What image does Nice conjure up for you? Swanky belle époque residences and palm-fringed promenades? Bustling urban life in France’s fifth biggest agglomération? Carnival frolics with la Bataille des Fleurs? Or the olde worlde charm of Vieux Nice, with its bijoux souvenir shops and quaint ruelles? It might seem surprising to the casual tourist that Nice also possesses one of Europe’s richest artistic traditions, certainly as far as 20th-century art is concerned. It boasts no fewer than four major art museums, and that’s without mentioning notable collections of Asiatic art, art naïf, and numerous other galleries and temporary exhibition spaces. Art permeates the arteries of the city: even the new(ish) tramway claims a dozen or so artworks along its route, mostly consisting of lavish light displays.
First up, a disappointment: the MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE ET D’ART CONTEMPORAIN was shut, save for a temporary exhibition room (see Vincent Corpet). One of the world’s leading contemporary art museums, its permanent collection is second to none, with whole galleries dedicated to Niki de Saint-Phalle and Yves Klein, a strong representation as you’d expect from Ben and l’École de Nice, and many Pop Art and Arte Povera works. Visitors are still greeted in the precinct by Saint-Phalle’s Le monstre du Loch Ness, though Nessie is starting to show her age, worryingly tarnished in parts.
As the road rises towards Cimiez, and the apartment blocks increase in grandeur and pomposity, you come across the MUSÉE CHAGALL, housed in a most unprepossessing slab of concrete dating from 1973. 
The exterior’s contrast with the museum’s contents could not be greater: once inside the bunker, the visitor is intoxicated by the colours radiating from every canvas. Chagall’s command of colour is unique in the history of painting – sickly for some tastes, exhilarating for others. For the latter group, this collection is magnificent.
The museum consists of two galleries. To the left of the entrance, a largely un-thematic collection of paintings from various stages of the artist’s career, including Le cheval rouge and Le cirque bleu, culminating in a tapestry, Paysage Mediteranéen, which manages to squeeze in a sketch of the Promenade des Anglais. On the right is a gallery largely devoted to two cycles of painting: the Message Biblique, twelve Old Testament scenes, and La Cantique des Cantiques (Song of Songs).
There’s always something satisfying (albeit from a geekily collectionist perspective) about seeing complete artistic series in situ rather than having them broken up and scattered around the globe. Here you can trace the evolution of ideas, recurrent themes, the continuity of the narrative. In Le Sacrifice d’Isaac, we see Abraham, his dagger poised over Isaac, drenched in the red and orange inferno of the Holocaust; in the next tableau he is being cast away by angels. Or we can observe the echo of the corpse of Man in La creation de l’homme and the prostrate form of Isaac in the very next picture in the sequence.
In fact, I can study these every night if I like, thanks to the generosity of the Musée Chagall’s staff, who happily let me snap away at each picture. No such hospitality at the MUSÉE MATISSE further up the hill, where photography of any kind is grumpily interdit, with a plethora of discouraging notices, some even threatening legal action. Thus, reader, I can offer only a nice shot of the musée’s rear end.
If truth be told, there isn’t a lot to photograph in the museum itself. While the Chagall is a glorious colour fest of world class painting, the Matisse is more of an homage to the man himself, with various personal objects nestling among the works. The museum is spread across four floors of a 17th century Genoese villa. On the lower ground floor, we have the gouaches découpées, such as Le requin et la mouette (The shark and the seagull), in which the sea creatures are picked out in white card on a blue background, and the famous Danseuse créole. On the next floor up, photographs of the painter in his workshop.
On street level (the entrance is through a pleasant garden full of pétanque-playing locals), there are sketches and paintings, mostly from his less interesting early phase, although there are a few classics, including the sumptuous Nature morte aux grenades. But it’s the sketches that are the key to the genius of Matisse, where we can see his technique pared down to the bare minimum. In essence, it consists of two simple moves: the zigzag that stands for the eyeball, and the single line that that takes in the nose and one eyebrow (typically the left). Once you’ve got that, all it needs is another line for the other eyebrow and voilà – it’s a face!
Indeed, Matisse’s most successful sketches are the very simplest, such as La vièrge et l’enfant, where he simply abandons all detail, leaving us simply with the outline. And that’s the secret of the gouaches too, where familar objects are simply picked out by their shapes alone. 
So simple are the sketches in fact, that there was no need for the camera at all – I was quite able to reproduce a couple in my notebook without being apprehended by the guard (though have a look here for a less happy outcome for an American museum-goer armed with trusty sketch pad).
On the top floor, we find the more esoteric exhibits – Matisse’s favourite chair and table, several vases, and a set of models made of the chapel at Vence for which he designed the stained glass windows, along with a collection of preliminary drawings, engravings and a couple of unused glassworks from the same project.
My museum trail ended with a visit to the more traditional MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS to the west of the city centre, housed in a typical belle époque mansion fringed with palms. This time I was barely able to take aim with the camera before a guard appeared, although I did manage to snatch a sneaky shot of Jules Chéret’s Le Domino Jaune (here on the left). It’s Chéret who is the surprise package of this collection. Best known for revolutionising the art of the poster (the inspiration for Toulouse-Lautrec), Chéret lived and died in Nice and the museum is named after him, containing a large number of pastel canvasses of great elegance, in which circus, theatrical and musical performers are brought to life with an energy and vigour that is almost Rubenesque. Along with some nice busts by Rodin and Carpeux, it’s the collection of another local boy, Raoul Dufy, that constitute’s the museum’s other highlight. Various depictions of Nice and other Provençal delights, notably Le Jardin d’Hyères and La baie des Anges.
