Two Kinds of Light: At the Fondation Hartung Bergman in Antibes
La douceur fleurie des étoiles et du ciel et du reste descend en face du talus, comme un panier, contre notre face. - Arthur Rimbaud, "Mystique," Illuminations The flowery sweetness of stars and sky and the rest descends opposite the embankment, like a basket, against our face, and creates the flowering and blue abyss down there. - John Ashbery's translation in English You get there past a Carrefour. This is the magic, the mundane giving way to the sublime. You turn off an ordinary road above Antibes, climb a short hill, pass through a white wall, and then the olive grove opens. Two hectares of silver-leaved trees, the Mediterranean light falling through them in pieces, a white geometry of buildings. The heat and the sound of the cicadas rolls over you, under a cerulean sky. The Fondation Hartung Bergman, villa-atelier of Hans Hartung and Anna-Eva Bergman, was conceived largely by Hartung with Bergman and completed in 1973 after years of collaboration (and occasional c...
