As the annual tourist season on the French Riviera draws to a close, it seems strange to remember that a century ago this was most definitely not the time of year to visit the region. Until the 1920s, the majority of visitors would only head for this stretch of coast during the winter months from late December until March.
That the fashionable period for tourists so radically changed was due at least in part to the generation of artists who headed south during the inter-war years. In their wake they brought their friends, admirers and associates; these, in turn, enticed other visitors to the C⌠te d'Azur and eventually this latter group became so large that the artists who had originally popularised the area felt obliged to forsake it.
Kenneth Silver believes the role of the Riviera in the creation of modernism has been under-appreciated, primarily because of the region's hedonistic associations. He argues that successive art historians and critics have preferred to overlook the connections between work and play in 20th-century culture lest it make the objects of their attention appear too frivolous. Yet it is indisputable that many artists, especially in the years after the conclusion of the first World War, were perfectly content to intertwine their personal and professional lives.
Among the examples cited by Silver is the Dadaist Francis Picabia, who built himself a substantial home outside Cannes called the Chateau de Mai, owned a yacht and a Rolls-Royce and made money by organising lavish charity balls and parties along the Riviera. So, too, did photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, among whose other fund-raising methods was location-scouting for film companies.
Then there was the large band of American expatriates who either settled on the C⌠te d'Azur or spent large periods of the summer there. The leaders of this group were Sarah and Gerald Murphy, he a talented painter whose work continues to be under-appreciated, possibly because he and his wife are now better-known as the role models for the socialite characters in their friend Scott Fitzgerald's novels.
The Murphys and Fitzgeralds headed for the south of France in order to evade what they perceived to be the grey conservatism of their native country. By contrast, the Riviera seemed tremendously contemporary, absolutely au fait with current cultural movements and, by way of bonus, a relatively unspoilt and inexpensive place in which to live.
Hence it was that a succession of modernist homes was built along the coast, including Eileen Gray's E.1027 at Roquebrune-Cap Martin and the villa designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens at HyΦres for the Vicomte Charles de Noailles.
The latter and his wife provided the perfect environment in which artists could produce fine work while surrounded by sybaritic luxury. This aspect of the south is embodied by a work produced in the Riviera almost 20 years before the de Noailles villa was created, Matisse's Luxe, Calme et VoluptΘ. Painted in 1904 after the artist and his family had been to stay at St Tropez with Paul Signac, the picture represents the extraordinary love of colour which seems to have been induced by the south.
As Silver notes, this palette, in which yellow and violet were shown next to one another to convey heat, came about despite the tendency of light on the Riviera to bleach out all colours. It is as though, in the face of this neutralising, the response of most artists was to combine the most brilliant shades on the one canvas.
Blinded by light, perhaps they were also unable to see the consequences of their behaviour. As more and more visitors chose to follow their example by travelling south, the landscape which had been such an inspiration became steadily more despoiled and uninteresting. The little fishing villages and ports which had once seemed so alluring were swamped by tourists and the Riviera evolved into what it is today: an over-developed, over-priced and over-publicised strip of coastal real-estate. While Silver closes with some examples of art produced in more recent decades along the C⌠te d'Azur, it is clear the region's moment of cultural inspiration has long since passed.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist and author