The Golden Era The Riviera: A History in Pictures

In the second half of the 19th century,

the empty beaches and pine-covered hills of the French Riviera

had provided powerful inspiration to some of the most significant

pioneers in modern art, a place to escape and experiment,

exploring new ways to live and paint,

remote from the artistic mainstream.

Their revolutionary paintings brought this enchanted stretch

of the Mediterranean coast to the attention of a wider public,

and in the first years of the 20th century, the Riviera

had already earned a reputation as a crucible of artistic ideas.

But the First World War abruptly interrupted this idyll,

leaving a deep mood of insecurity in its wake.

'People looked to the past,

'and sought reassurance instead in the triumphs of older civilisations.'

But, for the Riviera, this was to prove the dawn of its Golden Age,

both in prosperity and as an inspiration to artists,

its rich classical heritage presented a perfect

setting for a "return to order" after the chaos of the war years.

The Riviera rapidly evolved into the world's first international

tourist destination in these years,

a hedonistic playground for the modern era, where artists

became an integral part of the fabric of society

on the Cote d'Azur.

For half my life, I have been one of the multitude who have been

drawn here by this unique combination of leisure and culture.

It was artists who discovered and celebrated this coast,

and as the 20th century progressed,

they became its new royalty, but ultimately they could only

watch helplessly as it became a victim of it's own seductive beauty.

On Christmas Day, 1917,

a solitary, middle-aged man checked into a hotel

on the seafront in Nice.

It was very cold, and raining incessantly.

His tall, narrow room was pokey and sparsely furnished,

aimed at the transient tourist,

with only a row of hooks for his things.

A week later, on New Year's Eve,

he celebrated his birthday by himself.

It snowed.

# Well, my heart is lonely and my room's so cold and bare... #

At this point, Henri Matisse considered returning to Paris.

But he didn't.

Instead he set up his easel and painted the only thing he could,

the interior of his room.

# Got the blues in the south cos I feel I ain't nowhere... #

Matisse's arrival in Nice was an important moment,

both for him and for the Riviera.

The war was in its fourth year,

and the city was over-flowing with refugees,

both military and civilian,

holding its breath, hoping life would return

to normal some time soon.

Before the war, Nice had been a wealthy city

whose fortunes were tied to the British and Russian

aristocracy who had made it famous.

But the only British visiting France now were in the trenches,

and the Russian revolution had put an end to their winter holidays.

Matisse was soon forced to move on

when his hotel room was requisitioned

as yet more soldiers arrived.

If the Riviera was suffering, so was Henri Matisse.

He had last worked here in 1904,

when he had painted Luxe, Calme et Volupte, in Saint Tropez,

a picture whose pioneering technique and radical new use of colour

set him on the path to become one of the leaders of the Parisian avant garde.

But now, he was exhausted, as he said, by "long tiring years of experiment".

Matisse, on some levels was doing very well.

But it was also a time of anxiety for him.

Two of his sons were in the army, so he was worried about them.

His mother and brother were behind enemy lines

in the family home in northern France.

But also, of course, he was living under wartime conditions in Paris.

He himself was experiencing food shortages.

It was a time of great anxiety for him when he makes the decision to come down to Nice.

Matisse arrived in Nice as a tourist,

like so many others before him and so many more to come.

But then, the Mistral blew, and chased the clouds away.

"It was beautiful," said Henri, "and I decided not to leave Nice."

And he never did.

In the next few years,

Matisse would become one of the most revered painters in the world.

But the Riviera would change dramatically too.

In the 19th century, it had earned a reputation

for gambling and loose morals,

an aristocratic retreat from polite society,

offering pleasure seekers a place to misbehave.

Now, every holidaymaker

would have access to this hedonistic way of life.

But the Cote d'Azur would, at the same time,

establish itself as a powerhouse of progressive artistic ideas,

moving on from being the home of a handful of painters

and occasional visitors

to become the premiere location for any artist to live and work,

to see, and be seen.

It became indelibly associated in the public mind with modern art,

and Henri Matisse was in the vanguard of that change.

When the war ended,

Matisse moved into an apartment in this building,

overlooking the busy market square of the Cours Saleya, in the oldest part of the city.

It was to become his home for the next 20 years and, in that period,

he dedicated himself to his art with an extraordinary intensity.

The circumstances he needed for his art to thrive

were not those normally associated with the life of a bohemian painter.

He was rigidly disciplined, and his daily routine began at dawn.

As the Cours Saleya market came to life each morning,

he walked the short distance from his apartment to the Club Nautique

where he set out into the harbour in a small canoe.

Matisse was always properly dressed for the job in hand.

At his easel, he wore a white overall.

And in his canoe, he wore a jaunty sailor's hat.

He earned a medal from the club for assiduity.

After two hours at the oars,

he returned to his apartment where he practised the violin

until the serious work of the day began at nine.

He painted for three hours.

He expected the same single-minded dedication from his models,

who were often required to hold the same pose all morning.

One lapse was tolerated

but, if they lost a pose a second time, they were sacked.

'After lunch at a nearby cafe,

'he returned to the apartment for a nap.'

