The great workshop of the midi - The album of the exhibition (English version)

The album of the exhibition (English version) "The great workshop of the midi,  from Cézanne to Matisse, from Van Gogh to Bonnard" at the museum Granet, Aix-en-Provence and the museum des Beaux-Arts,  Marseilles (June13 - October 13, 2013).

Designed as a diptych, the exhibition presents over 200 masterpieces painted between 1880 and 1950-1960. Starting from two tutelary figures of the modern movement, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, it seeks to show how the South of France, in a broad sense, going from the north of Spain to the Italian Riviera, with a few sallies into North Africa, was an extraordinary laboratory for experimenting with modern ideas in painting.

The traditional debate over the respective merits of form and colour enlivens the various parts of the exhibition, showing how these habitual opposites were closely intertwined in a complementary relationship summed up in Cézanne’s famous statement: “When colour is at its richest, form takes on its fullest expression.”

Many 20th century artists referred either to Van Gogh in their use of colour as a means of self-expression, or to Cézanne in their use of form to achieve a “harmony parallel to nature.”