Tuesday 22 September 2009

Stalking Picasso


Last week we had the Storms of September. When we weren’t having Storms, we were having visitors: Maire Aine and Dave (that’s his alias, to preserve his cover). On Wednesday, MA and I went to see the Picasso/Cezanne exhibition at the Musee Granet in Aix. Very full of people and I couldn’t help but wonder why they had chosen to put all their text in the corners (pet peeve no. 1) in white on a pale gray background (???) but interesting themes and a great story of Picasso telling his dealer in Paris that he had bought Cezanne’s Mont Ste Victoire. ‘Which one?’ asked the dealer, thinking he meant a painting. ‘The real one,’ Picasso answered.

Which led us to Thursday’s walk, from Les Venturiers to Vauvenargues, on the slopes of Mont Ste Victoire, and the chateau where Picasso lived in the last years of his life and is buried. Beautiful sun-dappled pine trees, dozens of butterflies in different combinations of red, orange, yellow, black and white. We tried to photograph some of them but then realized our walk would take a lot longer than we intended.



Admired Picasso’s chateau from the outside, then followed a group of firemen to a café for lunch.




Overheard a group of Englishwomen at the table next to ours discussing their tour of the chateau and criticising the choice of paint colours ….

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