The Royal Academy’s latest exhibition, “Painting the French Riviera,” attempts to capture the mythic, sun-drenched allure of the Mediterranean coast, but ultimately misses the mark. Rather than exploring the profound artistic evolution inspired by the region, the display adopts a pedantic focus on geography, rewarding artists based on which specific coastal locales they depicted. This curatorial strategy leads to significant distortions, favoring neo-impressionist works—such as those by Paul Signac—with spacious, grand placement, while squeezing the more radical Henri Matisse and his fellow Fauves into a cramped, secondary space. Yet this exhibition misses the point entirely. What we get here is a pedantic obsession with the geography of France’s southern coast, instead of the modern myth of the Med.
The exhibition’s dismissal of Matisse is particularly baffling given his revolutionary contributions in Collioure, where he and his associates moved beyond nature to paint from their own internal color palettes. By prioritizing the strict Côte d’Azur over the broader Mediterranean coast, the curators seem to harbor a grudge against the Fauves. This bias is evident in the pairing of Matisse’s 1920s work—which focuses intimately on women in Nice hotel rooms—with the relatively conventional Raoul Dufy. The show culminates in an underwhelming juxtaposition: a late Matisse cut-out titled The Wave is placed alongside repetitive blue nude imprints by Yves Klein. A serpentine white line through aquatic blue called The Wave, is juxtaposed with a lot of blue imprints of bare-naked ladies by the showboating 1960s artist Yves Klein, then at the end a single late Matisse cut-out.
Despite the exhibition’s shortcomings, the power of Matisse’s vision remains visible in his 1904 Study for Luxe, calme et volupté. Displayed in the smaller Fauve room, this canvas embodies “luxury, peace and pleasure,” featuring nudes posing by the shore in a seaside Eden. Unlike the rigid, dotted fields of neo-impressionist works, Matisse’s experimental use of gold, green, and violet dots showcases a raw, burgeoning passion. It remains a poignant reminder of his 1904 dream of a perfect, hedonistic day at the beach, created amidst a century marked by political instability and revolution. It’s 1904, the new century is full of nationalists, revolutionaries, discontent, but he dreams of a perfect day by the sea surrounded by beautiful beach bodies.
Picasso is treated with similar disregard. The exhibition includes a large-scale reproduction of his 1922 work Two Women Running on the Beach, created as a backdrop for the Ballets Russes production of The Blue Train. However, the show avoids the deeper, more erotic dimensions of Picasso’s Riviera period. Essential themes of lust, sun, and sea, which defined his relationship with figures like Marie-Thérèse Walter, are largely absent. The only inclusion that captures this erotic spirit is a 1961 terracotta vase shaped like a woman wearing a painted bikini. It is not actually by him but an enlarged copy by a scene painter of his small intense 1922 original Two Women Running on the Beach.
A more compelling exhibition would have centered on the “Matisse-Picasso, the Rematch” narrative, acknowledging how both artists fed on the paradise of the south while exposing its darker, more complex layers. Instead, the current collection feels like a series of disjointed diversions. The decision to emphasize Monet over Cézanne—who possessed a visceral, intense connection to the landscape—further weakens the argument. While Monet’s Antibes views are technically sound, they lack the raw, sun-baked intensity of Cézanne’s Bathers, which perfectly encapsulates the dream of Mediterranean light and obscure eroticism. One of those Arcadias we long for – timeless, perfect worlds saturated with light, it is a dream of paradise. You’ve seen them all, that’s OK; though when you’ve seen one pixelated shoreline.
By excluding pivotal figures like van Gogh and including unnecessary detours into the work of artists like Picabia, the exhibition fails to find its focus. The resulting presentation makes the French Riviera appear as uninspired and dull as a grey day in Margate, stripping away the very “luxury, peace and pleasure” it claims to represent. Far from capturing the essence of the coast, the Royal Academy has curated a display that prioritizes safe, sunset-friendly visuals while ignoring the more disturbing, complex, and beautiful desires that once defined modern art in the south of France.
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