French Riviera

by Girard, Xavier

• ISBN13: 9782843233661
• ISBN10: 2843233666
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Assouline

Summary

The years that this book means to bring back to life are bathed in an enchanting, uncertain light, so faint and yet so bright that it may have been only a dream. Their unreal tones, like some shimmering landscape in a film where disaster lies in wait, light up that period between the end of the Great War and the dark days of the 1930s, between the belle epoque and the final summers of the Roaring Twenties. The French Riviera was the place to be during the twenties and early thirties. Artists and writers from all over the world came to invent a new way of life--Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Picasso, Picabia, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Eileen Gray, Anna de Noailles and Hemingway, to name a few. A photobiography of this happy time, French Riviera revives the now-legendary story of these mythic personalities living in a world divided between a thirst for creation, the hunt for happiness and the ominously approaching violence of World War II.

Table of Contents

Introduction	7	(22)
Bird-catcher in the sun	22	(16)
The poetic southerly climes of Jean Cocteau
Villa America	38	(26)
In modernist exile at Cap d'Antibes, at home with gerald and Sara Murphy
Villefranche nights	64	(16)
Paul Morand, a cosmopolitan gentleman on the French riviera
The mysteries of the Chateau de De	80	(22)
The Villa Noailles, or the engineer's dream
A handsome monster-tamer	102	(16)
Picabia at the Chateau de mai
A touch of disaster	118	(30)
The ``magnificnet Riviera'' of Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
The Blue Train	148	(22)
Monte-Carlo at the time of the Ballets Russes
The Mediterranean myth	170	(20)
The Riviera of the painters
Notes	190	(2)
Who's who	192	(2)
Bibliography	194	(2)
Photograh credits	196	(1)
Acknowledgments	196