Sun, Sea and Surrealists: Picasso’s Libertine Summers at the Hotel Vaste Horizon
- U I Team
- Jun 20
- 5 min read
Let us drift back, if you will, to the languid, sun-bleached summers of 1936 and 1937, a moment suspended on the cusp of catastrophe, to holiday alongside Pablo Picasso and an extraordinary constellation of international avant-garde companions on the French Riviera. Their chosen refuge was the modest yet storied Hotel Vaste Horizon, a humble boarding house tucked within the tangled lanes of Mougins’ old town, which would become for a fleeting window the unofficial summer headquarters of Europe’s restless surrealists and bohemians.
The Vaste Horizon was hardly the Grand Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc; its charm lay in its intimacy and informality. It boasted a warren of small rooms and shaded courtyards where, year on year, a circle of radical painters, photographers, poets and libertine spirits gathered to pursue the dual rituals of creative invention and pleasurable excess. Among them were Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, the melancholic photographer Dora Maar, Max Ernst, the irrepressible Leonora Carrington, poet Paul Éluard and his enchanting wife Nusch, and the strikingly independent Lee Miller.
These were no ordinary summer visitors. They brought with them canvases, cameras, poetry notebooks — and a brimming sense that life and art were to be devoured with equal appetite under the blazing Côte d’Azur sun.
Walls Painted, Walls Whitewashed
It is said that Picasso, ever restless and unwilling to confine his brush to mere canvas, set to work decorating the walls of his rented room almost immediately upon arrival. His private fresco, however, scandalised the practical-minded hotel owner, who insisted it be painted over the next day in plain white. If only those whitewashed walls could have spoken, they would have whispered of whispered trysts, heated arguments over aesthetics and politics, and the tangled hearts of lovers and muses who wandered their corridors.
For in those same rooms began the turbulent love affair between Picasso and Dora Maar, an affair that would shape nearly a decade of Picasso’s artistic output and fuel an emotional storm between them both. Dora was not merely a muse but a formidable photographer and intellectual force, though history often preferred to remember her as a beautiful appendage to Picasso’s myth.
A Carnival of Lovers
Surrealism, though a brotherhood of radical ideas, could be distinctly old-fashioned about its women. Within this coterie, relationships overlapped in a dizzying mosaic of desire and betrayal. Dora Maar herself had once been Man Ray’s lover before Picasso’s insatiable gaze found her. Man Ray, meanwhile, had turned his affections to the vivacious Adrienne ‘Ady’ Fidelin, a Guadeloupean dancer whose very presence punctured the Eurocentric homogeneity of the group and remains an overlooked testament to Surrealism’s colonial blind spots.
Ady Fidelin’s beauty and spirit shone on the beaches of Antibes and Mougins, yet she too was boxed up by labels: a model, an ‘exotic diversion’. Man Ray, ever the predator and poet, admitted without shame,
“She stops me from sinking into pessimism. She does everything: shining my shoes, making me breakfast, and painting the backdrops on my large canvases.”
For Ady, whose contributions to Surrealist visual culture remain largely uncatalogued, her summer by the sea is all that endures in blurred celluloid and half-remembered anecdotes.
Lee Miller, famously the woman who once bathed in Hitler’s bathtub while photographing his bombed apartments, arrived too, arm-in-arm with her future husband Roland Penrose. Not so long before, she had shared Man Ray’s bed and darkroom in Paris, co-inventing solarisation and eclipsing him at times with her fearless photojournalism.
And always hovering at the bar or behind the lens was Paul Éluard, lyric poet of Surrealism, and Nusch Éluard, muse, lover, occasional model, and rebel in her own right. Their marriage was elastic enough to accommodate Man Ray’s camera and Picasso’s brushes. The painter could hardly resist immortalising Nusch in a series of delicate portraits, while Paul, seemingly unperturbed, spun verses from her image.
La Garoupe and the Ritual of the Beach
Every day the ritual repeated itself. A short drive wound down from Mougins’ pine-scented hill to La Garoupe, the famed sandy cove at Antibes where aristocrats and artists alike bronzed themselves in nothing but oil and gossip. Sunbathing topless, draped lazily over striped deck chairs, they turned the beach into an open-air salon where philosophical debates mingled freely with casual seductions.
By dusk, this ragged aristocracy of creativity migrated to the local bars and fish restaurants, laughter echoing off stone walls. Villagers peered from doorways, scandalised and entranced in equal measure by the audacious mingling of wives, ex-lovers and muses. The evenings stretched into dawn, absinthe and cheap Provençal wine stoking yet more reckless ideas.
Art Amid the Heat
This heady theatre of flesh and thought seeped into their work. These months in Mougins were not a break from their art — they were the art. Man Ray’s lens caught Ady and Nusch in suggestive studies of feminine beauty and modern desire. Lee Miller, too, turned her eye on her fellow holidaymakers, capturing candid moments that defied the posed glamour of Paris studios.
Picasso, for his part, channelled the brooding undercurrents of those sunlit days into his greatest testament to political rage: Guernica. As the news of the Nazi bombardment of the Basque town filtered through that same summer, the holiday atmosphere cracked. From the sensual warmth of the Riviera rose an image of horror and protest that would become one of the defining paintings of the twentieth century.
After the Sun, Shadows
These summers were an echo of pre-war decadence, the last gasp of a bohemian liberty soon to be suffocated by fascist boots and ration books. When war broke, the Hotel Vaste Horizon closed its doors to the misfit poets and libertine painters who would scatter across occupied Europe, some to resist, others to survive as best they could.
Many of the women whose brilliance flared so brightly on those beaches struggled afterwards to have their legacies taken seriously. Nusch Éluard’s collages were long misattributed to her husband; Dora Maar’s pioneering photography often signed over to her male collaborators. Only in recent decades have these creative women been reclaimed from the footnotes and reassessed as visionaries in their own right.
A Brief Paradise
For a few sweltering summers, on a pine-crowned hill above Cannes and Antibes, a circle of iconoclasts found something close to paradise. They invented themselves anew each day in a haze of salt, sweat and paint. The Riviera gave them permission to forget the gathering storm for a little while, to live, love and quarrel under the brutal southern sun.
Man Ray, in a rare moment of nostalgia, put it best:
“It is not a question here of telling you about my life, but of evoking these few fertile weeks in search of pleasure, freedom and creation… how not to remember this past, the insolence of this summer happiness?”
In the rooms of the Hotel Vaste Horizon, where even Picasso’s paintings were whitewashed away, they left behind something far more enduring than walls can hold, a story of art and audacity, of sensual rebellion and fleeting escape, half dream, half memory, forever shimmering in the Mediterranean heat.
Sources
“Man Ray: Self Portrait” (1963)
Mary Ann Caws, “Surrealism and the Literary Imagination” (1972)
Mary V. Dearborn, “The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Lee Miller” (1999)
Various archives of the Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou.
