Nice

Museums to present a major summer exhibit

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 22, 1997

Page: M1

Section: Travel

And the Matisse Museum is one of 28 exhibition spaces on the French Riviera participating in a landmark collaboration this summer, ``The Cote d'Azur and Modernity, 1918-1958,'' which examines the role of the south of France in modern art. This paradise was a protagonist in that drama, of course. Matisse and Picasso both spent decades here. There are museums in the region devoted to their work, and to that of Renoir, Leger, Chagall, Dufy, Cocteau, and other luminaries identified with this sun-splashed landscape.

Most of those museums are involved in the ``Modernity'' project, which is the brainchild of Girard, who lives in the most enviable digs in Nice -- the top floor of the Matisse Museum, a space filled both with sun and with the 1930s and '40s French ceramics in Girard's personal collection. Picasso and Matisse, he notes, spent part of their time on the Cote d'Azur making ceramics -- chunky, exuberantly painted clay pieces that are the antithesis of the preciousness of Sevres. Girard's balcony offers a view of what he dubs ``the leisure center'' -- the ruins of the Roman baths that once occupied the site, baths whose purpose was pleasure, the watchword of the Cote d'Azur.

Worldwide, museums tend to compete more than collaborate. The ``Modernity'' project is a gratifying example of the opposite tendency. It's also a case of picking up on the obvious. ``All the most important artists, moviemakers, and writers after the first World War came here,'' says Girard, exaggerating only slightly. ``But the museums have never paid attention to the phenomenon. My idea was not only to put together Leger, Matisse, Chagall, and Picasso, but also architecture, gardens, and movies.''

The individual shows are arranged by theme rather than by artist. The Matisse Museum, for instance, mounts one on ``Mediterranean Myth,'' centered on subjects like minotaurs, fauns, Andromeda, Daphnis, and Chloe. Nice's Palais Massena-Musee d'Art and the Palais Lascarais, both as interesting for their ornate buildings as for their contents, will collaborate on a show documenting the architecture of the Cote d'Azur. The Leger Museum in Boit and the Espace de l'Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, an ancient stone castle where contemporary art is shown, stage a joint exhibition about the Group of Grasse, artists including Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Tauber-Arp.

For an art lover, the ``Modernity'' project represents a chance to gorge on some of our century's greatest work, in the Arcadian setting where it was created. Imagine yourself zooming along winding Riviera roads in a convertible, feeling F. Scott Fitzgerald-ish, stopping at one choice little gem of a museum after another. ``Little'' is the operative word. No vast encyclopedic museums to tax your attention span here. And when your appetite for art has been sated, there are Nice's shops to explore. The best of these are also small, specializing in the region's wines or olive oils or sherbets flavored with local herbs -- lavender, thyme, rosemary. Stop to sample the city's signature snack -- socca, pancakes made of chick pea flour. Stop, too, to marvel at churches that are a riot of Baroque excess, their architectural details -- cornices, crown moldings -- mostly trompe l'oeil, painted-on decorations that are completely convincing, guaranteed to make you smile when you make the discovery. Trompe l'oeil windows are a Nice specialty -- not to keep out the strong sun, but because residents used to be taxed according to the number of windows in their homes.

Nice's palaces and chateaux built for European royalty and aristocrats have been cleverly converted for various uses. The city's Museum of Fine Arts started as the late-19th-century private palace of the Ukrainian Princess Kotschubey. Built in the Genoese Mannerist style, its grand rooms are home to European painting collections including the world's largest of the work of Jules Cheret, a pioneer of modern poster art famed for frothy views of the Folies Bergere. The museum's contribution to the ``Modernity'' project is a show centered on Raoul Dufy, a quintessential Rivera painter who celebrated the life of yachts, racing, and fashion.

The Villa Arson in Nice began as a count's 18th-century home, and now has become an art center with gallery, school, and artists' colony, all centered around an architectural complex of terraces with cobble-studded walls. There is art indoors and out, including a skeletal outdoor gazebo by the Iranian/American master of function-with-poetry, Siah Armajani.

The Chateau des Ollieres in Nice is yet another made-over manse, this one converted into a sumptuous nine-room hotel tucked into the hills. The 19th-century retreat of the Russian Prince Lobanov-Rostowsky, it's a Belle Epoque fantasy, full of wedding cake plasterwork, chandeliers of pastel porcelain or Venetian glass, walls covered with watered silk, a garden with specimen trees gathered from all over the world, and metal dragons holding up the awning at the main entrance. Staying here is a chance to participate in a carefree Cote d'Azur life that may have existed only in books; it's pleasant, for a few days at least, to pretend that it was real.

Yves Klein loved blue. He's famous for his monochromatic canvases and his sculptures that look like blue through-and-through, blue made 3-D. Born in Nice in 1928, he surely must have borrowed the signature color he called ``International Klein Blue'' from the brilliantly colored sky and sea he grew up with. He wanted viewers to soak up that blue like so many sponges, to wallow in it. He became an international sensation for art-pranks like dragging a nude woman, whose body was coated in blue pigment, across a canvas on the floor.

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in his hometown retains a fine selection of Klein's work, including the ``Portrait-relief of Martial Rayesse, Arman and Claude Pascal,'' three torsos in pure blue set against a gold leaf ground, a color combination as opulent as a Byzantine mosaic. It's impossible for an American to ponder this piece and not think of the popular performance artists, Blue Man Group.

