Up the hill

Last week we walked out of central Cannes and up a main street. 

Cannes, despite all its Cote d'Azur charms, surprisingly congenial and always thrumming tourist area, and elements of pure glitz, is surprisingly urban. It is a city of 75,000 people that oddly feels like New York or San Francisco at times, to give the U.S. frame of reference. The large avenue we walked up felt almost generically big city European, and I was interested that I found that mildly appealing. Maybe since our whole experience landing in France so far has been taken up in deleriously charming beach vacation towns, a little raw city life offered a nice counterpoint. That said, this street was not full of places I longed to visit, being more like an avenue of many usable services and shops, too many cars, and maybe a couple of secret gems.

The point of our climb up this hill, a longish one, was to visit the neighborhood of Le Cannet and, more specifically, The Bonnard Museum. Pierre Bonnard, in case you wondered, was a post impressionist painter who made his home in the neighborhood until he died in the mid twentieth century. His colorful, expressive work is right up my alley and I've always enjoyed it. The museum was stunning, with its back windows overlooking a half quaint, half grand church and the higher upper floors (the museum is spread over several tidy floors) looking out over a bit of Le Cannet and down to Cannes.  

While the museum clearly has a permanent collection it appears to present strictly in specific thematic shows built around Bonnard. I suspect, along with their curatorial staff's excellent taste, that this is a brilliant way to go about a museum like this, as the relationships around being able to loan many Bonnards out at any time allows one to borrow all kinds of interesting top quality work to create a themed show around. And since Bonnard's life and career spanned the latter part of the 1800's and the first half of the 1900's, the possibilities are nearly endless. The show we saw included Monet (it's uncanny how any Monet in a group show ends up being a signature highlight!), Picasso, Morisot, Seurat, Renoir, Corot, Matisse, and some curiously wonderful Giacomettis.

This last exhibit just closed and a new one, involving his studio with mimosa trees and loans from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, opens in a few weeks and I am deleriously excited. In our list of our wants and desires from the city we end up in, museums a little too easily sink down the list, but this place was a real reminder of how much they mean to us.

I made a small ai short of Bonnard paintings come to life. Remember how these work? Click to engage it. Enlarge in the bottom corner, and click again to play. There is a bit of ambient sound too!