The Artistry of the Other South of France : Few Americans vist the Languedoc-Roussillon, but the artists who were drawn to the area left behind a feast for the eyes. : The Languedoc-Roussillon includes the largest contiguous vineyard area in the world. : Destination: France

The A-9 autoroute follows the curve of the French coastline, running southwest from the mouth of the Rhone, past the ancient university town of Montpellier, past the medieval bastions of Beziers and Narbonne, along the salty lagoons that insulate the rocky coastal foothills from the sea, past Perpignan, the capital of Catalan France, and then up into the Pyrenees, right to the Spanish border.

Along its course, the highway passes through spectacular countryside, alternately lush and barren, earthy and lunar. What is most immediately striking about this part of France, though, isn’t so much the landscape itself as the way the landscape is illuminated. The light here is brilliant, haunting, memorable. Sometimes it seems searing and metallic, as if reflected off a hot tin roof; sometimes it’s radiantly clear, spilling down from the perfect deep blue skies; sometimes it grows moody and thick, moving over the hills so forcefully that it almost seems borne by the wind--the relentless tramontane that blows for days at a time here, always (say the locals) for three days, or for multiples of three.

Perhaps best known for its fishing ports and lush beaches, this corner of France, which hugs the Mediterranean coast from the Spanish border north to the Rhone and west, almost to Toulouse, is called the Languedoc-Roussillon. That’s its common name, at any rate, though in fact it consists of two quite different areas, the Languedoc and the Roussillon--which are, in turn, historical and romantic names for what are officially a cluster of modern-day departements , including the Herault, the Aude and the Pyrenees-Orientales.

The Languedoc-Roussillon (pronounced, approximately, LANGUH-dock ROO-see-yohn) is also famous for its rich history (here, at Tautavel, were found the oldest known human remains in Europe, dating back 450,000 years), for its excellent fruits and vegetables (which are shipped all over Europe) and for its wines, once rough and inexpensive but now increasingly fine (as in the Fortant de France and Pradel labels). In fact, the Languedoc-Roussillon includes the largest contiguous vineyard area in the world.

*

But the region is also famous for something else--something that surely has to do with its extraordinary light: Since early in this century, it has been an artistic hotbed of uncommon vigor, drawing nearly every major figure in 20th-Century French art to its hills and coastline, at one time or another. The first to come, in 1905, were Matisse and Andre Derain, who invented the intensely colorful, free-form school of landscape painting known as Fauvism here, in the seaside village of Collioure, six or eight miles north of the Spanish border.

Another seaside town, Banyuls-sur-Mer, even closer to Spain, was the birthplace (and workplace) of the famed sculptor Aristide Maillol. The town of Ceret in the Pyrenees became known as the “Mecca of Cubism,” having played host to Picasso and Braque when they were developing the idiom, between 1911 and 1913. After that, such artists as Chagall, Juan Gris, Kisling, Chaim Soutine, Andre Masson and Max Jacob came to live and work in the same place. Other parts of the region, over the years, have welcomed Jean Dubuffet, Jean Cocteau, Robert Delaunay, Raoul Dufy, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, Dali and Miro (from just across the border) and, more recently, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Buren, Richard Serra and the Catalan artists Antoni Tapies and Antoni Clave--among many others.

Artists still come to live and work in the Languedoc-Roussillon--and, happily for visitors, the region now celebrates its rich artistic tradition enthusiastically, with a splendidly refurbished and enlarged museum, a wine estate that mounts a New York- or Paris-quality exhibition every summer, a contemporary art foundation offering one of the more appealing gallery spaces in Europe and more. The attractions of its beach resorts and historical monuments aside, the Languedoc-Roussillon is fast becoming one of the best places in Western Europe to see 20th-Century art, both modern and contemporary.

At the center of the region’s new artistic ferment is the town of Ceret, perched in the Pyrenees southwest of Perpignan and only a hill or two away from Spain. Founded by Charlemagne in AD 814, Ceret became a strongly fortified redoubt and was fought over for centuries by warring French factions and by the French and Spanish. It found new life as an agricultural capital in the mid-19th Century and became known above all for its cherry orchards--the cherry having become practically the heraldic emblem of the place.

