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French Riviera and Its Artists
Art, Literature, Love, and Life on the Côte d'Azur
By John Baxter Museyon, Inc.
Copyright © 2015 John Baxter
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-940842-05-9
CHAPTER 1
OF TIME AND LIGHT: The Rational Eye of Paul Cézanne
Superficially, neither Paul Cézanne himself — dour, black-bearded, reclusive, and often rude, shy, angry or depressed — nor his expressionless portraits and meticulously assembled landscapes, subdued, precise but empty of people, had much in common with the sunny and hedonistic Riviera. Reflecting this, the brief time he spent there was at L'Estaque, the same semi-industrial town near Marseille where Georges Braque, no more cheerful than Cézanne, would later attempt, with little success, to contain the colors and light of the Mediterranean within the chilly mathematics of Cubism.
And yet it is Cézanne to whom almost every later artist of the Riviera paid tribute as "the father of us all." Where Impressionism had freed the painter's brush, making it a tool of the imagination, responsive to the spirit of the moment, Cézanne demanded that the artist suppress this spontaneity. His own best example, he would spend hours contemplating an apparently simple rock or tree before committing a single brushstroke to canvas.
Inspired by such old masters as Peter Paul Rubens, he studied each subject until he understood its topological form. Looked at analytically, a tree was essentially a cylinder, an apple or a human head both spheres, a range of hills no more than an arrangement of pyramids and cones. To Cézanne, a devout Catholic, this underlying unity proved the existence of a divine order in nature. "When I judge art," he wrote, "I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."
Although Cézanne never lacked for money from his prosperous family in provincial Aix-en-Provence, he received little encouragement from them in either his personal life or his art. He studied law at the insistence of his father, who expected him to enter his bank. Preferring to draw, Cézanne took art classes in Aix, left for Paris, failed there, returned, worked briefly in the bank, but again gravitated to the capital, encouraged by a school friend, Émile Zola, soon to be famous as a novelist.
For Cézanne, living away from his hometown proved as hard as remaining. "When I was in Aix," he wrote from Paris, "it seemed to me that I would be better elsewhere, but now that I am here, I miss Aix. When one is born there, he is ruined; nothing else means anything to you." In Paris, he was nostalgic for the craggy landscape around Aix and the often harsh but always revealing Provençal light. In particular, he missed Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain that reared out of the landscape a few miles from Aix. Its uncompromisingly pyramidal form confirmed his theories about the volumetric basis of nature. Once he returned, he constructed a rough studio in an ancient stone quarry on the edge of Aix from which he had an unimpeded view of this monolith. He painted it forty-four times in oils and forty-three times in watercolor.
Rejected repeatedly for the annual Paris salon, Cézanne suffered a sustained mauling from critics, one of whom suggested that a portrait was so horrible it might induce miscarriages in pregnant women. Never comfortable painting people, he seldom worked with live models. His best-known attempt at figure painting, a nude group known as Les Grandes Baigneuses — the Large Bathers — was based on sketches made as a student or from Renaissance paintings in the Louvre. The subject occupied him in various forms for years. With each new version, the women and the arrangement of their bodies became more stylized. He died with the picture unfinished, but already halfway to abstraction.
In 1870, to escape conscription into Napoleon III's army fighting the Prussians, Cézanne took refuge in L'Estaque, a town on the Gulf of Marseilles where he had spent holidays as a boy. Seen through the mature eyes of an artist, the Mediterranean landscape was a revelation. For the rest of his life he would return there, often staying at a house on Place Malterre and painting views of the town and the sea beyond from a nearby headland. In 1876, he described the town to friend and fellow artist Camille Pissarro as "like a playing card. Red roofs over the blue sea. The sun here is so terrific that objects appear silhouetted not only in white or black, but in blue, red, brown, violet."
In January 1882, Pierre-Auguste Renoir visited him en route to Paris from Italy. "What a beautiful place this is!" Renoir wrote. "It must surely be the most beautiful place in the world." During his few days there, Renoir finished four canvases, mostly studies of the dappled light on paths in the heavily wooded hillsides, a subject that didn't interest Cézanne. On one day, however, the two men set up their easels on his favorite point above the town to paint the same scene. The result are Renoir's Rocky Crags at L'Estaque and Cezanne's The Viaduct at L'Estaque.
The contrast between their visions is striking. Renoir's painting demonstrates his preference for gentle landscapes, with rolling hills and curved shapes, while Cézanne's Viaduct depicts a more intense, angular interpretation of the same scene. While Renoir's understanding of what he sees is lush and soft, Cezanne's layers of planes and silhouettes are more austere, flat, sculptural, and ultimately more modern. Renoir seeks to soften the view, but Cézanne reminds us of geometry's relentless logic.
