In Southern France, nature inspired the masters

Galleries of the Gods

By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff and Rosemary Lappin, Globe Correspondent, 08/25/96

AINT PAUL DE VENCE, France -- There are so many attractions in this part of southern France: lush valleys and medieval towns, the scenic Mediterranean coast and jet-set haunts of the Cote D'Azur, extraordinary food and wine, relics of ancient civilizations, the relaxing rhythms of an enduring agrarian lifestyle.

Before this lovely patch of the planet became a playground for tourists and the wealthy, however, artists were drawn to its climate and the ethereal effect of sunlight on its stunning landscapes.

Some of the most famous painters and sculptors of the 19th and 20th centuries worked here -- among them Cezanne, van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse and Chagall -- and their lives and work are celebrated and memorialized all across the province.

If you visit Provence, experience all of its charms and features, but set aside time to absorb its effect on great artists and enjoy the priceless treasures they have left behind.

To celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, we spent a few days in Paris, staying at the tidy, three-star Hotel Odeon on the Left Bank, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, on a street once frequented by James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway. The area is tamer than in its bohemian heyday, but the outre spirit survives. On our second day, we were awakened by loud, mind-numbing techno-pop music on the street. We went out to find Paris' Gay Pride celebration, a spectacle that made its Boston counterpart look like a Mummers' parade.

From Paris, we headed south on the high-speed train to the ancient walled city of Avignon on the Rhone River. The city's principal feature is the Palais des Papes, the huge fortresslike palace of seven 14th-century popes.

The vast, imposing palace alone is worth the visit, and each summer draws thousands to its main courtyard, which is converted to an open-air theater for Avignon's famous drama festival. Through September, there is an added bonus: an exhibit of the works of Auguste Rodin, the prolific French sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The exhibit fills the palace's Grand Chapel with scores of bronzes, including small casts of Rodin masterpieces ``The Thinker'' and ``The Burghers of Calais.'' In an adjoining room, an intriguing exhibit of Fernand Michaud photographs features a nude model posing with dozens of Rodin sculptures as life imitates art, art imitates art and art competes with and complements art.

In our rental car, we sped south from Avignon (in France, everyone speeds; driving is an endless grand prix) along narrow roads lined by plane trees, with their distinctive mottled trunks, and the occasional spectacular field of sunflowers. Just outside the village of St. Remy de Provence, we stayed at Chateau de Roussan, charming in its dishabille.

St. Remy is a wonderful introduction to the allure of Provence. It has many features that appeal to tourists -- fine shops featuring Provencal fabrics and foods, good restaurants and cafes. But the pace and quality of life of the locals triumph. There is a hearty hum to the place, a robust languor.

It's a place to stop and smell the lavender, which we did.

St. Remy is also the site of the sanitarium where painter Vincent van Gogh was hospitalized after he sliced off his ear, following his attack on friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin, in nearby Arles. St. Remy is also a short drive from Glanum, the ruins of an ancient Roman village, and close to Les Baux, a medieval village atop one of the cragged Alpilles hills, amid miles of vineyards and olive groves.

In Arles, the old city on the Rhone, van Gogh is memorialized in a stele at the Public Gardens and at the Hospital Van Gogh, where he was treated several times. The Dutch painter created a large number of paintings and drawings during the last two years of his life, before madness overtook genius and he committed suicide in 1890.

The scenes that inspired him remain, including the eerie Les Alyscamps, a huge cemetery of marble and stone sarcophagi and funereal statuary dating to the fourth century.

Major attractions in Arles include its famous Roman architecture, especially the massive and well-preserved amphitheater (still used for bullfights and concerts -- one poster touted an upcoming performance by the rock bands Santana and Vermont's own Phish -- and featuring a magnificent view of the city and Rhone from its highest tower), the ruins of a theater from 30 BC, also still in use, and the outstanding Romanesque architecture of the Cathedral of St. Trophime and its cloister.

From St. Remy, we drove east to our next stop, Aix-en-Provence, a small cosmopolitan city. We stayed in the pricey but lovely Hotel les Augustins, a converted 12th-century convent that is now a four-star hotel just off the city's lively main boulevard, the Cours Mirabeau.

Aix is a university city with about 40,000 students, so the pace, lifestyle and fashion are funky. There are beautiful fountains everywhere, a great cafe society and many narrow side streets jammed with an exotic array of ethnic restaurants. The aroma is fabulous: Moroccan, Greek, Vietnamese, Indian, Turkish, Thai, Lebanese, Chinese, Tunisian.

This is also the city where Paul Cezanne grew up and to which he returned in the last years of his life. His studio or atelier, built on a hill overlooking the city, is open to the public and is kept as it was at the time of his death in 1906. There are sketches plus photographs of him with friends, painters Camille Pisarro and Claude Monet. And there are letters from a writer friend, Emile Zola.

Not far from his studio he could see Mount St. Victoire, the dominant topographical feature of the region and a frequent subject of Cezanne.

In town, seven Cezanne canvases are on display at the Granet Museum, which features a good collection of European paintings.

The Tapestry Museum, however, is unique to Aix. Located in the elegant old Archbishop's Palace, it features 19 enormous French tapestries from the 17th and 18th centuries. They are displayed in rooms with high ceilings, a chandelier, a gilded clock, inlaid marble, armoires and other period furniture and fashions.

With still-vivid color and rich detail, nine depict episodes from Cervante's ``Don Quixote,'' four are exotic scenes of Russian life, and the remainder, titled ``The Grotesque,'' arelively depictions of animals, dancers and musicians.

More tapestries are next door, in the altar apse of the 15th-century Cathedral of St. Sauveur with its magnificent hand-carved wooden doors.

