Blaise Cendrars in the 1930s

In order to paint my pictures,” Matisse announced when he moved to Nice in 1917, “I need to remain for several days in the same state of mind, and I do not find this in any atmosphere but that of the Côte d’Azur.” The elderly Renoir lived nearby at Cagnes-sur-Mer, and most of modernist France soon followed: Bonnard bought a house at Le Cannet in 1926 and, in old age, Picasso, Léger, Chagall lined up, each with a new young wife, in rival villas along the coast.

Thus was the Mediterranean as landscape of pleasure invented. A legacy is the solo-artist museums that provide, each summer and autumn, the intellectual ballast to the Riviera playground and this year offer unusually heavyweight pickings. Nice’s Musée Matisse trumps Paris’s Musée Rodin by inaugurating Matisse Rodin, which moves to the French capital next month, while the Picasso, Léger and Chagall museums in Vallauris, Biot and Cimiez join forces for the first time to explore, in Dis-moi, Blaise, how avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars influenced all three artists, shedding light on the interaction between modernist literature and painting.

Impoverished, newly married Matisse famously pawned his wife’s favourite jewel, an emerald ring, to buy Cézanne’s “Three Bathers” from Ambroise Vollard in 1899. Less well known is that at the same time he purchased Rodin’s “Bust of Henri Rochefort”. The Nice exhibition includes both the bust and Matisse’s beautifully pared-down oil and graphite drawings of it, and illustrates how, as he worked out ideas for a new painterly language in two and three dimensions, the 19th-century sculptor was a pervasive influence. Art historian Bernard Berenson, visiting Matisse in 1909, warned: “Tâchez de ne pas vous Rodin-er”.

Seated, standing and reclining nudes, torsos seen from the back, dancers including Matisse’s sinuous “Serpentine” and Rodin’s contorted, erotic “Nijinsky”, and the sturdy, silent figure of the massive peasant Bevilacqua, each modelled by both artists, are set side by side in this story of assimilation and evolution. Matisse’s classicising tendency is emphasised; so is the way he condensed Rodin’s dramatic expressiveness into a simplification of forms, the hard-won efforts concealed because “I wish my own works to have the lightness and joyfulness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost”.

‘The Clock’ (1918) by Fernand Léger

Thus Rodin’s anguished, shadowy nude in “La Voix Intérieure” (1884) is formalised and desentimentalised in Matisse’s multi-faceted “Madeleine” (1903); a magnificent 1900 crayon and green watercolour of a long-haired nude arching backwards, “Femme nue aux longs cheveux, renversée en arrière” by Rodin, is echoed 50 years later in Matisse’s “Grand Acrobat” of 1952.

Matisse thought about Rodin all his life, and uniquely united sculpture, drawing and colour. “Drawing with scissors: to cut to the quick in colour reminds me of the direct cutting of sculptors,” he wrote of his late cut-outs. The Musée Matisse has a strong collection of these 1940s to 1950s works, suffused with Mediterranean light and bright hues: the “Jazz” series; the gouaches-on-paper “Blue Nude IV”, “The Wave” and the severely classical “Woman with Amphora”, which echoes Rodin’s drawing “Woman like a Vase”. The cut-outs continue to look uncompromisingly modern, yet in this context take their place too as the culmination of multimedia experiments which Matisse began in the 19th century.

Meanwhile Rodin, who died in 1917, looks here like the 20th-century artist he partly was: both in wonderfully freely painted watercolours such as “Cambodian Dancer”, and in the fragmentation of his figures and his cut-and-paste practice, reusing body parts in different groups and orientations, which can now be read as anticipating cubism.

Cubism’s unsung poet was born Frédéric Sauser in Switzerland in 1887. He ran away at 16, adventured in Russia and America, then reinvented himself in Paris in 1912 as Blaise Cendrars: the names, evoking embers (braise), ashes (cendres) and art (Latin ars), suggest his hope that radical new art would arise phoenix-like from the old world. The child of watchmakers, Cendrars was obsessed with time, relativity, speed, mechanisation, and his ruptured poetic style, depicting events and images – most famously in “La Prose du Trans-sibérien” – coexisting simultaneously, was a literary equivalent of cubism’s multiple planes and viewpoints.

“What a book one could write about all those unknowns who came to conquer Paris, that quilted star stitched into the sky of Paris,” Cendrars mused. The triple-venue exhibition of his manuscripts, letters and books displayed alongside experiments towards cubism by Picasso, Léger and Chagall captures the prewar epoch when artistic certainties were dashed and hordes of excitable foreign artists, punch-drunk on cubism’s possibilities, swooped into Paris from across Europe to pick up the pieces.

‘Thinking about Picasso’ (1914) by Marc Chagall

Picasso is the benchmark – the shows include studies for “Three Women” (1908), with which he pushed forward the breakthrough of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, classic violin and bottle still lifes, as well as Chagall’s witty 1914 ink drawing “Thinking about Picasso”, which embodies a generation’s anxiety of influence. Chagall, arriving in Paris from Russia in 1911, immediately assimilated cubism’s geometric foundations to give volume and depth to his hallucinatory, fantastical compositions: “Paris Through the Window”, “The Cattle Dealer”, “Homage to Apollinaire”, where Adam and Eve stand straight like the hands of a clock within a massive central disk seeming to rotate like a planet. Around this clock of eternity Chagall has inscribed the names of his two poet friends, Apollinaire and Cendrars.

From 1912 until 1914, when Chagall returned to Russia and Cendrars joined the Foreign Legion, the pair were inseparable. In 1917, Cendrars, now a one-armed war casualty, reappeared in Paris and teamed up with Léger, the “tubist” whose style of conical, cubed forms hardened after the war – he served as a sapper – into a slangy mechanical aesthetic, bringing cubism out of the studio and into the street, factory, battlefield. The metallic rotating forms of “The Clock” from the Beyeler collection is a fine example, and perhaps resonated with Cendrars’ obsession with time. The two collaborated on a ballet, The Creation of the World, with jazz-influenced music by Milhaud; Léger’s violent, primitivist costume and set gouache designs are a highlight here.

The ballet triumphed at the Champs-Elysées Theatre, opening in 1923 just as Chagall, believed dead in the war, resurfaced in Paris to claim canvases left in his studio a decade earlier. The canvases had disappeared, he accused Cendrars, and the two did not speak again until Cendrars was dying in 1961. But asked years later to name the most important events of his life, Chagall replied in one breath: “the Russian Revolution, and my meeting with Blaise Cendrars”.

‘Matisse Rodin’, Musée Matisse, Nice, to September 27; then at Musée Rodin, Paris, October 22-February 28; ‘Dis-moi, Blaise’, Musées Nationaux du XX Siècle des Alpes-Maritimes Chagall, Léger, Picasso, to October 12