Many critics, while recognizing Cézanne's technical mastery, found his canvases unpleasant, even ugly. "Cézanne never was able to create what can be called a picture," wrote anti-modernist Camille Mauclair. Others remarked uneasily that one had to distinguish between Cézanne's worthwhile ideas and the often jarring use he made of them.
In 1895, Cézanne had the good fortune to meet the young dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had just opened a small gallery in Paris. Their rapport was instantaneous. Vollard compared the impact of his paintings to a punch in the stomach. "An innovator like Cézanne was considered a madman or an impostor," he said, "and even the avantgarde regarded him with contempt. On the spot, I managed to buy 150 canvases from him, almost his entire output. I raised a great deal of money — my entire fortune went into it. And I anxiously wondered whether my audacity might not turn out to be the ruin of me. I didn't even have enough money left over to frame the canvases decently."
The show, a huge success, established not only Cézanne's reputation but that of Vollard. It also reassured those who admired Cézanne that they were on the right track. Pissarro wrote to his son, "I believe this dealer is the one we have been seeking. He likes only our school of painting or works by artists whose talents have developed along similar lines. He is very enthusiastic and knows his job."
Cézanne died in 1906 of pneumonia after being caught outside in a rainstorm. So modern do his pictures appear today that one easily forgets they were done at a time when most artists were still preoccupied with Impressionism.
His influence would prove to be far wider than anyone envisaged, not only on painting but on theories of art, and also on literature. Gertrude Stein admired his work, and urged Ernest Hemingway to study the way in which he concentrated on his immediate subject, to the exclusion of all else. Hemingway spent hours in Paris's Musée du Luxembourg, where, prior to the construction of the Musée d'Orsay, the Cézannes of the national collection were displayed. "Cézanne is my painter, after the early painters," he said. "I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne, I learned how by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times."
CHAPTER 2
PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR: Naked Among the Olives
So closely is Pierre-Auguste Renoir associated with Impressionist scenes of bohemian Montmartre, of dancers in bals musettes and picnics along the Seine, that one forgets he spent eleven equally productive years — his last — on the Riviera.
Beginning in 1892, rheumatoid arthritis relentlessly reduced Renoir's ability to paint. An arm broken in an 1897 bicycle accident led to progressive rigidity in his shoulders and hands. The sight in his left eye also deteriorated. In 1907, then sixty-six, and hoping Mediterranean warmth would restore some movement to his joints and bright sunlight compensate for failing vision, he bought Les Collettes, a ten-acre farm outside the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the hills above Nice.
No stranger to the south, Renoir had travelled in Italy as a young man and also visited North Africa. In January 1882, he called on Cézanne in L'Estaque, and drew new inspiration from the sparseness and precision of his work, in particular his decision to concentrate on essential forms, to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone."
"I had gone as far as I could with Impressionism," wrote Renoir, "and I realized I could neither paint nor draw." Studying Raphael and Titian in Italy led him to a new appreciation of Classicism. No longer interested in recording a passing impression of life, he concentrated instead on the volumes, tones and textures of nature and the body — not the real but the ideal.
Aggressive representation by his dealer Ambroise Vollard ensured that his paintings continued to sell at high prices. In particular, American inventor Albert C. Barnes amassed the world's largest collection of his work, an astonishing 181 items.
With such patronage, Renoir could afford every material comfort in his new Riviera home. Supervised by his wife Aline, his former model, twenty-three years his junior, the farmhouse was extended and enlarged and the gardens landscaped to show off the lemon groves and massive olive trees. She installed a glassed-walled studio and every modern convenience. Unusual for the time, Les Collettes had electricity, central heating, and a telephone. Renoir also owned an automobile. In 1908, he and Aline moved in with their three sons.
Age and infirmity reduced but didn't eradicate Renoir's libido. If anything, being imprisoned in a deteriorating body sharpened his appreciation of women. As the new house required many servants, he surrounded himself with pretty girls, some of whom became his models. He celebrated their voluptuousness in such late paintings as Les Baigneuses (The Bathers, 1918-1919) in which plump nudes romp and lounge like figures out of Rubens.