Today, Ceret is both a quiet town, its main road shaded by towering plane trees, and a busy one, with an active local social life and a manageable but highly visible tourist population. It is a pretty place, with houses built into old stone walls, and the partially ruined towers of its two main gates still standing with some authority by the side of the road. Its Eglise de St. Pierre, said to be the largest baroque church in the Roussillon, contains several nicely frescoed chapels and an impressive high altar from the Napoleonic period. Scattered around the city are sculptures by Maillol, Picasso and the Catalan sculptors Manolo Hugue and Mario Vives.

Among the artists, it was Hugue who “discovered” Ceret and who, indirectly, led to the establishment of its most important artistic attraction by far: its newly redesigned, expanded and enriched Musee d’Art Moderne. Hugue, who was a friend of Picasso’s, came to Ceret in 1909, moving into a large house there with several artist and composer friends. Because of them Picasso came, and because Picasso came Braque did too--and then, over the years, dozens of their friends and colleagues and rivals followed suit.

*

In 1934, the widow of the town’s late civic archivist began to collect paintings done in Ceret by this illustrious group. Her collection found a home in 1950, when another of Picasso’s friends, an artist named Pierre Brune, opened a small modern art museum on the site of a former prison in the heart of town. Picasso himself gave 53 works to the museum in the first three years of its life, including some wonderfully intense ceramic bowls and platters with a bullfight motif; at about the same time, Matisse donated 14 drawings he had made in nearby Collioure in 1905.

Proud of their growing assemblage of art, the citizens of Ceret founded an association of Amis du Musee or Friends of the Museum to support the place, and it was largely through their efforts that the museum has been upgraded recently by the French government to national museum status and that a professional curator, Josephine Matamoros, has been hired. It was also with their help that cultural authorities in Paris were persuaded, in the latter 1980s, to earmark nearly $5 million for the redesign and expansion of the institution. An architectural competition held in 1989 was won by the Catalan architect Jaume Freixa (who collaborated with Josep-Lluis Sert on both the Fondation Miro in Barcelona and the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul-de-Vence, on the French Riviera), in collaboration with Philippe Pous and Michel Gerber--and the new museum opened in 1992.

It is an uncommonly accessible place, both literally and figuratively. On the main boulevard that winds through Ceret, it has a clean-lined classical-modern facade with a broad pedestrian forecourt into which the sidewalk flows, so that anyone strolling up or down the avenue can step inside easily. The interior, appropriately enough, is flooded with natural light from both skylights and large windows. With its white walls and its floors in high-gloss off-white or bleached blond hardwood, it seems very cool and casual, and very Mediterranean.

The showpiece of its collection, besides the Matisse drawings and the stunning oversized pictographic mural Tapies executed especially for the place, is Picasso’s splendid “Portrait de Corina Pere Romeu” from 1902, given to the museum by the French government in honor of its rebirth. Other Picasso works here include the aforementioned bullfight ceramics and a superb little 1946 still-life, “Nature Mort au Crane et au Pichet” (Still-life with Skull and Pitcher). Elsewhere are works by Maillol, Chagall, Braque, Dali, Miro, Dufy, Cocteau, Albert Marquet, Andre Masson and others--including some Cezanne-ish paintings by museum founder Pierre Brune and some powerful drawings and terra-cotta heads by Manolo Hugue.

It is not a huge collection, and it is not overloaded with undisputed masterpieces, but it is highly enjoyable to view--particularly given the intimacy with which the museum is linked to the artists and their places of work and inspiration. Passing through these galleries, it is impossible to forget that the giants (and less-than-giants) whose art you see on the walls here were also living, breathing human beings who fit quite nicely into the cane chairs at the Grand Cafe--the town’s most popular artist’s hangout--a few yards away.

