Word: azure
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anyone who has not been there, the Cannes Film Festival sounds like paradise: free movies, bountiful booze, great food and beautiful people all converge under the sunny skies of the Cóte d'Azur. Would that it were so. In reality, the festival is a grotesque trade fair. The few good movies are mobbed; the best restaurants are overbooked; traffic jams glut the countryside; it often rains. The festival celebrates money, not art, and only the industry's hustlers seem to have fun. For anyone else, a day in Cannes is like a week in Vegas...
...ritual, exercising a civil right, and in the process hungrily consummating a winter's yearnings. The summer vacation season is upon them, draining the gray, rainy cities of the north, flooding the beaches of Spain's Costa del Sol, France's Côte d'Azur, Italy's Capri and the Greek islands...
...main focus of the vacation onslaught has been that 160-mile strip of overbuilt beach front in the south of France, the Côte d'Azur. Local rail terminals are overflowing as additional sun worshipers pour into Saint-Tropez, Sainte-Maxime, Cannes, Nice and Menton. When they arrive, along with myriad motorists who are clogging France's autoroute du soleil, a rude shock is waiting: no accommodations are available. As many as 1,000 people a day are redirected by the local tourist office to the Maritime Alps, inland and anywhere from 50 to 100 miles...
...pitch a tent illegally in a parking lot, on a piece of highly desirable beach or even, as one did, on a shady traffic island in the middle of Cannes. Typical is Axel Koenigs, a young West German bank employee who drove to the Côte d'Azur with two friends. After trying 40 campgrounds without luck (and meantime sleeping in his Volkswagen), he invaded a freshly cut hayfield. Says he: "Since there is no possibility to find solitude, we intend to make the best...
...might call mine," says Motherwell, "it is simply a blue that feels warm, something that cannot be accounted for chemically or technically but only as a state of mind." This blue has literary prototypes, embedded in Motherwell's reading of French verse. It is Mallarmé's azur, the color of oceanic satisfaction. It is the hue of Baudelaire's sea, the color of escape. But it is also pure ideated feeling. One cannot say that a painting like Summer Open, with Mediterranean Blue, 1974, with its softly respirant field of ultramarine, "depicts" a seascape...