And, on waking, he dealt with his correspondence,

writing letters to his family and friends.

At 4pm, he picked up his brushes once more

and continued to paint until the daylight failed.

He would then draw by artificial light

until heading out, once more, into the old town for dinner.

He followed this schedule six days a week.

Matisse may have been predictable, but so was the Riviera.

Nearly every day, the sky was blue.

"When I realised that every morning I would see this light again, I couldn't believe my luck," he said.

He very quickly became part of the furniture in his adopted home town.

There seemed to be something about this city

that fitted him like a glove.

Alistair, why do you think Matisse felt so at home in Nice?

Primarily because this was a sophisticated resort.

He spent time on the southern coast of France earlier, places like the fishing village of Collioure.

They were more rugged, rough-and-ready kind of places.

In Nice, he found something very different. Something he very much liked.

Good hotels, good restaurants.

We should remember, by this time, he was middle aged, he's got family,

he's doing quite well selling his paintings.

So he's comfortable financially.

It seems this feels much more like his kind of place

by this time in his life.

It may have been his kind of town

but, strangely, it only played a supporting role on his canvasses.

His paintings at this time were quickly executed

with rapid brush strokes, and bright areas of flat colour.

But they were almost exclusively interior scenes

where Nice was glimpsed through the window.

Now that he had this light every day,

you might almost say he took it for granted, and ignored it.

Can you explain why he stayed inside, to paint the outside?

I think there are practical reasons, one of which is

it's very hard to paint under this kind of bright light,

or Matisse found it to be so.

More important, I think, is the kind of feeling he wants to convey with the paintings.

They give a sense of a secluded and private realm of pleasure.

He seems to be trying to create an artificial paradise.

So, he very often, poses his model in exotic costumes,

he places them against painted backgrounds, inventive backgrounds,

that would tend to hide the real architecture of the room.

I think what he's doing is trying to blur the boundary

between the real and the illusory, the real and the imagined.

Essentially, creating a fantasy world that he invites us to step into.

In order to better create this fantasy world,

Matisse sought professional advice.

In the 1920s, Nice's Riviera film studios were known as the Hollywood of France,

turning out silent movies, starring the likes of Douglas Fairbanks Jr

and Rudolf Valentino.

His requirements might have been more modest,

but Matisse recognised the similarities between

the work that was going on here,

and his own endeavours back in his apartment.

During his excursions into the streets of the old town,

Matisse often saw film crews from these studios

transforming the alleys of Nice

into Sinbad's Baghdad and the kasbahs of Algiers.

In no time at all, he was doing exactly the same thing in his own studio,

contracting these guys to build sets on wheels,

and he amassed an incredible collection of exotic props and costumes

to rival any film studio.

"Everything is fake, absurd, amazing, delicious," said Matisse.

He became his own movie director, and his home became his studio.

Using these moveable backdrops,

the apartment began to resemble the seraglio of an Eastern potentate,

with drapery, vases and mirrors he had bought in local antique shops.

These pictures became known as his odalisques,

concubines relaxing in the harem.

And, when they made their way back to Paris,

Matisse was dubbed the "Sultan of the Riviera".

The sultan and his fantasy harem

might seem to have nothing to do with the Riviera where it was created,

but this was a land of dreams,

and Matisse wasn't the only one who was dreaming.

This was a period of conflicting emotions.

The 1920s are often remembered as a decade-long party

where people sought to escape the trauma of the war in unbridled hedonism.

And escapism had always been one of the attractions of the Cote d'Azur.

But, at the same time, many felt a need for a more profound change in society

to avoid the possibility that such a conflict could arise again.

They looked for a way to salvage something from the wreckage.

This hunger for seriousness

led to a paradigm shift in the artistic outlook.

The intensity with which innovation and experiment

had pushed artistic ideas forward during the early years of the century was unsustainable.

Now, they began to look backwards, into the past.

The ancient Mediterranean civilisations of Greece and Rome

seemed to represent a time of certainty and security,

a democratic ideal that, in these immediate post-war years,

became the dominant cultural theme.

It was known as the "return to order".

The return to order, in artistic terms

generally refers to a return to Classicism,

which is understood to be traditional principles of drawing,

of form, of balance and symmetry in artworks.

The political side of it, of course, is, in part, to do with the war.

The social, political and artistic come together

as artists are seen to be responding to this call to unity,

and to the call to a notion of French tradition.

On a commanding hilltop overlooking the harbour at Monaco,

the ruins of the Trophy of the Alps dominate the little town of La Turbie.

This colossal monument was built by the Emperor Augustus in seven BC

to celebrate his subjugation of the local tribes.

It's one of the most conspicuous reminders

of the classical past on this coast.

In the 17th century,

the imaginary landscapes of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin

were littered with these classical monuments set in an Arcadian Utopia.

The artists, who now came to live on this coast,

began to explore this connection once more.

This did not mean ignoring the upheavals

that art had been subject to in the previous hundred years

and returning to simple, figurative painting.

