Vincent Van Gogh
L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux Oil on canvas, 91×73 cm Paris, Musée d’Orsay © RMN – Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Gérard Blot

The port city of Marseille and Aix, in the Provencal region of France, take pride of place as the European Capitals of Culture this year.

Phase II of the year-long festivities – slated to run from May through October – boast no fewer than six festivals and a series of unmissable art exhibitions at major museum and galleries. The abundance of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces on loan for these shows, by artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso, is worth a visit in itself.

The theme for this surfeit of art and culture is one only the French could dream up.  It is, but of course, “Dreaming”!

An exhibition taking place concurrently in two museums has the umbrella title: “Le Grand Atelier du Midi.” “From Van Gogh to Bonnard” is one portion that will be on view at the newly renovated Musee des Beaux Arts in Marseille and “From Cezanne to Matisse” will act as its complement at the Granet Museum in Aix en Provence.

In total, nearly 200 masterpieces have been loaned from 115 public and private collections across the globe for the blockbuster that will be on view from 13 June to 13 October.

The luminous offering includes major works by Van Gogh, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Signac, Cross, Derain, Dufy and Braque, and should go a long way in vaulting Marseilles, long dismissed as a “tough” port City, into the ranks of a cultural capital to be reckoned with.

The exhibition organizers argue – and probably not unfairly – that the light that bathes the region (most agree better expressed in paint than words) actually changed the artistic style and aesthetic vision of an entire generation of Western artists in the late 19th and early 20th century.

“With its special light and unique colors, Midi, in the broadest sense of the term, in the north of Spain to northern Italy via North Africa has been a source of inspiration for artists,” said the Commissioner of the

“The works of Van Gogh made in Arles in 1880 marked the starting point of the journey of the exploration of light,” he posits.

Van Gogh’s palette of exploding color ultimately led to the sun-drenched, pastel palettes that illuminate the gardens and lily-laden ponds of Monet’s Giverney and Renoir’s meadows in which parasol-ed ladies frolic in gossamer gowns.

Concurrently, in Aix-en-Provence, another part of the exhibition focuses on form and composition, using the work of post-impressionist painter, and native son, Paul Cezanne as its centerpiece.

Paul Cézanne
The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque 1878-1879 Oil on canvas, 58 x 72 cm Paris, Musée d’Orsay © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Thierry Le Mage

Along with perhaps Kandinsky, Cezanne’s fragmenting, and his unique (at the time) breaking down of form and color to allude to his subject in an emotive rather than transcribed way, lead to the emergence of artists such as Miro and De Stael.

By visiting both exhibitions that comprise “The Grand Atelier du Midi,” one can see the story unfold of the artistic movements that changed the nature of Western painting between 1880 and 1960: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism and abstraction.”

The works chosen also reflect the exaltation painters felt when immersed in the Mediterranean lifestyle, and the obvious influence that the natural and sensual beauty of the “South” had on their art.

To express the pride organizer’s feel for the role the “Midi” has played in the development of Modern art, they let Van Gogh himself have the last word:

“I think that when all is said and done, all of the new art is in the South” he once famously said.

The great (Spaniard!) Picasso will too be honored this summer with several exhibitions in the city of Aubagne, Provence.

The shows include a number of largely-unknown works including one of the best surveys of Picasso’s ceramic sculpture, much of it exploring his graphic style of Primitivism in geometric faces and patterns, and some of the one hundred artworks that will be on view in the gorgeous Chapelle des Pénitents Noirs, have never before been seen in public.