Belles Rives: F Scott Fitzgerald at Juan-les-Pins

A long-held wish came true last weekend. I went to the Hotel Belles Rives near Antibes on the Côte d’Azur. We were staying with old friends nearby and this, to my delight, was where they had booked for dinner on Saturday evening.

For here is the villa that F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda rented for the summer in 1926. They had enjoyed their time on the French Riviera the previous year with wealthy American socialites Gerald and Sara Murphy and their bohemian circle that included Gertrude Stein and Picasso, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and their mutual friend Ernest Hemingway. So Scott and Zelda returned with their five-year-old daughter Scottie to recapture the experience.

Ninety years ago, the property on the edge of the shore at Juan-les-Pins was called the Villa St. Louis, and was supposed to be a retreat from their frenetic life in Paris, where Scott was trying to write a new novel after the publication – to surprisingly indifferent sales – of The Great Gatsby, but constantly getting sidetracked by friends like Ernest Hemingway and the bottle. Zelda, meanwhile, was studying dance. 

The heat and light, the blue Mediterranean sea and scented umbrella pines, the lush, bright flowers and balmy nights provided Fitzgerald with a sensuous backdrop for the novel which would become Tender is the Night: the “diffused magic of the hot sweet South … the soft-pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below”. Even today, when development has scarred the landscape he would have seen, his descriptions are instantly recognisable.

Though the building has been extended, it is still owned by the same family who turned the Villa St. Louis into a hotel in 1929. The ambiance of the 1920s is carefully preserved and enhanced, and the entrance foyer (pictured below) leads straight out onto the fabled terrace above the sea.

As the sun set and the lights came on across the hills towards Cannes and on the yachts at anchor, a small green light began to blink at the end of a jetty on the shallow rocky shore. Could something similar have been here on Fitzgerald’s previous visits to the area and found its way into the book as the green light on the dock that Jay Gatsby makes a symbol of his longing for Daisy?

As we sipped Bellinis overlooking the water, it was impossible not to be “borne back ceaselessly into the past”. Fitzgerald’s writing is remarkable for its sense of loss and nostalgia, even for the moment that has only just passed. It occurred to me that the Portuguese word saudade, untranslatable in English, comes closest to capturing the yearning sadness that infuses his most lyrical passages, trying to hold fast to moments of fleeting beauty. All the more poignant when you think of Zelda's descent and the subject matter of Tender is the Night, a novel that would not be published until 1934 due to her illness and Scott's need to earn easier money in the interim to pay for her medical care.

For the Fitzgeralds, the summer of 1926 on the Cap d’Antibes did not prove idyllic, despite the setting. Zelda was close to the madness that would blight the rest of her life. Scott made little progress on Tender is the Night and took refuge in drink, as he always did. Neither could Zelda restrain herself. Their increasingly reckless and erratic behaviour resulted in strained friendships with the Murphys and others. One night Zelda threw herself headfirst down a flight of stone steps because she was so incensed that the dancer Isadora Duncan was flirting with Scott.

Sadly, the rented villa was the scene of vicious marital arguments. In adulthood, Scottie recalled her parents fighting bitterly and constantly. Zelda kept fully packed luggage in every room, threatening departure at the slightest grievance. The dream of a successful life together was coming to an end.

The story goes that one night husband and wife had been drinking hard, and – inevitably – fighting. Rising to Zelda’s taunts about his professional and personal failures, Fitzgerald stormed out. At a nearby restaurant in Juan-les-Pins where an orchestra was employed every evening to entertain the diners, he persuaded the musicians to come home with him, no doubt offering a ridiculous amount of money. He led them into the Villa St. Louis, ushered them into a room – and locked them in. He commanded them to play all night if they hoped to be released by dawn. Then he turned to Zelda and asked her if she still thought he was a loser.

In the present day, the music comes from the piano bar, a grand room with stunning décor that carefully evokes the 1920s and 30s. What looks like a painting by Braque on the left is actually a picture viewed through two separate windows. Through the window on the right, you can see the dining terrace.

