Henri Matisse described the light there as “soft and tender, in spite of its brilliance,” and credited it for lightening his palette. Paul Signac wrote to his mother about “the golden banks of the gulf, the blue waves coming to rest on a little beach, my beach, below,” and declared, “I have enough here to work on for the rest of my life. It’s absolute joy that I’ve just discovered.”
And so the 80-mile stretch of coastline along the French Riviera inspired numerous 20th-century European artists, who settled there and left behind their works in museums and chapels throughout the region. A few years ago, Dr. Barbara Freed, CW’63, Gr’78, head of the modern-languages department at Carnegie Mellon University, decided it was time that someone write about this uniquely fruitful convergence of place and talent. Using a grant from the Florence J. Gould Foundation, she has written, with Alan Halpern, C’47, Artists and Their Museums on the Riviera (Harry Abrams).
“I guess I unconsciously was working towards this for a long time,” says Freed, who was the former vice dean for language instruction at Penn and coordinated summer French programs in La Napoule. It all began when her family moved to the medieval village of Vence — then the home of Marc Chagall — in 1960. Her father, an artist, had studied in Paris as a young man and decided he wanted to return to France to paint. They were quickly integrated into the local art community during the year that Freed lived there. “It immediately became part of my soul,” she says. “It was not a conscious inspiration, but it was very much with me.”
She returned to the United States, and with a bachelor’s degree in French from Penn, began a career as a French teacher. Freed continued her studies, focusing on the acquisition of French language and culture, and joined the faculty at Penn. She returned to the Riviera with every excuse she could create, even getting married in Cháteau de La Napoule (to Sheldon Tabb, W’45, WG ’48). Five years ago, at a study-abroad meeting, she was astounded to discover that few American faculty knew about the cultural offerings in the area. So she put together an illustrated guidebook filled with information on the museums and chapels along the Riviera, as well as anecdotes about the artists themselves.
“These museums don’t necessarily hold the largest number of greatest works of these artists,” Freed says. “But I think what is so inherently interesting about these museums is that one can see the artwork in the context in which it was created.” Also unique, she says, “is the juxtaposition of the artwork and the structures. The buildings where their art is displayed are the homes of ancient aristocracy, old palaces, chapels.” And the museums are all autobiographical. “They tell the story of a time and place in the artists’ lives. The Matisse museum really cuts across his entire career, from the things he did when he was young to the monumental cutouts he did in his last years.”
One of her favorite stories is about the origins of the Picasso Museum in Antibes, a centuries-old cháteau that had once belonged to the Grimaldi family and served many uses before being acquired by the city. “Picasso, in his early twenties, discovered it quite by chance when he followed a group of children running along the beach. They crawled through a hole and he followed them, and came into this crumbling palace by the sea,” Freed says. Subsequently he was offered the chance to use the third floor of the castle for his studio.
Because he feared the cháteau’s humidity would destroy anything he created with conventional materials, Picasso worked with hardier fiberboard and boat paints, creating a series of works in colors inspired by the sea, the sun, and the local vegetation. Many of the museum’s works represent his daily life when he was living there, including paintings of his young lover, Francoise Gilot, pregnant and dancing; local sailors; and cafe owners.
Other art treasures that Freed writes about have been less publicized. In Saint-Paul-de-Vence, she notes, “There’s this tiny little public school that has a Chagall mosaic right in front of it. It’s a charming little thing to see. I spent countless periods of time in the area, and it was only when I began working on this book that somebody happened to mention that ‘Chagall did our school.'”