WE DON’T HEAR MUCH about the Mediterranean anymore, at least in terms of the art world of painters. The glossy Cannes Film Festival still gets annual media play, French wine is a mainstay, the Grand Prix comes along, and there’s all those old James Bond movies.
This apparent demise of Mediterranean glory is a stark contrast to what happened with modern painting in southern France a century ago. The roll call is impressive: Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Bonnard. They all had the southern French climes in common, spanning a generation. They spoke to the everyday enjoyments of middle-class life. Indeed, they were documentarians of bourgeois pleasures.
Matisse said it best: "Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue." True, Picasso had some jagged periods, as if a knife slicing at comfortable couch paintings. Yet much of his work echoes not only the domestic sun and warmth of the southland where he lived, and retired, but he was perhaps the last painter to revive motifs of the ancient Mediterranean, that is, the bacchanalia of the Greco-Roman world.
No one represented the middle class pleasures of art more than Cezanne, a supposed rebel. He did not like cubism or abstraction, scoffing at its intellectual pretension especially. Working in virtual isolation, he simply wanted to replicate two things: nature and the domestic life of an everyday Frenchmen. Mountains, forests, and hillside cities, and then still lifes of fruit and pictures of his homebound wife.
His first solo exhibit in Paris came in 1895, eleven years before his death. But his approach to the everyday struck a chord. Picasso, who first visited Paris in 1900, was influenced by Cezanne’s work, as were others. In effect, after the day-trip paintings of the Impressionists, and then Cezanne, the censure on painting normal objects and pleasures of life was dramatically lifted. The pleasures of landscapes, towns, bottles, fruit, men playing cards, and musical instruments emerged in bold shape and color.
After his "fauvist" period, Matisse did much the same in terms of subject matter. He moved to apartments on the southern French coast and painted comfortable indoor scene, with a good deal of emphasis on the sexuality of his female models. This was bourgeois life in the sun on the Mediterranean.
Van Gogh's haunt was also southern France, where he had been joined for a short time by painting companion Gauguin. There he painted restaurants, fields, and town streets. None of his paintings sold in his lifetime, but he too was party to the bourgeois Mediterranean spirit in his subject matter and uncomplicated pursuit of beautiful things. By turns, Gauguin transported that same outlook to Tahiti, where he produced his major works.
Pierre Bonnard, too, was a painter of the domestic home life, of living room windows and tables variously set in sunny apartments. He constantly painted his wife, a reminder that the pleasure principle of the Mediterranean artists was never shy of sexual suggestion. It was a hot, steamy climate, apropos to those impulses. The buttoned-down Cezanne and Van Gogh bypassed the sex part, but Picasso, Matisse, and Bonnard played it up.
The aristocrats of France’s Ancien Regime were the first patrons of the pleasure principle in art. One thinks of the painters Antoine Watteau (d. 1721) and François Boucher (d. 1770), chroniclers of aristocratic pastimes and sensuality. Earlier still, there was Giorgione, Titian, and Rubens, and later Gainsborough in England, all painters for the upperclass. And, all were painters of the good life.
From Cezanne onward, it was the middleclass that wanted such pleasure art, and as it turned out, it was a Mediterranean outlook that provided the goods. It did not last forever. The sunny times were eclipsed by the Freudian era, and Freud’s view of dark human impulses seemed confirmed by two world wars. After that, true art had to be wrenching, unblinking in the face of human confusion and dread—from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism.
Perhaps the pleasure principle was revived in the 1960s with Pop Art. Andy Warhol said Pop Art “is about liking things.” That’s another story, though. Meanwhile, as one art historian argues, the old Mediterranean trio of Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse ended up, consecutively, the three most influential artists of the twentieth century. And Mediterranean souls they were.