North of Aix in Provence's interior is the spectacular Luberon region, with its chateaus, endless vineyards and quaint old hill towns. We stopped at Bonnieux, La Coste (under the castle ruins of the infamous Marquis de Sade) and Menerbes, a curiosity since British writer Peter Mayle made it his home and the subject of his 1989 best seller, ``A Year in Provence.''

From Aix, we headed east and meandered up the scenic Cote D'Azur, starting at St. Tropez. The sky and water are indeed azure, framing hills that roll down to the Mediterranean, often along promontories jutting to the sea.

We stayed at the three-star Le Grande Bastide, a converted country house in Saint Paul de Vence, a short drive from the old walled city on a hilltop above the coastal city of Nice. Saint-Paul, with its narrow, cobblestone streets and absence of cars, is charming yet commercialized.

Just outside its walls is one of the finest private modern art collections in the world -- and it's in the restaurant of a local inn. La Colombe D'Or's dining rooms are a wonder to behold. Artists on display here include Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Utrillo, Marc Chagall (who lived in Saint-Paul), Jacques Villon and Joan Miro. Some traded art for meals, inscribing their work with notes to the inn owners, the Rouxs.

This is a very expensive restaurant, but in summer, dinner is served outside, and you can view the artworks if you have drinks in the cozy lounge and slip into the dining rooms. Or wander the outdoors dining area to view the sculptures.

That is just a taste of the modern art treasures at Saint-Paul. Less than a mile outside the walled city is the Maeght Foundation, an architectural work of modern art itself, designed by the great Spanish architect Josep Lluis Sert.

The outer sculpture garden is breathtaking. Situated amid the bare spindly trunks of tall pines are works by Miro, Germaine Richier -- the featured artist of a summer exhibit -- and others, against the backdrop of a Pierre Tal-Coat mosaic wall that evokes primitive cave art.

The museum itself features a Chagall mosaic wall and one of his first large format canvases, ``La Vie''; an ``Atelier'' canvas, stained-glass window and fountain basin mosaic, all by Braque; and a bare courtyard of Alberto Giacometti sculptures.

Another Foundation jewel is the Miro Labyrinth, a wonder of conventional terraced stone masonry, accentuating totems, a ceramic mural and sculptures in enameled clay, concrete, marble and iron by the Spanish surrealist.

Within a short drive from Saint-Paul are four smaller museums dedicated to the work of individual masters who created and died in this area: Les Collettes, the Cagnes-sur-Mer estate of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the last years of his life; the Picasso Museum at the Chateau Grimaldi overlooking the Mediterranean in old Antibes; and the Matisse and Chagall museums, both in Nice.

In the final years of his life, Renoir, a founder of the Impressionists in the 1870s, suffered terrible arthritis. He moved south for the climate, building Les Collettes on a slope in Cagnes, outside Nice, in 1903.

Today, the stately nine-room house amid 140 olive trees (some reputed to be 1,000 years old) preserves some of his later work, his studio and working environment with original furnishings, family keepsakes, many photographs and even his wheelchair. There are moving photos of Renoir at his easel, his paintbrush bound to fingers splayed by arthritis, as well as 10 Renoir paintings from the period, though obviously not his greatest work, plus some samples of the sculpture he took up at Cagnes.

More significant in terms of their collections are the former homes of Picasso and Matisse.

The Picasso Museum, set magnificently in an ancient castle 200 feet above the sea, was the Spaniard's studio in 1946. Later, he settled nearby in the potters' town of Vallauris, where his epic masterpiece on wood, ``War and Peace,'' is on display in the chapel of a 12th-century castle that is now a museum.

Featured in Antibes is a large, diverse selection of his work, mostly from this postwar period, including ceramics, sculptures, sketches and major oil canvases with mythological themes like ``La Joie de Vivre'' and ``Ulysses and the Sirens.''

The museum also features a stunning sculpture garden featuring several Miros and Richiers and a fine collection of paintings by Braque, Matisse, Fernand Leger and Pierre Bonnard.

The Matisse Museum, in the elegant Cimiez district, is a splendid architectural adaptation of his home, located next to a park and a Roman arena that is still in use.

This is less a showcase for Matisse masterpieces than a sampler of his mastery of brilliant color in an astonishing range of media. There are fine paintings -- ``Still Life With Pomegranates,'' ``Odalisque With a Red Box,'' ``Window in Tahiti'' and ``Blue Nude IV'' among them -- but the overarching theme is Matisse's versatility.

There are his ceramic tiles and vases, bronze sculpture, stained glass, decoupage cutouts, gouache watercolors, excerpts from his book, ``Jazz,'' a tapestry and studies for one of his masterpieces, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

Also featured are works by Andre Derain, Georges Roualt, Maurice de Vlaminck and Bonnard.

In the same neighborhood as the Matisse Museum is the small but spectacular National Museum of the Biblical Message of Chagall, another master of color in various media.

The centerpiece is a collection of 12 large canvases with Chagall's interpretation of Old Testament stories in visionary, dreamlike composition. The colors and effect are stunning.

But there are other treasures here as well: five versions of the biblical ``Song of Songs'' in oil on paper glued to canvas; a three-window stained glass of vivid blues telling the story of ``The Creation''; a huge tapestry and a wall mosaic.

There is much more than art to see on the Cote D'Azur -- we took a one-day trip to Monaco and the architecturally exquisite Grand Casino of Monte Carlo (designed by Charles Garnier of Paris Opera House fame). So we ran out of time on our museum barnstorming tour, missing a few artistic shrines we had hoped to visit. No regrets. We'll find time on the next trip.