He has reigned over folk for more than 50 years and his first permanent work now sits atop a Provençal hill. The musician, price Nobel of Literature 2016 and American Artist Bob Dylan expose currently for the first time in France some of his paintings, and therefore his first permanent installation, in the artistic domain of Château La Coste, in Provence, in Peyrolles, in the hinterland of Aix.
Property of the wealthy Irish art collector Patrick McKillen, Château La Coste is a complex of nearly 200 hectares covered for a good half of vines and for another of spaces dedicated to art with pavilions signed by the greatest architects such as Oscar Niemeyer, Richard Rogers or Renzo Piano.
beat generation emblem
And it is in the one designed by Renzo Piano, one of the architects of the Pompidou Center in Paris, that 24 paintings from the series Drawn Blank Series, made by Bob Dylan between 2008 and 2013 from sketches made by the American singer during a wandering on the roads between 1989 and 1992, are exhibited. There he visits all the classics of contemporary fashionable painting, from an equine portrait to a still life that features an Italian coffee maker and an ashtray, or the view of a city that gives pride of place to signs, including a nude. . These works are presented in the same room as some of those of his masters to think in terms of painting. This is how it is possible to contemplate, in the middle of Provençal nature, two paintings by Picasso (man in hat), a Matisse or even a Renoir. This set is visible until August 15.
Further on in the estate, after a twenty-minute walk winding through the vines, pines and holm oaks, appears at the top of a slope on which vines grow his wrought iron wagon which, unlike his paintings, will therefore remain there. It was Bob Dylan who chose the location, after spending a short week at the estate. Entitled Rail Carthis converted freight car into which he has integrated elements of industrial parts, keys, cogs, vices, can be interpreted as a new tribute from the singer to the hobos to whom he has dedicated several songs (Only a hobo, I am a lonesome hobo). The hobos, these wanderers of the American railroad, are among the emblems of the beat generation American, of which Dylan, 80 years old today, is still one of the best representatives.