On the Trail of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse in the South of France
-
Loading... - Colin Drakos
- 23 Mar 2023
- 75 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
A lover of Paris alights for the first time in Provence—and sees how three artists who painted there transformed modern vision and remade Western art. Call it the power of place.
In the southern French region of Provence, there is, or seems to be, what we call a roundabout and the French call a rond-point every 30 feet. Thirty feet is doubtless a physical exaggeration, but it is not so perceptually: One traffic circle follows another with such relentlessness that you feel you are proceeding not in a straight line but circularly, like a spider racing around its web.
You spin around each roundabout looking for the exit for, say, Arles or St.-Tropez—the A55 or the D44, the latter of which may also be called the D95 or the Boulevard General Léclérc (every French road has at least three names, two cryptically numeric and one grandly historical)—and you often must go around again before finding it. That accomplished, you drive for a bit and come to another circle. Everyone in Provence will tell you that you will find it maddening until you see how functional it is. In almost two weeks of driving in Provence, we never saw how functional it was.
No geographic or, in this case, traffic circle coincidence can be left uninspected by an inquiring writerly mind, and so the spinning advance that my wife Martha and I made across Provence last October came to seem symbolic of our psychological state there. Some famous places serve as time tunnels to the past. You can agreeably imagine in Venice today that you are in Venice c. 1500. Others seem fixed in a steady state, so that Paris, for those who love it, never seems to change, even as it does. Read More…
