Artists and Their Museums on the Riviera examines the lives and work of the major 20th century artists whose names are prominently associated with the art of the French Riviera: Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Auguste Renoir. These artists were to the Riviera what Cezanne and his contemporaries were to Provence in the 19th century. The book describes the development of a unique constellation of personalized museums and hand-painted chapels, all of which lie between Menton and St. Tropez and which remain as a living legacy of these artists. Included as well are descriptions of larger collections which exhibit the work of these artists' contemporaries: Bonnard, Braque, Calder, Giacometti, Moore, Modigliani, Soutine, Sisley, Signac along with the work of a new generation of contemporary artists such as Arman, Ben, César, Klein, Pagès and Raysse.

This volume provides an illustrated journey of these artistic legends, as they traced their way inland and along the coast from St. Tropez as Signac found it at the turn of the century, through Cagnes where Renoir spent his last years and on to the perched villages of Vence and Saint Paul where Chagall lived and worked and to Picasso's potters' village of Vallauris. From there it moves to Nice which houses the Chagall and Matisse Museums, the new Museum of Contemporary Art and the Musée de Beaux Arts, and further east to Villefranche and Menton where Cocteau spent various periods of his life. This story offers the first collective chronicle of the artists and their museums, their masterpieces on canvas, in ceramic and marble or stained glass and frescoes, in chapels and village squares.