco, where he died in 1956. There’s little doubt that art and Nice go hand in hand. Today, the city’s artistic heritage has given Nice a wonderful range of galleries and museums, the finest in France outside Paris.

Bob Cartwright is a travel writer for Travelsavvy and writes extensively on European cities including Nice

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