The challenge was to fuse this new Classicism

with the inventiveness that had characterised the pre-war avant-garde,

and Pablo Picasso loved a challenge.

For someone who is now so strongly connected to the Cote d'Azur,

Picasso was something of a Johnny-come-lately

when he made his first visit.

Many of the painters he greatly respected,

like Henri Matisse and Georges Braque,

had expressed their love of the place

and, more importantly, its effect on their art.

But Picasso had resisted.

When he finally did make the trip in 1919, he was 37 years old,

and widely acclaimed as the leading avant garde painter of his generation.

But he didn't' come down here looking for something new,

but something very old indeed.

Picasso was becoming fascinated by classical antiquity.

The set designs he did for a Ballets Russes production in London

that year, The Three-Cornered Hat,

demonstrate that even he was experiencing the pull

of the return to order.

That August, he explored the Roman ruins that litter

the landscape around the town of Frejus.

Picasso was at a turning point in his career.

He felt that he had pushed cubism as far as it could go,

that if he went any further with it, it would become merely abstract painting,

and that was a step he was never prepared to take.

He was also becoming interested in the classical,

in part, under the pressure of the call to order.

He would always be playful with it, and slightly ironic,

but I think it's clear that he was also interested in what was going on down here,

he sensed that there was an emergent artistic scene,

and he wanted to check out what was going on.

There was an awful lot going on in his personal life at this time,

both domestically and artistically,

and these classical ruins,

half buried in the sandy Mediterranean pine woods,

would lead him in a new direction.

The previous summer, Picasso married the ballerina Olga Khokhlova,

a dancer for the Ballets Russes.

They travelled extensively across Europe,

visiting the classical ruins in Rome and the excavations at Pompeii,

which hugely broadened his horizons,

but also dramatically changed the kind of life he was leading.

Ever since his arrival in Paris at the turn of the century,

Picasso had tended to hang out in bohemian areas,

identifying with the working class,

living the life of the outcast artist.

But, by the mid teens, he was essentially becoming upwardly mobile.

One of the clearest signs of that

was his friendship with Diaghilev and others in the Ballets Russes.

It's there that he meets his wife, Olga, said to be the daughter of a Russian colonel.

Very elegant, very refined,

very different from the kind of bohemian women that Picasso had previously been involved with.

Though he was mocked by his friends for his bourgeois new lifestyle,

Picasso did his best to keep up appearances.

The couple stayed at the Grand Hotel Continental des Bains

which used to occupy this corner of the seafront in St Raphael.

The French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, was a regular in the hotel restaurant.

St Raphael was typical of the way the Riviera was developing.

The population of this ancient fishing village

had tripled in the previous 50 years

and it was now a resort town whose grand hotels and amusements

catered to the burgeoning middle class holidaymaker.

This was not Picasso's normal milieu.

It was unlikely that a leopard could so suddenly and comfortably change his spots.

And, though you had to give Picasso top marks for effort,

he was certainly aware of the imposture.

He told one of his models,

"My Russian wife likes tea, caviar, and pastries.

"Me, I like sausage and beans."

HE LAUGHS

Whatever he liked to eat, he certainly liked the Cote d'Azur,

and he couldn't wait to come back.

The following summer marked the start of Picasso's

true love affair with the Riviera.

He knew the coast now,

and found a villa above the beach at Juan-Les-Pins with a view of the sea.

Just before leaving Paris,

the couple discovered that Olga was pregnant.

Picasso was like a child,

bursting with anticipation for a long-desired treat.

He started painting the seaside two weeks before they were due to leave.

When he got to the coast,

it was exactly as he had seen it in his imagination.

"At that moment," he said, "I knew that this landscape was mine."

And he was to make it his own.

it was an incredibly productive summer, spent in relaxed informality in their villa,

much more in keeping with a diet of sausage and beans!

Picasso even claimed to have learnt to swim in the Mediterranean.

He had discovered the hedonistic life the Riviera was famous for.

The paintings he made that summer

are of statuesque, but decidedly sturdy women,

swimming or laying on the beach.

They inhabit a timeless, classical arcadia,

given over entirely to a life of pleasure,

bathing and enjoying the sun on their naked skin.

This is a vision of life on the Mediterranean shores at any point in history.

Only the book being read by the nearest figure gives the game away.

But, in a drawing that same summer,

Picasso explores another side of classical mythology.

One of his bathers has been carried off by a centaur,

and doesn't look too pleased about it.

In order to paint these mythical creatures,

he had to come down to the Riviera to see them, he couldn't do it in Paris.

"I feel that they live in these parts," he said.

He knew what he was talking about.

When it came to classical mythology, he had done his homework.

Picasso had been reading the German philosopher Nietzsche,

who drew a distinction between the Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus.

Apollo, god of sun, god of music and poetry,

Nietzsche, associated with classical beauty, calm, restraint and so forth.

But the classical had a dark side, Nietzsche said,

and that dark side was Dionysus,

god of wine, god of madness, god of destruction.

The Riviera could be seen as having an Apollo side,

the civilised and polite resorts such as Nice.

But it could also be seen has having the characteristics of Dionysus.

