The Musée Picasso in Antibes reopened in July after an extensive two-year renovation. Housed in the centuries-old former Château Grimaldi, built on the site of the ancient Greek city of Antipolis, the museum has the old village of Antibes at its front door, and the Mediterranean at its back.  It exhibits an impressive collection of Picasso’s paintings, drawings, and ceramics, as well as works of other modern and contemporary artists.

Ted Jones offers an overview of the various conferences and exhibitions held around the world in 2006 to celebrate the centennial of Graham Greene, author of among other novels The Third Man and Brighton Rock. Conferences and exhibitions were held around the world in 2006 to celebrate the centennial of Graham Greene, author of among others The Third Man and Brighton Rock, who was born a hundred years ago this month.

Walk a sandy track through the Garrigue, and look across the scrub towards a battered old stone mas with its shallow red-tiled roofs. Raise your eyes, and look beyond the limestone crags that repeat the blocky forms of the buildings, to the violet mountain ridges in the distance. You are walking through a characteristic Provençal landscape as painted by Cézanne.

When you taste the dust and sniff the resin and the herbs as you stroll; when you squint against the light, you are experiencing the landscape as Cézanne did, and you will be better able to respond to his work. Several of the great impressionist and post impressionist artists lived and painted in Provence, but for me, none of their work embodies the sense and spirit of the place in quite the way that Cezanne’s paintings do. His vision of the landscape as being made up of geometric, repetitive forms was to lead eventually into the development of cubism by later artists, and Picasso was to say: ‘He was the father of us all.’