We were a party of seven, and we had a wonderful evening. The food was gorgeous, mainly fish, and beautifully presented. The lemon soufflé for dessert was heavenly! I loved all the art deco details, and the way each corner is designed to evoke the atmosphere of the Jazz Age.

A glamorous dinner near Antibes

A few miles inland from the yachts at harbour and the chic nightspots of Antibes and Juan les Pins, our old friends Trevor and Angela have a summer home. In this light and airy place, surrounded by gleaming pool and Italian garden, we laugh a lot and remember the first trip we made to Provence shortly after leaving university. We still can't quite work out how the four of us fitted into Trevor's Mini Metro, given there was also Angie's enormous suitcase to factor in, plus Pete who hitched a lift down from the party to Portsmouth, where we took the night ferry.

Life has changed considerably since then, but we meet every year in one or other of our very different parts of the South of France. This time we were the honoured guests, and it was a night of some splendour, with dinner for six at home on the terrace prepared by Michelin-starred chef Serge Chollet.

Champagne and canapes were served promptly at seven. By the time we were summoned to the table, we were all salivating, such were the enticing glimpses of what was to come. The first course was a millefeuille of Mediterranean vegetables and crab with a passion fruit coulis and a spaghetti of beetroot.

For the main course, Monsieur Chollet served us breast of duck with lemon, fennel and polenta:

And for dessert, a dreamy lime panna cotta sitting on a mysterious nest. He made us taste and try to guess what it was before he let us in on his secret ingredient - green and tangy sweet with a slightly crunchy texture. It was utterly delicious and I was hoping he wouldn't think I was being rude when I suggested it was courgette (zucchini) confit - but it turned out that it was! Not the best photo, below, but by that stage it was dark and the candles were lit.

The next morning, we were having breakfast when Serge reappeared to collect something he had left in the kitchen. I say reappeared, actually he roared up in his Porsche. It was a fitting finale to a sumptuous meal - and another glimpse of the glamorous Riviera lifestyle. And all the better for experiencing it with very generous friends. Cheers, Trevor and Angela!

  

The concert and the final painting

The trouble with being endlessly curious is that there's always something else you'd like to know. Perhaps curiosity is a prerequisite of being a writer, or a storyteller at least: you are searching for a coherent narrative, striving to flesh it with detail.

So when I wrote yesterday about Nicolas de Staël listening to an orchestral concert in Paris and being so affected by the music that he rushed back to his painting studio in Antibes, I realised almost as soon as I had posted that I couldn't leave it at that. What was the music that had struck him so deeply? What was the last painting he worked on so feverishly and left incomplete?

When I found out, the answer was so poignant and made sense of an image I'd seen previously without understanding its significance, that I had to come back with a postscript.

To some extent this PS is also a correction of various details in the first post. It's a given that the more research you do, the more unreliable initial sources are proved to be, and so it is with this story. For example, I found a photograph of the building in Antibes where de Staël had his studio, which cannot possibly have been on the fourth floor:

There were also suggestions that a failed love affair - "un amour d'idiot" - had contributed to his despair, rather than the disparaging critic. As for the music, it seems the artist attended two concerts in Paris: the first featured pieces by one of his favourite avant garde composers, the Austrian Anton Webern, and the second - the crucial one - was a performance of Schoenberg's Serenade for Seven Instruments and Bass Voice (op. 24).

 

The Schoenberg concert was on March 6th, 1955, and it seems that the drama of de Staël's overnight flight south to begin painting followed almost immediately by his death was just that: a dramatic myth.

If he died on March 16th, then he painted feverishly for at least a week. But when you see what he produced in that time, it's certainly possible to believe that he hardly stopped for food or rest.

His penultimate canvas was The Piano (reproduced above) which was more than two metres by one and a half metres in size. And the artist's last, unfinished work, was The Concert, a truly massive six metres by three and a half.

The artist at Le Castellet

Le Ciel Rouge, 1952

One trail always leads to another…and so my discovery that the cookery writer Elizabeth David lived for some months in a large house in Ménerbes far more associated with another famous name from the 1950s inevitably made me want out find out more about the artist Nicolas de Staël. Who was he and what brought him to Le Castellet?

