PERPIGNAN, France — The A-9 autoroute follows the curve of the French coastline, running southwest from the mouth of the Rhone, past the ancient university town of Montpellier, past the medieval bastions of Beziers and Narbonne, along the salty lagoons that insulate the rocky coastal foothills from the sea, past Perpignan, the capital of Catalan France, and then up into the Pyrenees, right to the Spanish border.
Along its course, the highway passes through spectacular countryside, alternately lush and barren, earthy and lunar. What is most immediately striking about this part of France, though, isn't so much the landscape itself as the way the landscape is illuminated. The light here is brilliant, haunting, memorable. Sometimes it seems searing and metallic, as if reflected off a hot tin roof; sometimes it's radiantly clear, spilling down from the perfect deep blue skies; sometimes it grows moody and thick, moving over the hills so forcefully that it almost seems borne by the wind--the relentless tramontane that blows for days at a time here, always (say the locals) for three days, or for multiples of three.
Perhaps best known for its fishing ports and lush beaches, this corner of France, which hugs the Mediterranean coast from the Spanish border north to the Rhone and west, almost to Toulouse, is called the Languedoc-Roussillon. That's its common name, at any rate, though in fact it consists of two quite different areas, the Languedoc and the Roussillon--which are, in turn, historical and romantic names for what are officially a cluster of modern-day departements , including the Herault, the Aude and the Pyrenees-Orientales.
The Languedoc-Roussillon (pronounced, approximately, LANGUH-dock ROO-see-yohn) is also famous for its rich history (here, at Tautavel, were found the oldest known human remains in Europe, dating back 450,000 years), for its excellent fruits and vegetables (which are shipped all over Europe) and for its wines, once rough and inexpensive but now increasingly fine (as in the Fortant de France and Pradel labels). In fact, the Languedoc-Roussillon includes the largest contiguous vineyard area in the world.
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But the region is also famous for something else--something that surely has to do with its extraordinary light: Since early in this century, it has been an artistic hotbed of uncommon vigor, drawing nearly every major figure in 20th-Century French art to its hills and coastline, at one time or another. The first to come, in 1905, were Matisse and Andre Derain, who invented the intensely colorful, free-form school of landscape painting known as Fauvism here, in the seaside village of Collioure, six or eight miles north of the Spanish border.
Another seaside town, Banyuls-sur-Mer, even closer to Spain, was the birthplace (and workplace) of the famed sculptor Aristide Maillol. The town of Ceret in the Pyrenees became known as the "Mecca of Cubism," having played host to Picasso and Braque when they were developing the idiom, between 1911 and 1913. After that, such artists as Chagall, Juan Gris, Kisling, Chaim Soutine, Andre Masson and Max Jacob came to live and work in the same place. Other parts of the region, over the years, have welcomed Jean Dubuffet, Jean Cocteau, Robert Delaunay, Raoul Dufy, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, Dali and Miro (from just across the border) and, more recently, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Buren, Richard Serra and the Catalan artists Antoni Tapies and Antoni Clave--among many others.
Artists still come to live and work in the Languedoc-Roussillon--and, happily for visitors, the region now celebrates its rich artistic tradition enthusiastically, with a splendidly refurbished and enlarged museum, a wine estate that mounts a New York- or Paris-quality exhibition every summer, a contemporary art foundation offering one of the more appealing gallery spaces in Europe and more. The attractions of its beach resorts and historical monuments aside, the Languedoc-Roussillon is fast becoming one of the best places in Western Europe to see 20th-Century art, both modern and contemporary.
At the center of the region's new artistic ferment is the town of Ceret, perched in the Pyrenees southwest of Perpignan and only a hill or two away from Spain. Founded by Charlemagne in AD 814, Ceret became a strongly fortified redoubt and was fought over for centuries by warring French factions and by the French and Spanish. It found new life as an agricultural capital in the mid-19th Century and became known above all for its cherry orchards--the cherry having become practically the heraldic emblem of the place.