The debauched parties that people went to,

the semi-naked bathing in the sea,

giving oneself over to a kind of uncontrolled hedonism.

For the next 50 years,

Picasso very adroitly kept these two forces in equilibrium,

painting images that recorded the hedonistic Dionysian life of the Riviera,

but also always keeping it at arm's length.

Observing the madness, but wary of getting too personally involved.

As the exuberant chaos of the roaring '20s got into its stride,

Dionysus was about to recruit a whole new legion of followers.

The Riviera had been a playground of Europe for a generation,

drawing a rich, aristocratic clientele,

but its reputation had, by now, crossed the Atlantic.

Ocean liners travelled directly from New York to the ports of the Mediterranean coast.

America was about to fall in love with the Riviera

and would, in the process, completely change its character.

This is the Hotel Du Cap, on the very tip of the Antibes peninsula.

It had always been popular with British tourists

since it opened in 1889.

But, in May every year, the British went home

before the weather got too hot

and the hotel closed until September.

But, in 1923,

a wealthy young American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy,

asked the owner of the hotel to stay open for the summer

to accommodate themselves

and their many arty and influential friends they hoped would join them.

He agreed,

and this one small step for the Murphy's comfort

went on to be a giant leap in the fortunes of the Riviera.

The speed with which this change to the established order

spread to other hotels was astonishing.

By the mid-1920s, almost every hotel on this coast

had followed the lead of the Hotel du Cap, and opened for the summer.

The image of the Riviera in the public mind

changed just as dramatically.

The pre-war advertisements

featuring chic ladies in long dresses, enjoying the winter sun

gave way to images that concentrated on bathing costumes,

and the beach life of the summer vacation.

The Murphys were in their early 30s,

and both from American business dynasties.

They were Jazz Age refugees,

fleeing prohibition and parental disapproval of their marriage.

The great motivation for their move to France

was a hunger for some old world culture.

When it came to their summer holidays, however,

they had New World habits,

and enjoyed it in a way that would be familiar to us today.

Their carefree concept of leisure was very different

to the way that tourists enjoyed this coast in the past.

Rather than promenading in the shady grounds of the hotel under a parasol,

they went swimming in the sea,

covered themselves in banana oil, and set about getting a tan.

Their behaviour horrified the kind of guests

who normally stayed in the hotel.

In the 1890s,

the American inventor of the cornflake, John Harvey Kellogg,

suggested that sunlight was beneficial to human health,

and this odd notion was suddenly beginning to be taken seriously.

For previous generations of holidaymakers,

the sun tan was a sign of poverty.

You only got brown if you couldn't avoid the sunlight.

But the Murphys were part of a sudden and dramatic change of attitude in the early '20s,

and it all started here, on the tennis court.

Conventional ladies' tennis attire in the early years of the century

seemed to have been designed for anything but tennis.

But, in 1919, the flamboyant French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen

managed to win the Wimbledon women's singles

without the support of a corset,

wearing a dress which revealed her bare arms.

And, if this wasn't shocking enough, the exposed skin was deeply tanned.

As a sports star, Lenglen made tanned skin a sign of a healthy lifestyle.

But it became fashionable when the designer Coco Chanel

arrived on the Cote d'Azur

on the Duke of Westminster's yacht in 1923,

having acquired a deep tan on the voyage.

Having a tan suddenly became a symbol of youth, freedom

and a bohemian lifestyle,

and the Riviera was the perfect place to lead this kind of life.

The Murphys were "utterly captivating", wrote one friend,

and their summer trips to the Riviera attracted an ever-changing group of visitors

who helped make their holiday as amusing as possible.

This little stretch of sandy beach at Plage de la Garoupe

would have been more or less deserted in the 1920s,

and they adopted it as their base,

spending the day there, partying and picnicking.

Gerald brought a rake to clear away the seaweed each morning.

During the previous summer, they had stayed with Cole Porter,

and the following year, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald would join them.

But, in 1923, their star guest was Pablo Picasso,

along with his wife Olga, their two-year-old son Paulo,

and his mother, Dona Maria.

With so many fun-seekers coming and going, it must have felt like

one long, never-ending party, of the kind Jay Gatsby was so fond of giving.

Here, they all are enjoying a fancy dress party on the beach.

Olga, in a tutu, seems to be wearing her work clothes,

and Picasso later complained

it was all "too rowdy, with too many cocktails".

All of this leisure activity

overshadowed the fact Gerald was an extremely gifted painter himself.

His precise architectural depictions of the minutiae of their life

owe something to cubism,

but he had his own unmistakable technique.

This picture, Cocktail,

is a hymn to an important ritual in their daily routine.

When Gerald mixed a drink, he was said to resemble a priest at mass.

And, whilst this painting may appear to have used the cubist technique of collage,

in fact, every detail was painstakingly painted by Gerald.

Their enchanted life on the Cote d'Azur had a tragic ending, though.

Both of their sons died in quick succession in the 1930s.

And, during the Depression, they were forced to return to America

where Gerald took over management of the family firm.

He gave up painting

and became the businessman his father had always wanted him to be.

