Painting the French Riviera review – about as erotic and glamorous as a wet day in Margate

Royal Academy of Arts, London
They’ve marginalised Matisse and given Picasso the cold shoulder – and what’s left seems more informed by pedantic geography than sensual art

The French Riviera is not a place. It is a dream of paradise, one of those Arcadias we long for – timeless, perfect worlds saturated with light. In the modern age, artists found theirs in the south of France. Yet this exhibition misses the point entirely. Instead of the modern myth of the Med, what we get here is a pedantic obsession with the geography of France’s southern coast. Artists get rewarded for which bit of it they painted. This leads to some serious distortions.

The neo-impressionists – the dot-fixated movement led by Paul Signac – and their paintings of the Côte d’Azur get a grand, spacious setting. That’s OK; though when you’ve seen one pixelated shoreline, you’ve seen them all. What’s baffling is that Henri Matisse and the Fauves have been squeezed into a smaller, less weighty adjoining display. The revolution that Matisse and his friends enacted at the seaside town of Collioure, replacing nature with the colours in their heads, was far more radical, exciting and visually brilliant than Signac and co. I couldn’t fathom it.