Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956–1971: The École de Nice (review)

The École de Nice, which burgeoned as a modern art movement in the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the institutional hegemony of the largely abstractionist École de Paris at a time when the Riviera was growing into a major tourist destination and, in the wake of the iconic Picasso and Matisse, a vibrant centre for the visual arts. What emerged, essentially in Nice, in a period of post-war national cultural and societal change, was a burst of artistic innovation led by indigenous artists inspired by the geographic beauty of the Mediterranean and, inextricably, by the spirit of a new consumerist age. In her excellent study of what was, arguably, a southern artistic revolution, Rosemary O’Neill offers a detailed history of how the École de Nice evolved. In doing so she adopts a ‘case-study approach’ (p. 11), paying particular attention to the movement’s seminal contributors, in monographic chapters that show the artistic diversity of these various figures to be richly illustrative of shared aesthetic ideals. Indeed, an overarching theme of the book is the solidarity of the artists’ opposition to the formalist establishment art of the École de Paris. Espousing appropriative methods and theatrical modes of presentation that ran counter to the pervasive and nationally sanctioned art formel of the time, they opted for a predominantly conceptualist and locally inspired art actuel. After a historical background chapter that establishes the intersection of art, mass culture, and tourism as an early twentieth-century southern artistic trend, O’Neill goes on to examine the defining and broadly sequentially formed movements of the École de Nice: Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, and Supports/Surfaces. Here she really comes into her own, offering detailed analyses of group differences and commonalities via close studies of individuals. From this chronology, subtle ideological and artistic shifts are ascertained as the author points up the originality of the artists and the range of experimentation achieved. Consider, for example, Yves Klein’s purist sea and sky-blue monochromes, Arman’s haunting assemblages of used and discarded things, and Martial Raysse’s frozen bathing-beauty mannequins (Chapter 1). In many cases the movement away from painting is extreme, as in Ben Vautier’s ‘total art’ street happenings, George Brecht’s word-game poems (Chapter 4), and Claude Gilli’s collages of fragments of fair-ground machines (Chapter 5). Even with a return to painting in the late 1960s, a matter that split the school’s allegiances and contributed to its demise in 1971, the artists concerned (notably Claude Viallat and Noël Dolla) remained conceptually motivated and committed to a social and geographic engagement with the land. To her credit, O’Neill draws on a vast range of primary sources, many not readily accessible to today’s readers: contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, private correspondence, catalogues, archival materials, manifestos, and recorded interviews. In addition, the work is enhanced by the inclusion of interspersed black and white photographs and an inset of thirteen colour plates. While it is regrettable that the book’s presentation is significantly marred by typographical errors and inaccuracies (abundant in the footnotes), the author has produced a comprehensive overview of an important, previously somewhat overlooked, period in French art history.