In 1934, their friend Scott Fitzgerald published Tender is the Night,

whose main characters, Nicole and Dick Diver,

lived a life on the Riviera that closely mirrored the Murphys' own.

But their bitter, destructive personalities

were the complete opposite of his hosts'

on whose sunny, carefree lives they were based.

The Murphys were later described as "masters in the art of living".

But it seemed everyone was having a good time now.

"One could get away with more on the summer Riviera," wrote Scott Fitzgerald.

"And whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art."

Summer on the Riviera had been attracting artists for years.

The art academies of Paris were closed

and the Riviera, a winter resort, was cheap.

Now, all of a sudden,

in no small part due to the Murphys' family holidays,

this sleepy, summer backwater

was where the important things were taking place.

Artists, consequently, were everywhere on this coast.

The old guard were well established.

Matisse in Nice, Picasso in Antibes,

Bonnard in Le Cannet.

But now, a host of new names were to join them.

Jean Cocteau in Villefranche,

Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in Mougins.

And visitors like Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst,

and Raoul Dufy, whose colourful fauvist images of the French seaside

have made him a favourite poster boy for Nice.

Taking advantage of this maelstrom of creativity,

Sergei Diaghilev brought the Ballet Russes to Monaco

to act like a sponge and soak up all his talent.

Diaghilev had been perpetually one step ahead of his creditors

since the Russian Revolution had left him and his company exiled,

an itinerant troupe wandering Europe in search of a home.

In 1922, it seemed they might have found that home when the new

Prince of Monaco, Louis II, decided he wanted his tiny principality

to be known for something other than its legendary gaming tables.

He offered the Ballet Russes the use of the Theatre du Monte Carlo,

attached to the back of the Casino.

Diaghilev's great genius was to harness the cutting edge

artistic talent of the day,

and present it to the public as part of the spectacle of the ballet.

As part of the cultural celebrations of the Paris Olympics in 1924

he staged 'Le Train Bleu'.

'Le Train Bleu' was a luxury express service run by the same

company responsible for the Orient Express, and every bit as glamorous.

It gained near mythical status in the '20s and '30s,

in keeping with the hedonistic reputation of the coast it served.

The train left Paris each evening, travelling along the spectacular

Riviera coastline overnight in sleeping cars of great opulence.

Its clientele were the creme de la creme

and the journey frequently turned into a night-long party on rails.

Agatha Christie set a Poirot mystery on the train and Winston Churchill

later claimed to have been its most frequent passenger.

Diaghilev desperately needed a hit,

and this simple one act satire on the sporty Riviera beach scene

fulfilled the brief, but he wasn't taking any chances.

He was in the fortunate position of having people queuing up

to work on his productions.

On this occasion, the libretto was by Jean Cocteau,

the costumes by Coco Chanel, and the curtain by Pablo Picasso.

In fact, Train Bleu doesn't even appear in it.

The action all takes place amongst the smart set on the Cote d'Azur.

Diaghilev wrote in the programme,

"The first point about Le Train Bleu

"is that there is no blue train in it.

"This being the age of speed, it already has reached its destination

"and disembarked its passengers."

In a similar vein,

Picasso's curtain didn't involve much work from Picasso himself.

The monumental women in the picture,

examples of his sturdy Riviera classism, are completely at odds

with the performers in the ballet, who were all Olympic athletes,

whose gymnastics made up a large part of the choreography.

At 38 by 34 foot, you might argue

this is the largest Picasso painting ever made.

But in fact, Diaghilev saw the picture in Picasso's studio

and had it copied onto the curtain by a scene painter,

Alexandre Shervashidze,

who was moonlighting from his other job as Prince of Abkhazia.

Picasso's gigantic women, skipping

thunderously along the Mediterranean shoreline, suggested the artist

was not taking the call to order quite as seriously as he might.

And he was not the only one.

The warped flipside of the scholarly retreat into the classical past

was the disparate international grouping of artists

who gathered under the umbrella of Dada.

This playful image, by Marcel Duchamp,

a moustache graffitied in pen onto a postcard of the world's most

famous painting, summed up the attitude of Dada.

Like the call to order,

Dada was born out of the horrors of the First World War.

But where the call to order saw the solution as being a return to

tradition, Dada held the entire European tradition to blame.

And if the tradition was to blame, then everything had to be attacked.

So Dada was anti-art, it was anti-capitalist,

it was anti-bourgeois, it was anti-military, it was anti-church,

it was anti-colonial, it was even anti-Dada at times.

Almost everything on the list of things Dada was against were

present in abundance on the Riviera, so it was no surprise that

when the Dada painter Francis Picabia arrived on the coast

in 1925 he found it a rich source of inspiration.

Picabia was in his mid-forties, and undoubtedly a very gifted painter.

His questing mind explored the possibilities of every 'ism'

that came along, beginning as an Impressionist

and adopting Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in their turn,

but through it all he remained devoted to having a good time.

Picabia embraced Dada with more enthusiasm than any other art

movement he had tried,

perhaps because he had never had to take art seriously.

