Painting the French Riviera: a ‘miraculous’ exhibition

The impressionists are probably “the world’s favourite artists”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. For the past half-century at least, the big names of the movement have been exhibited so regularly and expansively that “it’s almost impossible to imagine a major show on these artists, and their successors, composed almost entirely of unfamiliar works”. And yet, this exhibition at London’s Royal Academy manages precisely that.

Drawing on loans from museums worldwide, it is focused on a moment around the turn of the 20th century, when artists took advantage of new railways and decamped from Paris to the Mediterranean coast en masse, attracted by its warm climate and connections to antiquity. Its theme is that the French Riviera – the Côte d’Azur – “was essential to the creation of modern art”.

For an impressionist and post-impressionist exhibition, it yields surprises galore. There’s a room full of 12 Monets I’d never seen before, of the “variously pink, lilac and turquoise sea” around Antibes. There are works by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries, exploring their personal visions of the region. It’s a revelation; it feels “almost miraculous”.

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The very idea of the Riviera is “a recent invention”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The phrase “Côte d’Azur” is a 19th century coinage; artists didn’t much visit this stretch of coast before Monet did in the 1880s. (“One swims in blue air,” he said.) Within a generation, though, the region had become “an essential destination for the avant-garde and the beau monde”.

Almost all of the major artists of the era visited, and many – not least Matisse and Picasso – settled there. The latter is represented by some stellar works, including a “brilliant” 1958 painting that records “high-rise developments encroaching on the bay of Cannes”. And Matisse’s “The Red Beach” (1905) is just one of several paintings here that “I would kill to own”. Yet the exhibition itself is “blighted by padding”, not least an entire gallery full of travel posters, and there are some real “duds” on show.

There are certainly a few disappointments, said Laura Cumming in The Observer – some “truly mediocre” Bonnard paintings, for instance – but, for the most part, “Painting the French Riviera” is very “easy on the eye”, a parade of “pure optical pleasure”. We see “Cézanne’s baked terracotta cliffs and Monet’s rose gold beaches”, as well as “Signac’s coral shorelines and Matisse’s blazing scarlet sands”. There are also some uncharacteristically “merry” pictures from Georges Braque, tourist posters created by Picasso and Matisse, clips of film stars on the corniche – and, in a lovely surprise, two Yves Klein sea sponges dyed in the artist’s signature blue.

All in all, this is an attractive show that shows “modern art inventing itself”. It’s “high summer at the Royal Academy, and will remain so all through the bleak midwinter”.
Royal Academy, London. Until 31 January