October 26, 2024
In Céret: the modern art museum
Rachael and I don’t seem to take in many museums for some reason, but I make an exception this afternoon when I walk the few blocks to Céret’s surprisingly worthwhile modern art museum. It’s my second visit, after stopping in on another walkabout several years ago.
It seems surprising to find such a well-endowed art museum in such a small, remote town; but it reflects the exceptional artistic heritage Céret enjoys, beginning with the arrival of Pablo Picasso in 1911. An excerpt from this article details the town’s artistic history, which reads like a Who’s Who of modern art:
This medieval city is the French gateway to the sunny lands of Catalonia, in neighboring Spain, bathed by the scent of mimosas and cherry blossoms.
It became the cradle of the most important movements of modern painting of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Ceret, in 1911, Picasso was already reaping the benefits of his work. The times of hunger and cold in his studio in Montmartre in Paris, when he was forced to burn his sketches in the fireplace in order to keep warm, were far behind him.
He came to live in the village full of new plans and renewed strength, invited by Catalan painter and sculptor Manolo Hugué. Soon thereafter, painters Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Juan Gris came to town.
A small community of young avant-garde artists was formed there. Art forms ranged from painting to sculpture, poetry to music. Ceret became known as “the Mecca of the Cubists”. The first collages as artistic expression also first appeared there.
In 1919, after World War I, a second wave of artists coming directly from Montparnasse in Paris, landed in Ceret, with painters such as Chaim Soutine, Raoul Dufy and the poet Jean Cocteau. The third wave of artists set their base in the village during the World War II, with Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet and Tristan Tzara fleeing Nazism.
This isn’t a large museum, but it has an impressive permanent collection of works by artists who lived here and gives you an opportunity to admire them without dealing with the crowds you deal with in the larger, famous museums like the Orsay or Prado. Today, even on a rainy weekend afternoon it’s fairly quiet and you can stand in front of works by the likes of Chagall or Pignon and stare and contemplate as long as you want without feeling pressured to hustle along.
With a few exceptions, the works below are all impressions of Céret from over a century ago. Besides admiring the works for their own qualities, it gives you a different perspective on how to look at the town today, imagining how it must have looked and felt in the not so distant past.
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