L'oro e l'azzurro. I colori del Sud da Cézanne a Bonnard

120 paintings and 20 drawings tell of one of the most fascinating stories of the art world set between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, a story which profoundly changed the course of painting. It is a tale of the journeys, but also the long sojourns that many French painters - or painters that grew up or were educated in that ambience - undertook along the Mediterranean coastline or in Provence, places that quickly became the site of a miracle in painting, where colour had the freedom to expand within the unrestricted space of limitless light.
This volume, published for the exposition held in Treviso, opens with an introductory essay on the figures of Guigou, Monticelli and especially Courbet between the eighteen sixties and seventies; but it is a painting by Cézanne (there are twenty of his works on show at the exposition) dated 1869 which opens a series of splendid views of the Gulf of Marseilles, where the blue of the sea dominates the speckled gold of the rocks and the roofs of the houses. Alongside the paintings by Cézanne we have works by other great masters who stayed in Provence and the Côte d'Azur, including Renoir, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Munch (who stayed in Nice from 1891 to 1892), Signac, Matisse, Braque, Derain, Dufy and Bonnard.