Seven days
A week of art in Provence, from a Van Gogh ward to a Gehry tower
Provence has more art within an hour of this house than most capital cities, and for one month of the year it has the two biggest festivals in France running at once: theatre in Avignon, photography in Arles. Add two Van Gogh sites, Cézanne’s studio left exactly as he died in it, and forty sculptures along a walk through a vineyard, and a week is not quite long enough.
Saturday
Five minutes on foot
Arrival day, so nothing involving a drive. The Château de Gordes stands at the top of the village — Renaissance, on eleventh-century foundations — and inside it is the Pol Mara museum, a Flemish painter who spent his last decades here. Worth knowing as you walk up: in 1948 a group of painters from the Denise René gallery in Paris came down to Gordes together, Victor Vasarely among them. He bought a house, and in the 1970s restored the château to hang his own work. It stayed until 1996. The op art has gone to Aix; the habit of the building stuck.
Sunday
L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, 17km
The Sunday brocante is several hundred antique dealers along the canals and through the old town, under the mossy waterwheels that drove the silk and paper mills. This is the third-largest antiques market in Europe and the trade comes from Paris and London to buy, so it is three hours of looking hard at objects. In the middle of it, the Campredon Centre d’Art occupies an eighteenth-century mansion and runs two or three substantial shows a year — and on a July morning it is also the only cool, quiet room within half a mile.
Monday
Arles, about an hour
The biggest day by a distance. LUMA Arles is Frank Gehry’s tower on the old railway yards — eleven thousand stainless steel blocks that catch the light differently every hour — with contemporary exhibitions inside and a park around it. Ten minutes’ walk away, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh: it holds no permanent collection but borrows one or two of his canvases for each show and hangs them against living artists, so what you see depends on when you come. Then the Espace Van Gogh, the old Hôtel-Dieu he was taken to after the night with the razor, its courtyard garden replanted to match the painting he made of it from an upstairs window. It is a library and a cultural centre now, and the courtyard costs nothing — which makes it, oddly, the most direct encounter with him in the town.
Tuesday
The market, then the pigment
Gordes market fills the square on Tuesday morning and you can walk to it. In the afternoon, Roussillon: cliffs in red, orange and seven or eight separate yellows, left by ochre workings that ran until the 1930s. This is the day art stops being something on a wall. The pigment was dug out of these hills, washed in settling basins, dried, fired to deepen the colour and sold across Europe by the tonne — and some of it ended up ground into oil on canvases now hanging in Paris and New York. The Sentier des Ocres runs through the old workings in half an hour. Wear something you do not mind staining.
Wednesday
Saint-Rémy and Les Baux, 40 minutes
Saint-Paul-de-Mausole is a twelfth-century monastery that has been a psychiatric hospital since the Revolution and still is. Van Gogh admitted himself in May 1889 and stayed a year, painting around a hundred and fifty canvases: the olive groves, the cypresses, the enclosed wheatfield below his window and, looking east over it before sunrise in June, The Starry Night. You go in through a Romanesque cloister that is one of the loveliest small spaces in Provence, past a wing that is a working clinic, to a reconstruction of his room. The field is still there. In the afternoon, the Carrières des Lumières at Les Baux projects paintings across the walls and floor of a disused bauxite quarry in near-darkness — not a gallery, makes no claim to be, and holds children who would not last twenty minutes anywhere else on this list.
Thursday
Aix, about an hour
Cézanne’s studio at Les Lauves is a plain house on a hill, built in 1902 and left as it was when he died in 1906: his coats on the hook, the bottles and the plaster cupid and the skulls he rearranged for the still lifes, and a slot cut in the wall to get the big canvases out. Twenty minutes further up is the terrace he climbed to look at Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which he painted some eighty times and never finished with. In town, the Musée Granet holds Cézannes of its own alongside the Planque collection — Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Giacometti — which is the best single room of paintings in Provence.
Friday
Château La Coste, about an hour
A working vineyard north of Aix where the owner has spent twenty years inviting artists and architects to choose a spot and make something for it. The result is a four-kilometre walk through vines, woods and olive groves with more than forty permanent installations: a Louise Bourgeois spider over a reflecting pool, a Richard Serra wedged into a hillside, pavilions by Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry and Oscar Niemeyer, a chapel by Tracey Emin, work by Sophie Calle and Ai Weiwei. Two to three hours at a reasonable pace, almost all outdoors, and the only day on this list where nobody asks you to be quiet. There is a restaurant at the end of it.