*

There’s a museum in Collioure, too, called the Musee Peske. Josephine Matamoros is in charge here, as well, but otherwise the place seems to have little in common with its counterpart in Ceret. Hidden away in a quite pretty Catalan-style house at the edge of a small, pine-framed public garden, the Musee Peske, named for a prominent local artist who left his collection to the town, has not benefited in any obvious way from the French government’s largess. Though it is a handsome enough exhibition space, it remains quite old-fashioned and, in places, rather dark. That Matamoros doesn’t pay the closest of attention to it might be guessed by the fact that a couple of amusing painted chairs by French artist Francois Baloffi have their labels switched.

Any important works that may have been included in the Collioure collection are now displayed in Ceret. What is worth seeing here, besides a few charming if characteristically facile Cocteau drawings and a clever sculpture--a dark felled log into which an antique lock and key are set--by the important contemporary Catalan sculptor Joan Brossa, is a wall of genre paintings by lesser-known but highly capable artists who worked in Collioure in the ‘20s and ‘30s, most notably a Fauve-style landscape by Georges d’Espagnat.

Smaller works, but by more important artists, can be found in Collioure’s unofficial art museum, though--a hotel/restaurant called Les Templiers. The walls of the dining room are jammed with paintings dating back three generations, some of them quite good, if few of them by world-famous artists. The Templiers’ leather-bound livres d’or or guest books, though, are little treasuries, containing not only the comments and signatures of scores of famed artists and writers, but also copious sketches and even watercolors by Picasso, Matisse, Raoul Dufy and the like. The books aren’t on display, but if you stay at the hotel or even stop by for lunch or dinner (the food is uneven, but can be quite good; try the soupe de poisson ) and express interest in the establishment’s illustrious past, proprietor Jojo Pous will almost certainly let you leaf through the volumes.

Perpignan is the capital of the Roussillon, and a city well worth visiting for all manner of reasons--among them its clean-lined, imposing Palace of the Kings of Majorca, its impressive cathedral and its museum of Catalan folklore (the Casa Pairal), as well as its handsome, unpretentious old quarter and its lively riverbank cafes. Art-lovers, though, should stop at the little Musee Hyacinthe Rigaud. Named for a local-born artist (1659-1743) who became official court painter to Kings Louis XIV and XV, this modest museum contains works not only by Rigaud and such other earlier French painters as Ingres, Gericault and Greuze, but also some minor Picassos, some rather more important Maillol sculptures and Dufy paintings, and a scattering of works by such present-day French and Spanish Catalan artists as Tapies, Clave and Jean Capdeville.

*

Art from the second half of the 20th Century, and often from approximately yesterday, is featured at two other unusual and attractive institutions in the Languedoc-Roussillon.

One of these, set in a gorgeous landscape of dramatic hills and rolling fields of vines in the very midst of the Cotes-du-Roussillon vineyard region, is the art-conscious winery called Chateau de Jau, a few miles west of Perpignan. While this estate, whose manor house dates in part from the 12th Century, is one of the region’s top wine producers (its wares are readily available in Canada), it has a growing reputation in the European artistic community for an adjunct that occupies one of its buildings--an ample and sophisticated art exhibition space called the Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains. Every summer in this venue, Sabine Daure, proprietor of the estate with her husband, Bernard, and her daughter Estelle, mounts a single major exhibition. Daure is herself an art collector and is very well connected in the international art world, and the annual show here (which begins in June and runs into fall) is always of serious quality and displayed with museum-like sophistication.

There’s also a winery connection, though not exactly a current one, with the other important contemporary art space in the region--the Lieu d’Art Contemporain, created in 1991 by Dutch artist Piet Moget, in the Languedoc port town of Sigean. L.A.C., as it is known, occupies a former wine cooperative exquisitely adapted for exhibition purposes. The interior of the two adjoining two-story structures has been effectively stripped, and the floors and walls are cool white. But selected architectural elements and actual winery machinery have been left in place--beautiful interior windows framed in stone, elegant iron pillars, massive oak beams, an ancient grape scale, two old-style gasoline pumps, even some entire concrete cuves , or wine storage tanks. These remnants of the structure’s past lend a particular, sometimes almost poignant, perspective to the cutting-edge contemporary art displayed in their midst.

