Directed by François Lévy-Kuentz • Documentary • 2021 • 53 minutes
A group of friends meet up in the country to spend the summer together. They go to the beach, play cards, and take day trips in the surrounding region. But these aren’t everyday city folk on vacation. The hosts are Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Among the friends are some of the leading painters, photographers and poets of the day.
ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA WITH MAN RAY AND PICASSO tells the story of the group in the summer of 1937. The film is told largely from the point of view of photographer, filmmaker and painter Man Ray, using footage he shot (including some on the then-experimental Kodachrome), a wealth of photos, and excerpts from his autobiography. The other guests at the pension in the village of Mougins are Man Ray’s girlfriend, Ady Fidelin, a dancer and model from Guadeloupe; poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, and writer Roland Penrose, with photographer Lee Miller, who would go on to be the first to document the horrors of the Nazi death camps.
ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA WITH MAN RAY AND PICASSO captures the complex swirl of their relationships, the art they made—during a period in which Ray was transitioning to painting—and the looming end of an era of personal and social experimentation, as war rages in Spain and Second World War looms.
Up Next in Starring Picasso
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The Mystery of Picasso
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • Documentary • With Pablo Picasso,
Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1956 • 78 minutesPablo Picasso, the most influential artist of the twentieth century, is making a painting, just as French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear and Diabolique) is making...
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Picasso and Sima, Antibes 1946
Directed by Christian Tran • Documentary • 2009 • 58 minutes
In June 1946, the sculptor and photographer Michel Sima met with Pablo Picasso in Antibes. At Picasso's request, day after day Sima photographed Picasso's works-in-progress in the workshop he found for him at Grimaldi Palace.
The art...
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Guernica
Directed by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens • Documentary • 1949 • 14 minutes
In 1937, Spanish nationalists called on Nazi and Italian Fascist forces to bomb the Basque town of Guernica. The horrors of the bombing led Pablo Picasso to create perhaps his greatest work, “Guernica”: a massive pain...
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