He was a wealthy playboy with the means to enjoy the Riviera,

and the wit to point out its absurdity.

This vision of the Promenade des Anglais,

the seafront road in Nice, is made from found objects.

The palm trees from macaroni, their fronds are feathers dyed green,

but in contrast to the picture itself,

the frame was made of snake-skin by the society bookbinder

Pierre Legrain in mocking imitation of tourist trinkets like sea-shell

encrusted cigarette cases, that were for sale in the seafront shops.

Picabia and his fellow Dada-ists had entered into a kind

of Faustian pact on the Riviera.

However much their anarchistic art emphasised the worthless

pursuits of the idle rich on this coast,

it was very clear that they enjoyed the good life

every bit as much as the people that were mocking.

Is it just a myth that there were people who lead decadent

lives in the South?

Well, Picabia shows you it was not a myth.

He leads a wild life, he truly leads a decadent exciting life living

in the chateau he builds in Mougins with three different women at once.

The wife, a girlfriend, the next girlfriend.

I did know Olga Picabia in her very old age and she said to me,

"No, we really did all live together in that house."

One thing Picabia took very seriously though, was the motor car,

and, in this respect, he was part of a trend on the Riviera

which he might otherwise have mocked.

"It came to me in a flash," He said,

"that the genius of the modern world is machinery,

"and that, through machinery,

"art ought to find its most vivid expression."

In the 1920s, a motor car was becoming as important to an artist

as his easel on this coast.

Any town with a railway station had quickly become a hot spot

for development and in order to discover the elusive beauty spots,

it was essential to head away from the main highways.

This restless life was recorded by a talented amateur photographer

called Jacques-Henri Lartigue,

who took this evocative photograph, in 1927 when he was 33.

It is simply titled 'Mediterranean'.

The South really gives him that kind of outdoor life

that he's so particularly attracted to

because he knows he can make art out of it, maybe something

about freezing motion is what's most exciting to him and he talks about

the sense of wanting to grab life, to keep life from escaping from him.

That's one reason you make art. I mean, it's Proustian, right?

You somehow want to make the transitory permanent.

I think that's true for Lartigue and I think nowhere did life feel more

fleeting than at a place devoted to pleasure like the Cote d'Azur.

He wrote in his diary,

"Having a motor car in this landscape is magical.

"The drive to Cannes along the narrow coastal road is wonderful.

"A motionless sea falling asleep in the sunset

"with its eyes still open."

Not everyone was so in love with the automobile though.

The painter Fernand Leger wrote to his girlfriend

from his hotel room in Nice,

"For 20 kilometres it's nothing but a racetrack,

"where cars drive past double file in both directions."

He compares this 'modern thunder' to the Battle of Verdun.

The headlong pace of development was now challenging the Riviera's

primary attraction to artists.

Fitzgerald put it simply.

"The lush midsummer moment, outside of time, was already over."

But now the dissatisfaction had a political edge.

In 1929, a radical 24-year-old director called Jean Vigo,

spent the summer filming the wealthy inhabitants of Nice,

and the underclass who supported their lifestyle.

The movie he made 'A Propos de Nice' was a damning portrait.

"By showing certain basic aspects of a city," He said,

"a way of life is put on trial."

By the time Vigo's movie was finished the New York stock market

had crashed in October 1929, initiating a worldwide depression

that wiped out much of the wealth of the revellers Vigo's film portrayed.

But even in the face of the economic catastrophe,

Nice did its best to carry on business as usual.

With the Wall Street crash,

the economic and political situation is extremely severe in Paris.

The small galleries for modern art really suffer and many of them close

and modern artists are really fighting to survive.

The south of France is still a bit of a refuge from all of that,

and it very much maintains its status as a place of a sun-kissed lifestyle,

of pleasure, even whilst of course, in the 1930s throughout Europe,

the political situation is worsening.

Vigo's view of Nice was carefully calculated.

He felt he was showing,

"The last gasps of a society so lost in escapism that it was sickening

"and made you feel sympathetic to a revolutionary solution."

The beaches of the Riviera might not seem like the obvious place

for a revolution, but the political upheavals in France in the 1930s

did play a major role in democratising access to this coast.

The 1936 general election was won by a new left wing alliance

known as Le Front Populaire,

an event that would bring about profound change on the Cote d'Azur.

Despite the speed with which it was possible to reach the Riviera coast

these beaches were still largely the preserve

of the upper reaches of society.

In the summer of 1936, the Socialist government passed legislation

giving every worker the right to two weeks holiday each year.

The result was transforming.

For tens of thousands of French families,

this was their first experience of the seaside.

The age of mass tourism had arrived.

You have the first popular reforms,

the 40-hour week, paid holidays for the first time,

and you have this brief moment

of exhilaration where workers are having picnics.

Some workers are going on these organised trips,

by their trades unions, to the South of France,

discovering the South of France for the very first time,

discovering that wonderful Mediterranean light

and cooking and fish for the first time,

and the incredible lyricism of that moment of hope.

500,000 discounted rail tickets to the Riviera

were made available through trades unions.

They became known as 'The Red Trains'

in a dig at the upper crust 'Train Bleu'.