As it turned out, it was a romantic, bohemian and ultimately tragic tale, all too fitting for the gothic undertones Elizabeth David had sensed in the fortified medieval manor house (post here).

Nicolas de Staël was born in 1914 into an aristocratic Russian family in St Petersburg. Five years later the family was forced into exile as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. When both their parents died in Poland, he and his two sisters were sent to Brussels. He studied in Brussels, latterly at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. In the 1930s he travelled widely, living first in Paris, then – in search of bright light - in North Africa where he first met his partner Jeannine Guillou in Morocco. At the beginning of World War II, he joined the French Foreign Legion, and fought in Tunisia.

By the end of the war he was living in Nice. During the occupation life for an impoverished immigrant was hard and he supported his sick wife, Jeannine, her son from an earlier relationship, and their daughter by working as a furniture polisher. Jeannine died in 1946, in childbirth according to some sources, or of an illness brought on by malnutrition, according to others. De Staël met Françoise Chapouton in the spring of 1946, and they married in May.

Back in Paris, de Staël acquired a studio near to Georges Braque's and the two painters became close friends. In 1950 he had a one-man exhibition in the capital and sold well to influential collectors. Success followed in Britain and the USA. Soon de Staël had a top New York dealer on his side.

He was evolving a distinctive style using thick impasto. Although he was painting non-figurative pictures, he did not consider himself an abstract painter, saying, "One does not start from nothing, and a painting is always bad if it has not been preceded by contact with nature."

Composition, 1949

                                               Parc des Sceaux, 1952

Agrigente, 1954

Painting directly from nature, de Staël applied brilliant flat colours with a minimum of detail to suggest the essence of a vista. This simplification of a scene that was nevertheless utterly recognisable was one of his biggest contributions to the development of modern painting. It seems to me to encapsulate 1950s modernism.

But however successful he became, the artist was dogged by insomnia, exhaustion and depression. “All my life, I had a need to think painting, to paint in order to liberate myself from all the impressions, all the feelings, and all the anxieties of which the only solution I know is painting,” he said.

Nu Couché Bleu, 1955

In 1953, although he kept his studio in Paris and travelled back regularly, he felt he could work best in isolation in the south of France. In what was then the run-down village of Ménerbes, he found Le Castellet up for sale. It seemed to offer the light and privacy he was searching for. But he was always drawn back to the Mediterranean, and soon found yet another studio within a stone’s throw of the harbour at Antibes. The brightness and colour of the Côte d'Azur was just beyond his fourth-floor eyrie: the harbour, beaches, Fort Carré and its constant marine traffic that featured prominently in his later works.

Sailboats at Antibes, 1954

In March 1955 he attended a symphony concert in Paris. Inspired by the music he left town immediately afterwards and raced back through the night to his studio overlooking the ramparts of the old town of Antibes, desperate to capture the images stirred in his mind by the music.

As soon as he arrived in Antibes he began work on the painting. He worked without food or sleep, like a man possessed as the paint took shape on the vast canvas. As the light failed, and further work became impossible, he walked away from the unfinished painting. He grabbed some paper and dashed off three letters, then burned his sketches for all future projects. At the window of his studio he looked out for the last time, then jumped into the rue de Revely, several floors below. Late that evening, a neighbour walking her dog found his twisted body. He had died instantly, at the age of 41.

Had the balance of his mind been disturbed by a recent meeting with a disparaging art critic? This became the accepted and enduring legend. Yet there was no question that he was commercially and critically successful, with a steady demand for new works. He had suffered much in his personal life, though, from exile to the early loss of his parents and then Jeannine. Perhaps it was all too much, and in the end, art could not compensate.

                                                  Nu Couché, 1954

His paintings are still highly desirable – perhaps more so than ever. Nicolas de Staël’s Nu Couché, painted in Ménerbes in 1954, was sold last year in Paris for €7 million, the auction record for any work of art in France in 2011.