A Belated Salute for 2 Birthplaces of Modern Art : Art: Collioure and Ceret, obscure French towns that inspired the creators of Fauvism and Cubism, are feted by the government with a refurbished museum.

After a little coaxing and a couple of anise aperitifs at the bar of his port side Hotel des Templiers here, it is not hard to persuade Rene Pous to open the hotel safe and bring out his guest books.

Pous, 65, is justifiably proud of the two leather-bound volumes. Started in the late 1940s, when the Hotel des Templiers was a hangout for French writers and artists, the books are themselves minor art and literary treasures, containing original sketches, gouaches and watercolors by Picasso, Matisse, Dufy and others.

A 1948 watercolor by Raoul Dufy, for example, is a simple painting of three sailboats in the Collioure harbor, with the bare, thickly textured paper of the guest book forming the white of the sails. Dufy (1887-1953) added a little rhyming poem:

Collioure sans voiles. C’est un soir sans etoiles. (Collioure without sails is an evening without stars.)

A few pages later, dated 1950, post-Impressionist master Henri Matisse offered a nostalgic sketch of Collioure when he first arrived in 1905, depicting the train that brought him from nearby Perpignan, his boarding house and studio on the coast. Matisse and fellow artists Derain, Braque, Othon and Friesz fell in love with the bright Mediterranean light of Collioure, creating a movement later known as Fauvism.

Students of modern French art are familiar with such artistic meccas as Giverny and Barbizon. But Rene Pous’ guest books are evidence of the rich art history found in this obscure fishing town near the Spanish border and the nearby Eastern Pyrenees’ village of Ceret.

During 1909-1914, artists including Picasso, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Kisling, Matisse and Braque all lived in Ceret, putting it on the map as one of the centers of the Cubism movement.

In belated recognition of the Collioure and Ceret contributions to modern art, the French government recently unveiled the renovated, redesigned Museum of Modern Art in Ceret. Although the museum had existed in Ceret since 1950, when it was installed in a former prison by artist Pierre Brune, a friend of many of the Cubists, it was only recently upgraded to national museum rank with a professional curator, Josephine Matamoros.

In a highly centralized country where most national art treasures are hoarded in Paris, the development of regional and local museums has been an important recent move, instigated by Minister of Culture Jack Lang and French national museums director Jacques Sallois.

Hoping to attract cultural tourists to the impoverished Roussillon region, site of some of the most violent recent demonstrations by farmers opposed to government agricultural policies, the French state invested nearly $5 million in the first phase of the Ceret museum’s redesign by Catalan architects Jaume Freixa and Philippe Pous.

Barcelona artist Antoni Tapies was commissioned to do the rather somber ceramic murals that decorate the museum’s entrance.

To give it a dramatic centerpiece, the national museum system assigned the Ceret museum an impressive early Picasso oil, “Portrait of Corina Pere Romeu,” given to France in the estate of Jacqueline Picasso.

The “blue period” portrait hangs in the entry hall of the clean, natural-light museum that also features other works by Picasso, Matisse, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Dufy, Kisling, Joan Miro, Max Jacob, Gris and museum founder Pierre Brune.

Other sections of the museum feature contemporary paintings, including works by American sculptor Richard Serra and Catalan artist Tapies.

Tapies, 68, a Catalan nationalist jailed by Spanish police under the Franco regime, attended the opening in July and said he was delighted with the museum, both artistically and politically.

“During the struggle against Franco,” Tapies said, “this region was a place of refuge for artists. When I was jailed in Barcelona in 1966 after participating in student demonstrations, Picasso and other artists donated paintings to pay for our fines. This museum is a way of saying, ‘Thank you.’ ”

Ceret--a modest agricultural town with no dramatic vistas or features, inhabited by a population that still prefers the regional Catalan language to French--seems an unlikely artistic mecca.

But just as the light of Collioure appealed to the Fauvists, the dark earth tones of Ceret matched the more somber needs of Cubism. Ceret’s central Grand Cafe, on a square shaded by giant plane trees, was for years an important gathering place for some of the world’s greatest artists. Years after their fame was already achieved, the artists returned to Ceret and Collioure on visits.

Collioure, famed for its anchovies, has a smaller hillside modern art museum in a house covered with grape vines and surrounded by eucalyptus and Scotch pine trees that Picasso once offered to buy.

In Case-de-Pene, about an hour away from Collioure by car, art patrons and vineyard owners Bernard and Sabine Daure have a collection of modern art by Serra, Wolfgang Laib, Richard Long and Lawrence Weiner in a gallery adjacent to their Chateau de Jau.

“I remember when Picasso came to Collioure in 1956,” Sabine Daure, 54, said casually recently during a lunch she hosted at the Chateau de Jau. “I remember it well because he was having an affair with a young girl who was also the mistress of my brother-in-law. Picasso was already well known but he hadn’t yet become the artistic star he later became. There was no tourism to speak of in those days, perhaps only 100 families each summer. You could always see Picasso on the beach playing with his children.”