saint-tropez and modern art

Saint-Tropez (Municipality, Var, France)
In 1892, the painter Paul Signac (1863-1935), one of the leaders of the Pointillist school, sailing on his yacht Olympia, discovered the small fishers' village of Saint-Tropez.

Paul Signac. The Red Buoy, Saint-Tropez, 1895 Musée d'Orsay

He bought a house that he named La Hune (lit., the top [of a ship]) and transformed into his studio, where he invited his friends, such as Cross, Matisse, Derain and Marquet. Saint-Tropez became a main center of painting avant-garde of the early XXth century.

Henri Matisse, Luxe, calme et volupté (1905), Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Museum of Annonciade
The Museum of Annonciade, housed since 1955 in a former chapel located on the port of Saint-Tropez and abandoned during the French Revolution, shows 56 paintings, dating from 1890-1950, bequeathed by the local collector Georges Grammont. The collection is fairly small but includes only masterpieces by painters from the Pointillist, Fauvist and Nabi schools. Among the painters exhibited there are André Derain, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Rouault, Georges Braque, Georges Seurat, Henri-Edmond Cross, Paul Signac, Raoul Dufy, Félix Vallotton, Albert Marquet, Aristide Maillol and Edouard Vuillard.

Paul Signac: Port St. Tropez, ( 1899)Musée de l'Annonciade, St. Tropez

Albert Marquet, Le port de Saint-Tropez (1905), Musée de l'Annonciade, Saint-Tropez

Pierre Bonnard , Le Port de Saint-Tropez, 1914, Saint-Tropez, musée de l'Annonciade

Paul Signac: French neo-impressionist painter 1863 - 1935

Artist's biography and a collection of his paintings

Recommended reading: Saint-Tropez: The Rise of an Artist Colony (an excellent illustrated online blog/article

Online Resources for Paul Signac:

• Paul Signac Web Museum
• Paul Signac Artchive
• Paul Signac Artcyclopedia
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Glossary:

Impressionism (n)/ Impressionist (adj)
A progressive art movement that originated in France in the late 19th century. Impressionist painters wanted to capture the rapidly changing modern world and the fleeting moods of nature. Impressionism relied on optical blending to depict the fluctuations of light and consisted largely of views of everyday middle-class life in the city and countryside of France.

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Garden at Sainte-Adresse, (1867) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. "Monet’s Garden at Sainte-Adresse depicts the artist’s aunt, father, and cousin relaxing on a seaside terrace."

Postimpressionism (n)/ Postimpressionist (adj)
The French artistic style that followed Impressionism. Such artists as Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec pushed beyond the Impressionist emphasis on the appearance of nature, stressing instead qualities such as emotional expression and the formal structure of underlying objects. Postimpressionism led to a variety of bold new styles, including innovative uses of color and brushwork that sometimes bordered on abstraction. (Click here to go read Gauguin's Tahitian Interiors : my post from Monday February 19, 2007)

Pointillism (n)
A theory and technique of applying small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that from a distance, they blend together; also called Neoimpressionism or Divisionism

Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte / Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte (1884-86) Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago
Art Access Glossary