URBAN GUIDE

The Spanish master's "obstinately Mediterranean" oeuvre is celebrated in four major museums on the Côte d’Azur, where the artist left an indelible mark.

Picasso still? Indeed yes, 45 years after his death the 20th century's greatest artist continues to draw record-breaking crowds to dedicated exhibitions around the world, send auction houses into a spin and incite vocations. Picasso of a thousand styles, Picasso of thousands of works – the figure 25,000 is bandied about! –, a seemingly unending source of art. As Laurent le Bon, director of the Musée National Picasso-Paris opined in spring 2017 on the eve of the "Picasso Méditerranée"* cycle that he instigated: "Today it is still possible to see Picasso in a new light, with contemporary angles on his art. Diversity of approach does not exhaust his oeuvre, which is doubtless what hallmarks his genius." The ambition of this wide-ranging project – more than 70 institutions participating, in France, Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Italy, Malta, Morocco and Turkey – is to "strengthen the ties between all the shores" that have not always been at peace. Among the plethora of exhibitions, the French Riviera's have a special poignancy, for in the course of his long life, Picasso stayed, lived or exhibited in Mougins, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Vallauris, Juan-les-Pins, Saint-Raphaël, Saint-Tropez, plus Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.

Nice
Duel in the sun
Admiration, emulation, confrontation. The exigent dialogue between Matisse (born 1869) and Picasso (born 1881), who both began painting around the same time (in the 1890s), lasted for nigh-on 50 years. It was in and around Nice that "the two men met regularly from the 1940s on, both finding a source of creativity in this Mediterranean land," explains Claudine Grammont, director of Nice's Henri Matisse Museum. In association with the Musée National Picasso-Paris, she has chosen as her angle how the painter relates to his model, "one of the main topics of the two artists' discussions on depicting the human body and the creative act". The 40-odd exhibits on loan from Paris include two absolute masterpieces: Picasso's Self-portrait with Palette and Matisse's The Dream from the Centre Pompidou collection.
Jusqu’au 29 septembre
Musée Matisse,Nice
164 avenue des Arènes de Cimiez, « Picasso, les Années Vallauris »

Vallauris
The sculptural aspect
Up in the Mauruches hills above Antibes sits La Galloise, one of Picasso's lesser known homes yet this "small and rather uncomfortable" house where the painter and Françoise Gilot lived from summer 1948 to September 1953 marks a crucial stage in his personal and artistic life. An active member of France's Communist Party, Picasso was immediately taken by this little working-class town barely recovered from the war, praising its inhabitants' simplicity and the knowhow of its long-idle potters. Picasso threw himself into new technical and iconographic experimentations in ceramics (at the Madoura studio) and sculpture, notably using salvaged materials and repurposed everyday objects.
Jusqu’au 22 octobre
La Guerre et la Paix ; Musée Magnelli et Madoura, lieu d’Art, d’Histoire et de Création,
Musée national Pablo Picasso,à Vallauris

Vence
DIY genius
Taking over where Vallauris leaves off, Vence's museum pays tribute to Picasso the sculptor who, struggling with a scarcity of raw materials during and after the war, became a pioneer of artistic recycling. In a "big contemporary studio" a series of sculptures (assemblages, cut sheet metal) that the "DIY genius" made mainly in Cannes confront works by a dozen living artists* for whom "fortunate accident, arranged chance, carpentry verve, creative obstinacy" form the hub of their work.
* Louis Cane, Anne Deguelle, Max Charvolen, Gérald Thupinier, Miquel Barcelo, Vincent Corpet, Fabrice Hyber, etc.
« Picasso et les Contemporains : Éloge de la fabrique », Jusqu’au 28 octobre
Musée de Vence / Fondation Emile-Hugues,
2 place du Frêne, Vence

Mouans-Sartoux
"something else to see"
On the borderline of abstraction, Picasso's Cubist work with its new way of seeing reality finds an obvious echo in the pioneers of abstraction in the Donation Albers-Honegger collections. The EAC demonstrates this in a novel face-to-face occupying all the rooms in the green building designed by Zurich architects Gigon and Guyer. The tutelary figure of the Spanish master incites attraction and rejection in equal measure, as when Gottfried Honegger, then just 20 years old, observing Picasso in the Lacourière engraving studio, cried: "When I saw him working, I thought him a giant!"
Du 8 juillet au 7 octobre
Espace de l’art concret, Mouans-Sartoux

Par Mireille Sartore

* Jusqu’en 2019 - www.picasso-mediterranee.org