Musee d'art moderne de Ceret

A quick blog post this evening as our wifi is a bit hit and

miss. Hopefully I will get finished before it conks out again!

On New Year's Eve we decided to cycle to nearby Ceret to take a look at their modern art museum. Established in 1950, the museum was created by artists Pierre Brune and Frank Burty Haviland with the support of their friends including Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. There is, understandably, lots of Brune's and Haviland's work on show. We quite liked the latter's style and were less taken with Brune's work as it was often dark and too gloomy for our taste. I was excited to see paintings and a large sculpture by Joan Miro, as well as remarkably un-Picasso-like paintings by Picasso. He was pretty good before he lost perspective! We were entranced by a large display of his matador-inspired pottery too. The museum has eight large terracotta plates painted with black toreador designs, and a couple of dozen small bowls, again painted with bullfighting scenes but the bowls are decorated in bright colours.

Other artists whose names we recognised included Raoul

Dufy and Antonio Tapies. Artists we didn't recognise, but whose work we very much liked included Edouard Pignon, Auguste Herbin and Vincent Bioules. The trees work pictured above is by Bioules and covers the entire wall down a staircase. It is also the cover of the museum's flyer which I was comfortable photographing at home. Unfortunately no one else was snapping away inside the museum - and it was nicely busy - so I didn't want to take a chance and risk getting us kicked out! I have 'borrowed' a couple of images from the museum's website instead. Hopefully they will encourage you to visit too! To the right here is 'Porteuse de linge catalane' painted by Auguste Herbin in 1919, and this post finishes with 'L'homme et l'olivier' painted by Edouard Pignon in 1954.

The museum entry was €5.50 each and we spent over an hour wandering around. Most of the work is local scenes, some of which would probably be undisplayable if they weren't local(!), but there's a good selection of work and it was definitely worth a visit.