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JB @ Palais Masséna

 

« Jour de Tempête à Nice »

summer 2025

participating in the UN Ocean Conference - Nice 2025

Jour de Tempête à Nice — Hommage à Matisse & pour ma Mère

c.2m x 3m; huile sur toile suspendue; 2010

collection Musée internationale d'Art naïf Anatole Jakowski, Nice


  this page in french  


contents

> à-propos

> Installation at the Palais Masséna, April 2025

> Turkish Dellight: The Oriental Inspiration

> Four Video Chapters  on the Story of the Painting

> Other Works on Nice & the Sea


   


 It is a great honour to have one of my favourite paintings chosen to feature in the exhibition at the Musée Masséna in Nice as part of the city's celebration of the UN Ocean Conference 2025.  The exhibition opens to the public on 8th May and will close in September.

The painting was done as part of my residency at the Musée d'Art naïf  in the summer of 2010, and depicts one of those days in which a violent storm rocks Nice during a span that started nonetheless with a welcoming sunrise and closes with a deep, calm sunset.  I first experienced such a day with my parents in 1972; my Mother's favourite landscape was the Tempête à Nice  by Matisse, in the museum here, and I have tucked his little struggling pedestrian into my picture for that reason.

 


Installation Palais Masséna

footage: Sarah Vermeersch     edit: JB

music: scherzo-presto from "A First String Quartet"  [Op.87] by JB

 


Alla Turca — the Oriental Inspiration

An extraordinary frisson came when I saw the room my picture occupies at the Palais Masséna: you enter and there it is, right before you through the doorway, also well visible, as I like it to be, from a distance.  Fine. 

But there on the wall to the left I found a picture I had not expected. 

At about the same size the curator has placed a reproduction of a double-page spread from a diary showing the artist's idea of the situation of the French forces resisting the Turks in around 1545.  Kept in the Topkapi Library in Istanbul, the scene depicted is of the siege of Nice as envisaged by a naval officer in the Ottoman navy, the work of one Matrakci Nasuh.

      This is weird.  I had had no idea that such a picture existed, I could yet never have chosen a finer piece to accompany mine.  Kudos to the curator! 

Two things are at play:

1] that both pictures have an ancestry in old Chinese art, or certainly 'oriental' art of some unFlorentine sort in which...

2] ...plain observational visual gestures are dancing alongside conceptual perspectives, giving the sort of participatory image we might have in mind when explaining a topographical setting to someone wishing to get a grasp of things, indeed of a story the Turk in an age that had not drifted across in a Montgolfier baloon, nor summoned up GoogleEarth as this Scot hates to do...


Four Chapters in the Creation of the Picture

at the Musée d'Art naïf  in Nice, 2010

 

first sketches

 

now for the trees... in the gusts of wind!


Other Work on Nice and her Sea

 "Queenie's", 1983

My pictures of Nice and the Corniches are central to the work I call "RoadMovies", that's to say 'paysages' thought of as 'voyages'... car-trips complete sometimes with the steering wheel and rear-view mirror, even the dashboard...

        

but even without the driver's view  in view, the pictures seek to give life to that vivid sensation of driving a road, for instance the drop down from Aspremont, via the Piol, to the Baie des Anges, or the way Villefranche addresses the sea, or as we bundle along the Moyenne Corniche past Monte Carlo...

       

"Villefranche", 2009

 

with the most ambitious composition, "The Four Ages of Man":

not forgetting the Moggy's eye view...

nor forgetting a never realised project for a sculpture

of the Promenade des Anglais using goods' palettes...

 


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