RA French Riviera Show Criticised for Sidelining Matisse — SkimNews
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- Matisse and the Fauves are relegated to a smaller adjoining room despite their revolution at Collioure being "far more radical" than the neo-impressionists, because Collioure sits on the far west of Mediterranean France near the Pyrenees, not technically on the Côte d'Azur
- Matisse's 1904 Study for Luxe, calme et volupté is singled out as the show's high point—a small canvas of female nudes posing by the shore, "the essence of the Riviera in French modern art," whose rawness makes the bathers feel like real women becoming goddesses
- Picasso's contribution is an enlarged copy of his 1922 Two Women Running on the Beach by a scene painter for the Ballets Russes' The Blue Train, and the show omits his erotic Riviera works—from multi-orificed beach volleyball players to prints of voluptuous women and his reveries over Marie-Thérèse Walter
- Cézanne gets less space than Monet, which the reviewer calls "tomfoolery," singling out Cézanne's Bathers as capturing the Med's dream and "obscure eroticism" with near-nude young men posed against sun-baked sky and water
- Van Gogh is conspicuously absent despite painting southern beaches and "owning the sun," alongside puzzling detours into Bonnard and Picabia that distract from the core Matisse-Picasso story
Why it matters: A high-profile summer exhibition at a major London institution chose geographic literalism over the mythic, erotic dimension that made Matisse and Picasso's Riviera work central to modern art—resulting in a show that starves its two essential artists of space and erases the disturbing desires that defined the Med as a modern subject.
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