French Riviera Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

About French Riviera Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

By the ULTIMATE French Riviera Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

The Riviera's painters are famous: Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Chagall and Léger all have museums here, and our companion story tells their tale. This is the other half of the story: the architects, designers and collectors who made the coast a laboratory of modern art, from Eileen Gray's villa above the sea to the Fondation Maeght, the Villa Noailles and the Espace de l'Art Concret. Here is the back story, and where to see it.

A villa on the rocks

Between 1926 and 1929, the designer Eileen Gray built a white villa on the rocks of Cap Martin with her companion, the architect Jean Badovici, and named it E-1027, a code that interweaves their initials. It is one of the founding houses of modern architecture by the sea.

Gray left the villa in 1932. Long afterwards, Le Corbusier spent a few weeks there in 1937, 1938 and 1939 and painted murals on its walls, and in 1952 he built his famous Cabanon, a wooden cabin of 3.66 by 3.66 metres, on a plot next to the Étoile de Mer restaurant beside the villa. The villa has been restored, and the whole site, owned by the Conservatoire du Littoral, is open to visitors as Cap Moderne, which includes the Riviera's only UNESCO World Heritage site. Visit details and booking are on capmoderne.com.

On the Riviera, modernism arrived not in the cities but on the rocks and among the pines.

The Fondation Maeght

In the pines below Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the Fondation Maeght was inaugurated on 28 July 1964. The Maeght family built it with the Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, whom Joan Miró had introduced to them, and it describes itself as France's first independent art foundation.

The building and its gardens are a single work of art. In the Giacometti courtyard stand figures including Walking Man I and II, Standing Woman I and II and Large Head, made in 1959 and 1960 and first meant for a plaza in New York. In the Miró Labyrinth, made with the ceramicists Josep Llorens Artigas and Joan Gardy Artigas in ceramic, Carrara marble, iron, bronze and concrete, you follow a white line on the walls, Ariadne's thread, from one sculpture to the next.

The painters' museums

From Saint-Paul it is a short drive to the museums of the painters. On the Cimiez hill in Nice, the Musée Matisse occupies a red villa among the olive trees, and its exhibition Henri Matisse – Alex Katz runs from 28 October 2026 to 18 January 2027. Below it, the Musée national Marc Chagall is one of the three national museums of the Alpes-Maritimes, with the Musée national Fernand Léger in Biot and the Musée national Pablo Picasso – La Guerre et la Paix in Vallauris, the town of potters, where Picasso painted War and Peace on the vault of a chapel.

In Antibes, the Musée Picasso fills the Château Grimaldi on the ramparts. At Cagnes-sur-Mer, Renoir bought the Collettes estate in 1907 and had the house built in 1908; it opened as a museum in 1960, with his studios and about a dozen original paintings. In Le Cannet, the Musée Bonnard stands where Pierre Bonnard lived at Le Bosquet, and in Menton the Bastion on the seafront is part of the Musée Jean Cocteau. For the full painters' story, read our companion piece.

Villa Noailles and the Var

Further west, above Hyères, the Villa Noailles is a modernist house by Robert Mallet-Stevens. Today it is a centre for contemporary art and design, home of the Design Parade festivals of product design in Hyères and interior architecture in Toulon, and of an international festival of fashion and photography.

In Saint-Tropez, L'Annonciade is the town's museum of modern art, and the citadel above the port houses the Musée d'histoire maritime.

The Espace de l'Art Concret

Inland from Cannes, at Mouans-Sartoux, the Espace de l'Art Concret was born of the meeting of two collectors, Sybil Albers and Gottfried Honegger, with the town. In 2000 the couple gave their collection to the French state on two conditions: that it be shown permanently in a building made for it, and that it be the heart of a coherent project around concrete art. The building by Gigon and Guyer opened on 26 June 2004.

The Albers-Honegger Donation, listed as a National Treasure, holds nearly 800 works of geometric abstraction, and since 2020 the centre has carried the Ministry of Culture's label of contemporary art centre of national interest. Its current exhibition, from a residency partnership with the Albers Foundation, runs from 28 March 2026 to 21 February 2027.

Palaces of the Belle Époque

The Riviera's grandest house is a collector's dream. The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild stands on the neck of Cap Ferrat between Nice and Monaco, surrounded by nine themed gardens, French, Spanish, Florentine, Sèvres, lapidary, Japanese, exotic, Provençal and a rose garden, and it is open every day. In Vieux Nice, the Palais Lascaris on rue Droite is a Baroque palace run by the city as a museum, and the Opéra Nice Côte d'Azur stands a block from the Promenade.

In Cannes, the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès was completed in 1983 and opened with Scorsese's The King of Comedy; its red-carpeted steps are the festival's stage each May.

Cultural calendar

Festival de Cannes: the 80th edition will be held from 11 to 22 May 2027 (festival-cannes.com).

Musée Matisse: Henri Matisse – Alex Katz runs from 28 October 2026 to 18 January 2027 (musee-matisse-nice.org).

Espace de l'Art Concret: the current exhibition runs from 28 March 2026 to 21 February 2027 (espacedelartconcret.fr).

Villa Noailles: the 2027 Design Parade festivals in Hyères and Toulon will be announced on villanoailles.com.

What's new

Eileen Gray's Villa E-1027 has been restored and is open to visitors as part of Cap Moderne. Checked October 2026 on capmoderne.com.

MAMAC, Nice's museum of modern and contemporary art, closed on 7 January 2024 for renovation; the museum gives no reopening date. Checked October 2026 on mamac-nice.org.

Our advice: book Cap Moderne early; give the Fondation Maeght a morning and lunch in Saint-Paul; and plan Nice around the Matisse and Chagall museums on Cimiez.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with French Riviera Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story before you go.