En passant days 6 & 7 : Ceret

Day 5 was a day of repose.
Ceret is Catalan for ‘cherry’ - one of the things this town of some 7,500 souls is famous for. It has the first cherry crop in France and the reason for this is that it is also the sunniest place in France (measured in days / hours of sunshine per year). It also has another claim to fame. Picasso spent four summers here before and during the Great War. He was one of a multitude of artists who made this town his summer residence and turned it into something of an artists colony. This was quite a bit of serendipity for me as just read Arianna Stassinopoulus-Huffington's 500 page biography of Picasso about thee weeks ago, so was well up on the role that Ceret played in the lives of Montparnasse artists). Marc Chagall later spent much of the Second World War here evading the Nazis. As a consequence of this artistic legacy the town now has a Museum of Modern Art that extends this tradition. Their small but impressive permanent collection includes works by Picasso, Chagall, Dali, Joan Miro and Matisse.

But what really impressed me was their summer exhibition – apparently they mount one every year. This year the theme was ‘The artist and the ring’ an exhibition about artistic representations of bullfighting. While I find this ‘sport’ abhorrent (or at lest the Spanish version of it) it has attracted the attention of artists (and writers) for hundreds of years. And the creators have put on a really good show that marries the well-known artists (Goya, Picasso, Bacon and a super bonus for me a room with six or Kalechensky paintings) with lesser known modern days ones. Picasso who said he would have wanted to have been a matador if not an artists has two rooms – with colour and monochrome paintings and an impressive series of decorated pots, including 30 bowls that he pained in the space of one week in April 1953. I don’t know whether to be more impressed with his prodigious output or his cataloguing skills. Each pot in dated to the day he did it! More impressive perhaps were the set of three strongly coloured quasi-abstract paintings by Najia Mehaedji that were given pride of place at the entrance to the expo facing the far more sombre Goya lithographs.

This, as far as I know ends my whirlwind tour of art history that has characterised the first leg of this journey. rom Monday onwards I move on to far more natural wonders