Some people found these overweight and highly-colored figures close to self-parody. American painter Mary Cassatt sneered in 1913 at his "enormously fat red women with very small heads." Renoir was unapologetic. The young women who sang and chattered as they went about their household chores were his muses. He needed their company, their admiration, their sexuality — but not, however, their intelligence. He believed education robbed a woman of the simplicity and natural charm that made her interesting. Exaggerating their bodies at the expense of their heads placed the emphasis where he felt it belonged.
The Riviera climate stimulated Renoir's senses and brightened the colors of his palette but only marginally improved his health. A stroke in 1912 left him confined to a wheelchair. As arthritis further invaded his joints, he could only grip a brush if an assistant placed it in his fingers, which were often bandaged to prevent his nails from digging into his palms. He worked on a vertical roll of canvas, leaving the cutting, stretching and framing to helpers.
Following his stroke, a doctor from Vienna spent a month at the farm in hopes of getting him back on his feet. With diet and exercise, Renoir was able finally, with the help of friends, to take a few steps, only to slump, exhausted, into his chair. "I give up," he sighed. "The effort takes all my willpower. I'd have nothing left for painting. If I have to choose between walking and painting, I'd rather paint."
Initially Renoir spent only winters in Cagnes, returning in summer to Paris, but his stroke and the outbreak of war in 1914 imprisoned him on the Riviera. The war affected him deeply. His two eldest sons were wounded. Jean, later a noted film director, was hospitalized in eastern France. In 1915, Aline crossed the country to visit him, but died unexpectedly soon after her return.
Renoir took refuge in his work. When Vollard, looking for ways around his infirmity, suggested sculpture, the painter held up twisted fingers and said "Find me a pair of hands!" Through Aristide Maillol, noted for his statues of female nudes, Renoir met Richard Guino, a gifted young Catalan sculptor, who moved into the house at Cagnes.
A succession of sculptures followed, typified by the larger-than -life Venus Victorious, showing the goddess of love holding the golden apple she has just awarded to Paris. (A copy of this figure stands in the grounds of Les Collettes.) Most of the new figures were based on earlier paintings by Renoir, which Guino remodeled in three dimensions.
A dispute with Guino marred Renoir's last years. Although Vollard promised Guino that the collaboration would make him rich, the bronzes they created together were sold as Renoir's work alone. The family were adamant that Renoir supervised each figure, using a baton to indicate where clay should be added or removed, but Guino claimed they were almost entirely his work, and that Renoir just scratched his signature in the clay before the figures went for casting.
Guino was particularly offended that when the great sculptor Auguste Rodin visited Renoir, he was given the day off. Returning to the studio, Guino found that someone had disarranged the cloths draped over the clay figures to keep them moist. He accused Renoir of showing them to Rodin as his work alone. The two men parted on bad terms. After leaving Cagnes, Guino did little of note, and descended into depression.
In 1919, Renoir traveled to Paris to see some of his work hung in the Louvre — the first living artist to be so honored. He died in Cagnes-sur-Mer on December 3, 1919 but is buried next to his wife in her hometown of Fayolles in the Dordogne. Few men battled more stubbornly with physical infirmity to achieve their vision. As he told his old friend Matisse, "Pain passes, but beauty endures."
CHAPTER 3
HENRI MATISSE: The Brush and the Blades
Asked at the end of his life "Why have you never been bored?" Henri-Emile-Benoit Matisse replied "For more than fifty years I have never ceased to work. Work cures everything."
His creativity triumphed over age and illness. When he was no longer able to stand upright to paint a mural, he attached charcoal to a long stick and sketched out the design on the wall for others to fill in. Unable to walk, he worked from a wheelchair. Finally confined to bed, he continued to create, cutting shapes from colored paper.
Matisse spanned an era. The year of his birth, 1869, coincided with the completion of the railroads joining the east and west coasts of the United States.
In 1954, the year he died, the first hydrogen bomb detonated at Bikini Atoll. "He lived through some of the most traumatic political events in recorded history," said art critic Robert Hughes, "the worst wars, the greatest slaughters, the most demented rivalries of ideology, without, it seems, turning a hair."
This isn't entirely true. During the Nazi occupation of France, friends and family members of Matisse were tortured and killed. U.S. Air Force bombing of Nice in 1944 forced him to move to the hillside town of Vence. But no hint of anguish appears in his work, which remained tranquil and life-affirming. His concentration was unswerving. Neither politics nor the feuds and cliques of the art world interested him. He signed no manifestos, embraced no radical agendas. The most he hoped for his painting, he said, was that we should enjoy it as a tired man might settle into a favorite armchair.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from French Riviera and Its Artists by John Baxter. Copyright © 2015 John Baxter. Excerpted by permission of Museyon, Inc..
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