Behind the western end of the Promenade des Anglais rises a hill on what once must have been the very edge of Nice. The roads twist through the older villas and newer apartments away from the flatter area of the centre of town. Just before the impassable barrier that is the railway and its associated void rapide stands a noble building with a pleasant garden, home of the Musée des Beaux Arts of Nice.
This kind of state run museum used to be found everywhere, but such are the changes of style in the last ten or fifteen years they are now in a minority, tainted with anachronism. Superannuated staff in ill-fitting black uniforms finish their conversations before attending to the public. They gather around the front desk seeking company. The small talk is made up of complaints and directed at footballers and television programmes. Ten yards away, under lock and key behind glass doors the few items that the museum has on sale would require a much more determined purchaser than they have seen today.
The rooms downstairs are not full of masterpieces but they do attract attention. There is an unusual sculpture of a veiled head, somehow brilliantly achieved in marble; an extraordinary feat made more extraordinary by the fact that the sculptor remains anonymous. In the next corridor a succession of large canvases from the eighteenth century take mythology as their theme. In the adjacent room two small exquisite romantic scenes by Vernet steal the show but they are an exception as, in general, here they like their paintings large and their women naked.
Upstairs the visitor is greeted by a Rodin plaster of Le Penseur, incongruous in a gallery of C15 Italian and French religious painting. The succession of saints leads to a crucifixion by Bronzino, clearly a highlight of the collection. Dramatically presented it has, more than anything else in the gallery, the air of newness and marks a culmination of the saintly procession.
Nice has more renown for the modern painters who found here movement and colour. After a drab January day outside it was especially nice to walk into a room filled with the scintillating pastels of Jules Chéret, late works inspired by his time in the city at the end of his life.
Opposite in two rooms that gaze out over the sea are the works of Raoul Dufy. More, perhaps, than any other painter Dufy seizes on movement, mass chaotic movement, and expresses it without reserve or restrain, unconcerned by the collisions it produces. His art seeks out moments of abandon: the explosion of fireworks, the mêlée of the circus, the crowds at a bullfight or the erratic trajectories of rowing boats at Henley Regatta. These shifting shapes give us shifting colours, bold and beautiful statements of light and air that find their finest moments in the Riviera. A curtain flapping at an open window, the road to Sainte Maxime, his is the Riviera we all love.
Up the hill behind the railway station is the 1970s building that houses the National Museum of Marc Chagall. Low concrete buildings lie in pleasant gardens and house a few dozen of this painter’s work. Chagall was born in Russia in 1887 and died 98 years later in St Paul de Vence after an eventful life, so he certainly had time to produce plenty of work. What is shown here is a relatively small sample.
One large room opposite the entrance is filled with large canvases whose subjects are all taken from the Old Testament. The figures are drawn with wondering smiles of innocence and love. Even Adam, expelled from Paradise, is smiling (although Eve looks less happy). Jacob in his dream state is almost laughing. In these large works figures are outlined in thick black lines and the large blocks of colour do not follow the forms depicted. This has an extraordinary effect of creating spaces within the canvas, in and through which the figures can move. The colours are bold and primary: blue red and yellow predominate. Green is present in some of the pictures and brown intervenes once. In an adjoining hexagonal room are five very red pictures depicting passages from the Song of Solomon. The central elongated figures of white bride and blue groom are smiling ecstatically. Above each picture is a quotation from this celebration of love.
Much of the building is taken up with images of the circus. After the initial video there is a large room devoted to this theme and much of the rest of the building gives detailed versions of elements from the larger canvases. Chagall’s ethereal figures are shown as clowns, or acrobats, girls doing the splits (a favourite pose) or lion tamers. The impossible feats of the acrobats seem to appeal to the artist who can have his figures hanging or floating in the air. The magician / artist can also create his famous anthropomorphised animals and elongated lovers that defy easy categorisation. Always it is the innocent smiles of the figures that stay with the viewer, along with the slightly more disturbing smiles of the animals. Bosch-like, his oversized beaky birds are the stuff of children’s dreams, good and bad.
Chagall’s attraction to the circus is perhaps as a landscape of joy for its own sake. This is a world of amusement that appealed to many artists of the nineteenth century. For Dickens in Hard Times the world of the circus is an expression of uncontrolled human emotion, a place which has much to teach the smoke-bound inhabitants of Coketown. This novel is an appeal to our emotional intelligence, the work of a man looking back and reflecting on the sense that can be made of this industrialised world and his own place within it. It is a world of outcasts yet honest thinking and feeling people. Sleary’s protestation at the end of the book, delivered in his lisping speech, is a warning to all who are strangers to art, to amusement and to emotion. “You mutht have uth Thquire. Do the withe thing and the kind thing too, and make the betht of uth, not the wurtht!”. Chagall’s paintings make a smiler appeal.
Further up the boulevard leading north is the hilltop district of Cimiez. This was where the Gauls had their oppidum and the Romans built their city. Next to the Roman amphitheatre is the third major museum of Nice, a collection of works by Henri Matisse. Again coming from the north Matisse started painting in Picardie and then among his fellows in Le Havre. He went south for the first time when he was thirty years old. The early paintings, of which a few are displayed here, are dark although exceptionally well executed for such a novice artist. Colour begins to dominate when he makes the south his home and he was to stay here until his death well into his eighties.
Matisse is often cited alongside Picasso as a definer of early twentieth century art and his obsession with human form has a very Picasso-like quality. His gifts as a draftsman allow him to define a figure in a stroke or two in a similar way to his more famous neighbour in Provence. Blocks of colour were added or not, but the outline was the thing, and his painting developed rapidly into very fluid movements which culminate in dancing figures and swimming-pool friezes. The major works are not present here and there is little enough in the building to form much of a view of such an important artist. Nevertheless this small museum manages to show off the important range of his talents.