Arman, another native son of Nice, was hitchhiking across Europe with Klein when he decided to be known by his first name alone, which is Armand. After a catalog mistakenly dropped the ``d,'' he was mellow enough to go with the five-letter version of his name. He's famous for smashed objects and accumulations of lots of the same thing, and while that might sound silly, the results can be lovely, as in ``The Birds,'' a frieze made entirely of pliers whose open jaws look like vultures' beaks. Arman, like Klein, is well-represented in the Nice museum: There's even a model of his house, which is in nearby Vence and which is built underground, its only ground-level manifestation three pillowy white forms popping through the earth.

At a time when the McDonaldization of art museums has made so many of them into clones of each other, it's great to see a city take pride in its own artists. Because Nice is a true Eden, the artists identified with it are not only natives but those lured here by an ambience that's so soothing.

One so lured was Marc Chagall, who, in 1966, donated 17 large paintings on biblical themes to start the National Museum of the Biblical Message/Marc Chagall, which today boasts the largest Chagall collection anywhere.

The Chagall museum nestles among cypress and olive trees in the Nice hills, a low and spacious modern building on a zigzag plan, with tall, narrow windows set in stone. Chagall, who lived on the Cote d'Azur for more than 30 years, until his death in 1985, oversaw the creation of the museum, which opened in 1973 and is run by the French government. A music lover, Chagall insisted on the inclusion of a concert hall, for which he designed a trio of dazzling stained-glass windows on the theme of the creation of the world; they bathe the room in deep blues. The museum demonstrates how effective and consistent Chagall was in various media -- painting, prints, stained glass, mosaic, and even marble, where he had no opportunity to use the vivid color that is his signature.

The community of man is one of the museum's great subjects; Chagall tended to group, even to glue, people together, their physical proximity a metaphor for spiritual closeness. His grand biblical paintings are arranged not according to chronology but chromatic harmony. You see 12 of them at once in the monumental great hall; they're a jolt of color that buoys up the floating, weightless figures. Biblical sturm und drang is tempered by luminous color -- and by Chagall's luminous spirit. His ``Adam and Eve'' don't even look gloomy when they're being chased out of Paradise.

Henri Matisse didn't think Nice was paradise at first. It rained for 10 days straight after his arrival, as his first painting made here, the 1919-'20 ``Storm in Nice,'' attests. Rainy, wind-lashed, gray-blue, it records what he saw from his hotel room. Except for the palm trees, it could be northern Scotland.

The day he was packing to leave, he opened his shutters to a morning of Riviera sun. He spent the rest of his life here, and he's buried on the grounds of a Nice monastery -- with a great view.

While the Matisse Museum in Nice lacks major masterpieces -- most were snapped up by rich collectors decades ago -- it does offer a sense of what mattered to the master. He never lived here. He resided in a hotel a stone's throw away. But this lovely villa in the midst of an olive grove, next to a Franciscan Church where you put two French francs in a box to light up each painting, was dear to him. Five years ago, a new underground entrance was built for it, part of the Louvre-glass-pyramid syndrome. As you descend to enter, the first work you encounter is one of Matisse's last, his 1952-'53 giant cut-out ``Flowers and Fruit,'' an exuberant burst of pattern.

Some of Matisse's actual props stand beside the paintings that represent them. The 1946 ``Fauteuil Rocaille'' is an example, the shell-shaped chair with dolphin heads on the arms standing beside the painting, offering a lesson in how Matisse saw. Instead of painting it head-on, he showed it from above, and at a sharp angle, a perspective that energizes it.

While living in Nice, Matisse created the work he called his masterpiece, his chapel in nearby Vence. The Matisse Museum displays the artist's designs for the vestments the priests wear for services there. They're bold and life-affirming, without a hint of Christianity's dour side. For a visitor from the Northeastern United States, from a city that still values an austere puritanism, this presentation of religion as the ultimate joy is even more warming than the Cote d'Azur sun.

The Chateau des Ollieres is at 39 Avenue des Baumettes 06000 Nice, France. Telephone 04 92 15-77-99; fax 04 92 15 77 98.

The journey from Boston to Nice is a two-flight process no matter what your route. To avoid New York, I flew Boston-London-Nice on British Airways. Americans traveling on to the Italian Riviera, as I did, could also fly back on a Genoa-London-Boston route, to fit in a visit to that art and architecture-filled Italian city where Van Dyck came to paint portraits of 17th-century aristocrats in their stately palazzi.

In the Italian Riviera town of Alassio, I stayed in the delightful little family-oriented Hotel Aida, which, as the name suggests, does indeed have some Egyptian touches: photographs of the pyramids and so on. The Aida, with 50 immaculate rooms with balconies, caters mostly to Europeans who come here year after year to enjoy the seaside setting, the ocher and yellow buildings with tile roofs, the shops specializing in Italian leather and knits, and the ancient chapel perched on rocks high above the town, whose winter population of 15,000 swells to several times that size in high season.

The Aida is run by Giovanni Galtieri, who is the life of this particular party, serving as maitre d', bartender, and entertainment committee chairman. The food is fine and plentiful; at mealtimes, Galtieri and his family bustle through the flower-filled dining room with carts of soup, pasta, and ice cream. A local musician wanders in at lunch to play Broadway and operatic tunes on the grand piano, and on that piano is a photograph of Galtieri with the legendary Italian ballerina Carla Fracci. Everyone in the place seems to know everyone else. Best of all, the Aida is a bargain: Even in high season, rates are well under $100 a day with all meals, and that includes taxes, service, and parking. The Aida's telephone is 39-182-644-085; the fax is 39-182-640-772.