Saturday
Avignon, on the way out
If the flight is late enough. The Musée Angladon is a private collection in an eighteenth-century townhouse — Degas, Manet, Sisley, Modigliani, Picasso, Cézanne — and it holds Wagons de chemin de fer, painted at Arles in August 1888. That is the only Van Gogh permanently on show anywhere in Provence. The whole museum takes an hour, which is exactly the right size. A few streets away, the Collection Lambert is the contemporary counterweight: two hôtels particuliers knocked together and one of the better contemporary collections in France.
In July, both festivals run at once
This is the thing to know when you are choosing your week. The Festival d’Avignon was founded by Jean Vilar in 1947 and is the oldest and most important theatre festival in France; it runs for the first three weeks of July. The flagship venue is the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais des Papes — medieval walls holding two thousand people under the open sky, which is as good a room for theatre as exists anywhere.
Alongside it, and far larger by volume, is the Off: an open-access fringe where anybody can take a venue and put a show on. Something like seventeen hundred productions across a hundred and forty venues, and the whole city becomes the festival — every courtyard, chapel, garage and cellar has something in it, actors hand you flyers in the street, and you can see four shows in a day for the price of a decent dinner.
Avignon is thirty-eight kilometres away, which makes it an evening rather than an expedition — and a house with a pool to come back to at midnight is a better proposition than a hotel room in a town at thirty-five degrees.
And Arles is running at the same time. The Rencontres de la Photographie opens in early July, days into Avignon, and runs until the beginning of October. For roughly three weeks you can have theatre one evening and fifty photography exhibitions the next day, both within an hour, from the same house.
The photography festival, in more detail
Les Rencontres d’Arles was founded in 1970 by the Arles photographer Lucien Clergue with the writer Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette, and it is now the most important photography festival in the world. It runs for three months, from early July to early October — which is to say, across the whole of the high season.
What makes it unlike other festivals is where it puts the work. More than fifty exhibitions are installed across the historic fabric of the town: in deconsecrated churches, in cloisters, in the chapel of a seventeenth-century college, in the vaulted halls of a disused railway workshop. You buy one pass and spend a day, or three, walking from one to the next through streets that are themselves the subject of half the paintings in this guide.
It is busiest in the opening week in early July, when the photography world arrives en masse and the town is unrecognisable. Come in September and you have the same fifty exhibitions with a tenth of the people standing in front of them.
Two Van Gogh places, and they are not the same thing
People conflate them constantly. Arles is where he lived and worked for fifteen months from February 1888 — the sunflowers, the night café, the yellow bedroom, the drawbridge — and where he was hospitalised at the end of it. The Yellow House was destroyed by bombing in 1944 and there is nothing to see at the site. The café on the Place du Forum has been repainted the yellow of Café Terrace at Night and is a tourist trap of the first order; have a coffee there anyway, because the square is lovely and you will want to have done it.
Saint-Rémy is where he went next, by his own decision, and where he painted the work most people picture when they picture Van Gogh. If you only do one, do Saint-Rémy: it is closer, it is quieter, the cloister is beautiful, and the building is genuinely the one in the paintings.
Where the actual paintings are
Worth knowing before you plan a day around it: Provence kept the landscapes and lost the pictures. The Arles and Saint-Rémy canvases are in Amsterdam, Paris, New York, London and St Petersburg. There is no permanent Van Gogh in Arles and none at Saint-Rémy.
The exceptions are the Angladon in Avignon, which owns one, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, which borrows. Everything else here is either a place he stood or an entirely different kind of art — and it is the second half of that sentence that people underestimate before they arrive.
If you only have one day
Saint-Rémy in the morning and Les Baux in the afternoon. Forty minutes each way, both the Van Gogh and the spectacle, and you are back in the pool before dinner.
And if Van Gogh is not the draw at all: Château La Coste on one day, LUMA and the Rencontres on another, and you will have seen more serious contemporary art and photography than a week in most European capitals would give you.
More about the Luberon