Paintings, sculptures, objets d'art: Cardinal Fesch, the first great Corsican collector
It is difficult to talk about painting in Corsica without mentioning Cardinal Fesch, the first great art collector who played a very important role in the circulation of works in Corsica. Uncle of Napoleon, this passionate collector gathered during his lifetime a breathtaking quantity of works, mainly Italian paintings, but also masterpieces of the Dutch and Flemish school (Potter, Berghem, Winants, Ryusdael, Hobbema) as well as many Poussin, a painter to whom he had unlimited admiration. Cardinal Fesch's collection is also an admirable gallery of portraits: it is the most important collection of representations of members of the Bonaparte family, which gives it great historical value. It also includes some sculptures, including works by great artists such as Lorenzo Bartolini, Antonio Canova, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Raimondo Trentanove.
The cardinal left behind a collection of more than 17,000 works of art, a record for the time! Good news: a large part of them can be seen today in the Palais Fesch - Musée des Beaux-arts in Ajaccio, which represents one of the most important collections of Italian paintings in French museums. The construction of this palace began in 1828 according to the will of the cardinal, who wanted to create in his native city an Institute of Arts and Sciences to educate the young Corsicans, but it was not completed until after his death during the Second Empire. To the works collected by Cardinal Fesch were added over time new paintings, including those of the most important Corsican painters. Today, in a department entirely dedicated to Corsican painting, one can admire a selection of works by the leaders of the island school.
The development of island painting in the 19th century
It is from the middle of the XIXth century, that Corsica begins to see the development of a local painting, with an increased interest for the work of the island painters and the multiplication of initiatives to promote it. It is often in Italy or in France that the latter are trained. When they returned to Corsica, they focused on depicting its magnificent natural heritage and it was landscape painting that developed above all. In this vein, several of them reach a national and international fame, like Jean-Luc Multedo, Lucien Peri, Jean-Baptiste Bassoul or François Corbellini.
The latter began to paint his native town, Ajaccio, and its surroundings at a very young age, and then went on to paint the rest of Corsica, its villages, its countryside, its coasts, notably Piana and its creeks. His oil paintings wonderfully express the soft and colorful light of the island and depict its inhabitants with a touching sincerity. In a completely different style, less detailed, quicker to execute, Lucien Peri also tried to show the beauty of his native island. Very popular on the mainland, he made his first submission to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1910. We can find not only his paintings, but also numerous lithographs and chronophotographs, the most famous being the posters for the promotion of tourism made for the transport company Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée.
Another trend in island art at the time was ethnographic painting, of which one of the most notable representatives was Leon Canniccioni. A student at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was noticed in 1909 at the Salon where he received a third class medal for his painting La Douleur d'Orphée (Orpheus' Pain), which can be admired today at the Palais Fesch. This rather classical painting is not, however, the most representative of his work, which later turned to more realistic scenes. In an impressionist vein, his paintings linger with affection on Corsican rural life and its customs, and thus constitute important resources for understanding the Corsica of the time. No social or political message in this work, but a tender and simple vision of the Corsican way of life, an almost ethnographic attention paid to its inhabitants. One notices in particular an unsuspected cultural mixing between Corsica and the Eastern world.
Corsican landscapes sublimated by photography
The reference place to discover photography is the Mediterranean Center of Photography, located in Bastia. Since 1990, this one has the vocation to endow the island with a permanent place for photography, it gathers a collection of more than a thousand works realized by great photographers, Corsican or foreign, on Corsica and the Mediterranean mainly. All genres are represented, from photojournalism to documentary or plastic photography. It is also a place of reflection and creation, with events, symposiums, workshops and educational activities organized regularly. Since 1994, the Mediterranean Center of Photography has been conducting a program of photographic commissions on Corsica, with different themes and genres.
