More Sun, More Colour! The allure of the Côte d’Azur

Christina Jansen visited the Côte d’Azur for a few glorious days last week, following in the footsteps of The Scottish Colourists and Lachlan Goudie’s favourite hang outs!

The Côte d’Azur’s landscape, colour and light has been a great attraction for artists for centuries, particularly in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Art is literally everywhere and underlines how important the French School is and its continuing influence. Picasso, Stael, Matisse, Chagall, Renoir or Cocteau… not to mention the architects, designers and writers.

Here is a taster of more sun, more colour and a few images and films the region.

E-1027 is a modernist villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France. It was designed and built from 1926-29 by the Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray and the French/Romanian Architect Jean Badovici. This is considered to be Gray’s first major work, making indistinct the border between architecture and decoration, and highly personalized to be in accord with the lifestyle of its intended occupants. 

Le Cabanon was the culmination of Le Corbusier’s work on rational and functional living space reduced to a minimum. It was designed on the dimensions of the Modulor.

Some of the biggest names in 20th-century European sculpture, including Georges Braque, Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti, came together to help create La Fondation Maeght, which has become France’s most important art foundation and is among the world’s leading cultural institutions. La Fondation was established by Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, a visionary couple who were publishers and art dealers, and who represented and were friends with some of the most important artists of the era, including Braque, Miró and Giacometti, as well as Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, and many others. 

The Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Chapel of the Rosary), often referred to as the Matisse Chapel or the Vence Chapel, is a small Catholic chapel located in the town of Vence on the French Riviera. It was dedicated to the Dominican Order.[1] The church was built and decorated between 1947 and 1951 under a plan devised by the artist Henri Matisse.

The history of Belles Rives begins with a love affair: the United States’ Lost Generation, made up of disenchanted youngsters and artists who had been devastated by the First World War, fell in love with the south of France and summers on the Côte d’Azur, a destination which had been discovered by the English aristocracy a few decades earlier.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a leading figure in the American literary movement between the two World Wars, and his wife Zelda were won over by the Cap d’Antibes in 1925, while staying in a villa belonging to their friends Gerald and Sara Murphy.

The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, also called Villa Île-de-France, is a French seaside villa located at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. Designed by the French architect Aaron Messiah, it was built between 1907 and 1912 by Baroness Béatrice de Rothschild (1864–1934).