NEW “The Radiance of the Day”: Making Modern Art in the South of France
Dr Charlotte de Mille
Wednesday 15 – Saturday 18 May 2024
£645
NB. All of our 2024 Study Tours have now taken place. Our new programmes for 2025 will be online in mid-December this year. If you are not already on our mailing list, do contact short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk to join, so that you do not miss out when we launch the programmes.
Course description
Cézanne believed the “eye educates itself by contact with nature”, and for him that meant a deep dive into the landscape of his native Aix-en-Provence.
This course follows Cézanne’s invitation to immerse ourselves in the landscape that so inspired him. This course follows Cézanne’s invitation to immerse ourselves in the landscape that so inspired him. We shall begin with a visit to the Musée Granet in Aix which served as his first inspiration as a painter. As the heat starts to leave the day, we reconvene for a walk about of key locations in Aix well known to Cézanne. We take in the houses of friends Emile Bernard and Johachim Gasquet, meander past Cézanne’s favourite bar, and finally take in the garden of the ‘Terrain des Peintures’ with viewing points relating to some of Cézanne’s iconic landscapes. Due to unexpected closure of Cézanne’s atelier in preparation for 2025 this replaces that visit.
From a foundation in Aix, we travel by private coach to Antibes to visit the Musée Picasso. Here we shall consider not only the impact of Cézanne, but over a long riviera lunch take in the profound impact of Mediterranean light and Southern warmth in the development of Modernist French art and the adoption of an Arcadian and utopian vision.
The tour continues to Nice, where we will be based for the final two days. From here we shall visit the Fondation Marguérite et Aimée Maeght in St Paul de Vence, a remarkable collection of 20th Century art in an idyllic setting, and Matisse’s Chapel du Rosaire in Vence. There will be the option of a lunch together at the Colombe d’Or, where artists famously exchanged works for lunch or an overnight stay. On our final day we shall visit museums dedicated to Matisse and Chagall in Nice itself.
Lecturer's biography
Dr Charlotte de Mille curates The Courtauld Gallery’s music programme. With the Gallery she co-authored Animating Art History, a joint initiative with Central St. Martin’s and the University for the Creative Arts, which was long-listed for a Clore Award in Museum Learning. She was Visiting Scholar at Lingnan University, Hong Kong in 2018, and Mid-Career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art 2019-20. She is Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld teaching the MA course Ekphrasis between Visual Art and Music. She edited Music and Modernism (2011) and is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Music and Art (2023). Her book Bergson in Britain: Modern Art and Philosophy was published by EUP in the autumn of 2023.