Picasso came to the Cote d'Azur every year during the 1930s,

and his work became more politically charged as the decade progressed.

He may have been working on the Riviera, but ultimately it would be

events in Spain that brought politics into focus in his work.

'Guernica', his passionate and tortured response to

the bombing of a Basque village, painted entirely in sombre

tones of grey, nailed his colours very firmly to the mast.

But in the months between the defeat of the Spanish Republican government

he supported and the outbreak of the Second World War,

Picasso painted a much more intensely colourful picture,

set, not in the country of his birth, but in his adopted home,

the Cote d'Azur.

"It is not sufficient to know an artist's works.

"It is also necessary to know when he did them, how,

"and under what circumstances," Picasso told a friend.

But even following his advice

may not fully explain 'Night Fishing in Antibes'.

It's a kind of happy painting,

if you wish because it's a kind of tribute to this place.

I think he really liked Antibes so we are facing the kind of landscape.

You have the sea, you have the city of Antibes,

and in the sea not far from the coast you have a little boat

like the one we're in now.

And in this boat, two guys fishing. Two fishermen.

One is looking at the sea, trying to see if fish are coming, you know,

and the other one is having a big trident.

They use electric light by night to make the fish come in the light.

It's not a very, how you say, legal way of fishing

but in that time maybe it was.

Anyway, so the two women on the wall on the right side of the painting,

one is with a bicycle and licking an ice cream.

This is Dora Maar, mistress of Picasso.

Dare I ask, what does it mean?

This painting is about maybe troubled times in a way

because it's just before the war

and you have the struggle of life.

The men are fishing, you know.

It's a kind of hunt in a way.

You have all these incredible colours in the paining.

With his mixing of blue, violet, green for the sea

and these kind of purple towers, it's a Cubist work.

-If you see the fishermen, their heads are quite...

-Distorted?

..distorted but it's also a very figurative work in a way

because you can see that ladies, fishermen, boats, the city,

everything is quite obvious,

so this is a mixing of many influences in Picasso's work.

'There's something else going on in this painting.

'There's a real darkness that goes beyond the fact

'it's a night time scene.'

You see that partly in the light that the fishermen are holding up.

It's an acetylene lamp to daze the fish

but it looks almost like a shell exploding in the air.

Picasso has other things on his mind.

He's thinking partly about the Spanish Civil War,

which has just finished, with Franco the victor,

and Picasso detested Franco and the Spanish Fascists.

It also has to do with the darkening mood in Europe at the time.

Shortly after Picasso finishes the painting Germany invades Poland,

and the Second World War begins.

In September, Picasso returned to Paris

and the Nazis were not far behind him.

The Riviera was initially in the southern Free Zone, run by

the French themselves, and became, once more, a place of refuge.

Those fleeing the round ups in the north included French Jews,

but also many modern painters, who the Nazis regarded as degenerate.

The area became a holding zone for those hoping to escape to America,

like Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Fernand Leger.

Matisse moved to a house in the hills at Vance,

fearing that Nice would be bombed.

In Paris, Picasso was kept under surveillance.

The Riviera was later occupied by the Italians,

then by the Nazis themselves.

Nice's battered population was near to starvation

when the city was finally liberated in 1944.

In a final act of vandalism,

the Nazis dismantled the Grand Jetee Pavilion for its metal content,

depriving the city of one of its most recognisable landmarks.

When the war ended,

both Matisse and Picasso were lauded as heroes by the French Republic.

Fernand Leger and Marc Chagall returned from exile

and a fantastic mood of optimism seemed to grip the entire country,

and its artists.

Picasso returned to the coast in 1946 and during this visit

he was offered the use of the attic rooms of the Grimaldi Castle

here in Antibes.

He donated his entire output from that summer to the town,

and shortly afterwards this building became the first national museum

in France dedicated to the work of a living artist.

Whilst here he painted this picture, 'Joie de Vivre',

expressing something of the mood of the age,

but also a renewed enjoyment of the mythological playground

that the Mediterranean coast represented to him.

This is a period of great happiness in his life.

He goes off to the South of France with his beautiful new mistress,

Francois Gilot, who's so much younger than he is.

I think, Picasso's personal happiness, is massively reflected

in 'Joie de Vivre'.

It's got a wonderful chalky palette of white mixed up with pale blues,

and, all those Mediterranean themes like pan pipes and sea

and naughty little frisking centaurs,

rediscovering Mediterranean themes, actually on the Mediterranean.

And I think Francois Gilot herself, not only as a beautiful woman

but also as a model for him, expresses that joie de vivre.

She's superbly fertile. She's giving him two beautiful new children.

Of course Picasso himself is participating in a baby boom

which is happening all over France at the time.

As in Britain, the political mood of the country had swung

decisively to the left and the French Communists polled

the most votes in the first post war elections.

Picasso had joined the party in 1944.

"He has never read a line of Karl Marx", said a friend.

"His Communism is sentimental".

That same summer of 1946,

he paid a visit to a small town outside Cannes.