The L.A.C. presents two shows a year, in spring and summer. The 1993 summer exhibition, for instance, was a “profile” of the noted Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, featuring 50 or so works by that gallery’s impressive international roster of artists. Included were several strong new canvases by Julian Schnabel, two eerily gory paintings by the notorious Andres Serrano, a superb picture by the Catalan artist Miguel Barcelo. To see work of this quality in such an out-of-the-way location seems quite remarkable--and, privately, at least, some local art-world figures say that they far prefer the L.A.C. to the museum in Ceret.

“There is something quite special about seeing art here,” says Layla Mogen, who helps her artist father run the space. “You’re not in a museum, you’re not being watched by guards. It’s just you and the art. It’s quite another spirit.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Languedoc Brushes With Art

Getting there: From LAX fly nonstop to Paris on United, Air France and AOM French Airlines and connect to Montpellier, France, on Air Inter. Or take British Air nonstop from LAX to London and transfer on British Air to Montpellier. Round-trip fares start at about $860. Montpellier is about 80 miles from Perpignan.

Where to see art: Cases-de-Pene: Fondation du Chateau de Jau. One exhibition every summer, running from approximately June 15 through the first Sunday in October. Admission free; in France, telephone 68-38-9138.

Ceret: Musee d’Art Moderne de Ceret, 8 Boulevard Marechal Joffre. Admission: about $4; children under 16 free. Guided tours of the museum are available upon request; tel. 68-87-2776, fax 68-87-3192.

Collioure: Musee Peske, 6 Route de Port Vendres; closed January and February. Admission: about $2.50; children under 12 free.

Perpignan: Musee Hyacinthe Rigaud, 16 Rue de l’Ange. Admission free; tel. 68-35-4340.

Sigean: Lieu d’Art Contemporain, Hameau du Lac. Two exhibitions are mounted during spring and summer, one running from just after Easter to approximately mid-June and the other from approximately late June to late August. Call or write for exact dates and scheduled exhibitions. Admission: about $4; children under 12 free; tel. 68-48-8362, fax 68-48-8332.

Where to stay and dine: Cases-de-Pene: Le Grill de Chateau de Jau (see above for address and phone). Not an actual restaurant, but a terrace next to the winery where a single fixed-price lunch--traditional French Catalan in style, accompanied by appropriate wines--is served for about $27 per person.

Ceret: Les Feuillants, 1 Boulevard La Fayette. An excellent restaurant, modern in style but based on traditional local dishes (about $120 for two); also an adjacent brasserie with a three-course menu for about $25 per person. Huge list of Languedoc-Roussillon wines. Three-room hotel upstairs (about $120-$180 per night); tel. 68-87-3788, fax 68-87-4468.

Collioure: Les Templiers, Quai Amiraute, tel. 68-98-3110, fax 68-98-0124. An unassuming hotel and restaurant, except for its famous guest books (see above) (rooms about $35-$75 per night; dinner about $100 for two). Relais des Trois Mas, Route de Port-Vendres, tel. 68-82-0507, fax 68-82-3808. A quiet luxury hotel with decor said to have been inspired by local artists (about $80-$340); the hotel dining room, La Balette, is excellent (about $150 for two).

Perpignan: Hotel Athena, 1 Rue Queya, tel. 68-34-3763. Small but pleasant rooms in a converted 14th-Century mansion in the heart of the old quarter (about $25-$75 per night). Park Hotel, 18 Boulevard J. Bourrat, tel. 68-35-1414. Classic old-style hotel, well-located, with a highly rated restaurant called Le Chapon Fin (rooms about $50-$100 per night; dinner about $140 for two). Le Relais St-Jean, 1 Cite Bartissol, tel. 68-51-2225. Restaurant serving well-cooked traditional Catalan cuisine ($60 for two). Le Vauban, 29 quai Vauban, tel. 68-51-0510. A lively brasserie with a varied menu (about $80 for two).

Sigean: Chateau de Villefalse, Route de Narbonne, tel. 68-48-5429, fax 68-48-3437. A small suite-only luxury hotel, opulently furnished, with a first-rate if expensive dining room (rooms about $240-$500 per night; dinner about $180 for two).

For more information: French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills 90212, (900) 990-0040 (calls cost 50 per minute).