Visiting France

On the northern outskirts of Nice, this museum sat tucked between surrounding museums, roman bathhouse ruins, and saturated green mountains. To get to this museum right when it opened, I forfeited the bus and walked 50 minutes uphill in sticky, humid, heavy heat. It was worth it as I was able to wander around in the museum practically alone and take notes. I visited when they were exhibiting Hockney-Matisse. Un paradis retrouvé (a found/ re-found paradise). 

Before visiting this museum I knew of Hockney and Matisse, but knew little about them. I could recognize a Matisse piece, but I could only recognize Hockney by one of his famous pool paintings. I didn't really understand why they had an exhibit with Matisse and Hockney. Matisse is an impressionist and Hockney had more of a pop art style. However, by the end of the exhibit, I could see more connections between these artists.

This exhibit discussed motivation, subject, and influence.

As shown by the two images above, Matisse and Hockney want to capture some amount of 'presentness' in their work. 

When Matisse was painting in the early 1900s, he used landscape and window paintings to cope with the wars of the time. Death was present: people wouldn't come home and others would be in grief. By painting nature, he was able to find a sense of peace and calm that was difficult to have during the time.  

Comparatively, Hockney paints to give breath to the "beautiful, thrilling and mysterious" nature of various scenes. By painting the essence of these scenes, he encourages the viewer to become excited and interested in the scene before them. 

Throughout the museum, there were a variety of quotes posted to the walls surrounding the painting. While I was walking around, I wrote the ones I enjoyed down:

L'artiste qui se représente rencontre son image et... interroge la nature de l'acte perceptif (the artist who represents himself meets his image and... questions the nature of the perceptual act)

On peut jouer avec le style dans une peinture pour faire un 'collage' sans avoir à utiliser differents materieux. . . c'était une chose intéressante à exploiter, le style comme sujet (one can play with the style in a painting to make a 'collage' without having to use different materials. . . it is an interesting thing to exploit, the style as a subject)

Le spectateur s'y deplace m'entatement sans plus etre conditionne par la perspective (The spectator moves there slowly without being conditioned by the perspective.)

Closeness is what makes perspective difficult -Hockney

A Russian painter, Marc Chagall is known for lithography and his many illustrations for a variety of children's books. This museum presented a lot of this work, but also included a gallery of large oil paintings of biblical scenes. There was a quote on a wall from someone who noted Chagall "materializes [the] struggle between light and darkness" in his work, demonstrating "human duality."

Considering how long it takes to produce and lithography print, I was impressed with how many pictures he created. I thought it was also interesting to see he had a large range in his work--both in material and composition--even if he is known mainly for his prints.