Among the artists represented, we could admire the works of Christelle Geronimi, a Corsican photographer whose work is linked to the question of memory, mixing her childhood memories and the natural landscapes that saw her grow up, with which she maintains a very intimate relationship. In a completely different genre, photographer Antoine Giacomoni is interested in his Corsican roots through portraits. Initially an international reporter, he photographed numerous personalities from the world of rock before returning to his native island. Since the 2000s, he has been working with a device for taking pictures through a mirror behind which he photographs personalities from the Corsican artistic scene or members of his entourage, in a series entitled Corsica through the mirror. Among the foreign photographers inspired by the island of Beauty, we note the work of Jane Evelyn Atwood, a New York photographer whose work focuses on the human and the notion of exclusion. In 2013, following a commission from the Mediterranean Center of Photography, she delivered a photographic report entitled The Train of the Heart, 21 images dealing with Corsican rurality through the changing landscapes over the railroad, and the links that this means of transport creates between its users.
Contemporary art in development
The Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain de Corte, which regularly organizes exhibitions and other cultural events, is the most active institution on the island in terms of contemporary creation. In a context where local artists are often forced to go to the mainland to obtain institutional recognition, this place plays an important role and gives access to qualitative programs. In parallel, young and not so young artists try to launch initiatives to revitalize this territory to which they are attached. This is the case of Ange Leccia, an artist very inspired by his native land, whose work, transversal and poetic, borrows from different media: cinema, video, photography or installation. Professor at the Beaux-Arts de Cergy and then director of the Pavillon (the creation laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo), his career is impregnated with an educational dimension. It is therefore to allow foreign artists to discover the beauty of this rural territory as well as to offer young Corsicans the opportunity to create and discover quality works that the artist decided to create the Maison Conti, a former family home located in the Gulf of Saint-Florent.
Street-art, an increasingly recognized practice
Far from clichés, this rich art attracts an increasing attention from visitors. Because going to discover the nuggets of street-art, it is to discover the cities under another angle, while leaving the beaten tracks. Nevertheless, it is impossible to list with precision works that are by nature ephemeral. But for a few years now, this art, initially perceived as marginal, has been recognized and promoted by certain municipalities that develop large-scale sustainable projects that are easier to identify.
This is for example the case of Bastia which, on the occasion of the third edition of Creazione, a festival of popular art, fashion and design, has honored this new mode of expression. Halfway between contemporary popular cultures and the tradition of Latin muralism, local street artists have taken over the walls of the city with great enthusiasm. This initiative is part of a broader policy of improving the urban environment, seeking to promote living together: far from degrading the landscape, these works bring their neighborhoods to life by adding color. They invite people to discover the rich heritage of urban space, which becomes a medium of expression for its inhabitants. Among the most popular local artists who participated in the festival, we must mention the Graffink collective, composed of two figures of Bastia street art, Karmatheora and Soes.
Also in Ajaccio, street art is honored with a special museum, a kind of open-air gallery that took shape in front of the Lantivy Palace, on the Cours Napoléon. This formerly abandoned site occupies a prime location, opposite the gardens of the prefecture and the palace. The renovation policy launched by the municipal services has made it possible to clear up the site, leaving artists a space of 120 m² to express themselves. The idea is to create a pathway by mobilizing other spaces in the imperial city, such as, for example, the railway station which since 2015 has been invested by about fifteen artists (just like the station in Bastia). Two key artists of the Ajaccio scene are at the origin of this project: Vannina Van Schirin and Mako Deuza.
Vannina Van Schirin, art restorer by day and street artist by night, daughter of a famous journalist and a Russian princess, is a colorful character. Very involved in the life of the city, her works often carry a political message. Her friend Mako Deuza, a self-taught graffiti artist, accompanies her in her adventures with a style all his own. His frescoes, which often represent characters, famous or not, are recognizable at a glance with their realistic or even hyper-realistic aspect. His work can be admired in the Ellipse cinema in Ajaccio as well as on many storefronts.
But street-art is not the prerogative of the big cities, since we find for example the frescoes full of hope of Adrien Martinetti, not only in Ajaccio, but also in Palneca, Calcatoggio, Ile Rousse, Porto-Vecchio, Olivese, Conca or Vescovato!
