One of the first stops in Aix en Provence for us is the Caumont Art Center. We really wanted to visit at least one of the museums to escape the heat and this one had an interesting exhibit so after some back and forth we decide to visit it. It is quite expensive to enter and it is not a large museum so whether to visit or not hinges on what the temporary exhibit is really. After paying the entrance in a modern building we make our way to the old entrance where the actual museum is located.
The museum is located in a former private mansion which is quite impressive, you can imagine how many balls were held here during its heyday.
There are even a couple furnished rooms that you can visit to see how they looked way back. The one thing that comes to our mind is….busy. Lots of objects, paintings, furniture all thrown together. Or maybe that is how they are shown now and not how they looked back then?
And then it is time for the temporary exhibit. It is modern art, so something we enjoy but we do not necessarily know the artist which is quite famous it seems, Niki de Saint Phalle.
There is a helpful biography here though where we learn that she was one of the few female monumental sculptors with a style described as outsider art. She had no formal training in art with her style evolving over the years as we can see from the exhibits.
Some of the art we enjoy most is the one created from melted plastic figurines, be they army men or babies, creating dinosaurs and monsters, quite inventive.
The art is in naive style and we enjoy the explanations given for each of them and try to look at the many interesting details.
The one era in her development that we can relate to, as we have seen such art also in Mexico, is the colorful and bright art inspired from Latin American culture, at least in our opinion.
There is a suprising number of people in the exhibit and we explore the couple rooms thoroughly, the exhibit is interesting but it seems small compared to how much the entrance cost.
One of her most famous series is that of nanas, celebrating the fecund female form and featuring large breasts and buttocks and there are quite a few of them on display here. And then there is the Golden Kraken or at least that is our name for one artwork that really jumps at us while exploring.
After finishing with the exhibit we also visit the famous but small interior garden and enjoy the quiet and solitude for a while before exiting the museum and continuing our exploration of the city.