Vallauris was a Communist stronghold of artisan ceramicists

that had now fallen on hard times.

Picasso's politics were revealing a side to the Riviera that was

largely ignored by the wider world.

A hinterland of old craft industries and working class towns that

were a million miles from the holiday beaches.

Picasso wandered into the Madoura pottery workshop in July 1946

and his reaction to the work that he saw going on was,

'Can I have a go at this?'

The ceramic work Picasso made in Vallauris adapted the plates

and jugs that were already being produced in the workshops and, using

these raw materials, he pulled, cut and tore the clay into new forms.

What Picasso really liked in ceramics was the fact that you're never sure

the way it will go out from the oven,

you know, because there is a kind of alchemy.

You have something in mind and it's something else that happens

so Picasso was very excited about that.

Picasso had all the time he wanted to make these kind of

trials on the pottery.

Usually ceramic works were done for precise functions, plates,

you know for the food, but they are also sculpture, animals,

you see, this condor, the big bird there,

and this incredible bull, so these are really disconnected to

any function, they are works of art, they are sculpture.

Ceramic sculpture.

Picasso's work here put Vallauris back on the map,

and he single-handedly brought about a revival in the fortunes

of the town, and just to show he was serious about his ceramics,

he moved here to live in 1948.

In the market square, the sculpture he gave the town,

'Homme et Mouton' has pride of place.

Ivan Oreggia worked alongside Picasso in the Madoura workshops

for 20 years.

Picasso may have been trying to produce art to interest the masses,

but the masses were becoming more interested in his life.

Artists appeared alongside movie stars in the magazines

and newsreels and the celebrity circus liked it best of all

if you lived this life on the Riviera.

# The more I see you

# The more I want you. #

This is the Villa Santo Sospir, where Jean Cocteau stayed during

the 1950s, and it still speaks very eloquently of his life and his art,

including some of the ceramic works he produced in Vallauris.

The location, on the tip of Cap Ferrat, couldn't be better,

with a view of Nice across the unreal blue of the Baie des Anges.

By the 1950s it seemed every other person you met on the Riviera

was an artist, and most of them were famous.

Of the many watering holes along this coast where you could expect to

spot a member of this newly exotic species,

the one with the greatest claim to an authentic artistic heritage

is in the village of St Paul de Vance,

the Colombe d'Or restaurant.

Beginning in the 1930s, the owner, Paul Roux,

amassed one of the great collections of modern art here, picking up works

for a song from impecunious artists in exchange for a meal.

Tony Penrose was brought here as a youngster with his parents,

the artist Roland Penrose, and photographer Lee Miller.

The Riviera had this incredibly free atmosphere,

and I think what epitomises that is this photograph by Lee Miller.

She was my mum, and it captures absolutely the freedom,

the friendship, the love that all these people had between each other.

And this is my dad, that's Roland Penrose.

That's what an uptight Englishman looks like.

And I think, you know, that actually, the expression on his face sums up,

what it was like to come here in those days.

I first arrived down here in the early '50s

when we were visiting Picasso.

We drove overland from England, and it was a wonderful adventure.

So when you first met Picasso you were a small boy

so I assume you had no idea who he was,

other than that's just Pablo who doesn't speak English?

It sounds really pretentious,

but it didn't occur to me that there was anything unusual about this.

And it was amazing just hanging round.

He had this studio in an old scent factory and it was full of junk.

That lovely, warm, dusty smell of the studio.

The smell of plaster and all kinds of things that he was using.

And he had this wonderful magical ability to make junk into things

and she was called the lady with the key.

How do you feel about what has happened to the Riviera

since the 1950s?

I think it would be unrecognisable to my parents and Picasso

and the other guys that used to hang out there because,

it's the international impact of it, you know.

The beautiful Medieval towns like here, St Paul de Vance,

you walk around and there's bus tour after bus tour after bus tour

of people coming from all over the world.

Can't blame them for doing that

but it's altered the whole character of the place.

The artistic credentials that established the Riviera

on the bus tour itinerary have been inherited by a legion of followers

hoping that some of the magic will rub off on their own endeavours.

There is something about the heritage modernism

on sale in these shops that can make St Paul feel a bit like

an artistic Disneyland,

but this still doesn't detract from the extraordinary contribution

this coast has made to the story of modern art.

It's the scale of the French Riviera.

It's the number of years, decades and decades of art making

on the Cote d'Azur.

It's the variety of artists from a huge number of places

that makes this unique in terms of the history of art making.

Never has there been and it may well be,

never will there be again a resort, a pure pleasure zone,

that contributes quite this degree and quite this quantity

of remarkable artistic innovation as the Cote d'Azur has done.

The artistic treasure trove on the Cote d'Azur makes a holiday here

a cut above any other destination on earth,

and every tourist a part of a great artistic adventure.

And the adventure continues.

This coast still inspires,

and it also has a legacy unequalled anywhere else.

The museums and galleries of the Cote d'Azur

rank alongside the very best in Paris, London and New York

for the sheer range and quality of the art on display.

Is it paradise?

Perhaps not.

But it certainly looks like it when it poses for a picture.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd