Painting the French Riviera

The story of how the Côte d'Azur dazzled modern art's great innovators - among them Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and Klein. Published to accompany an exhibition at Royal Academy, London, from 2 October, 2026 to 31 January, 2027, moving to the Cleveland Museum of Art from March, 2027.

The Mediterranean coast of France and Catalonia witnessed the rise and development of modern art over a century, from Cézanne in the 1860s to Matisse, Picasso and Klein in the 1950s and 1960s. These artists and the many more featured here discovered an inexhaustible source of inspiration in this storied region, whose glittering, languid sea stretches out towards the far horizon beneath brilliant azure skies. Indelibly associated with the classical past, this magical land of eternal spring and spiritual renewal came to signify a state of mind, and avant-garde artists sought to convey the vitality and élan it inspired in them through new paradigms of modernist invention.