After our delicious lunch in Arles, we still had time before we would drive back to our “country home.” We decided to spend it at the Reattu Museum. We had passed it earlier on our walk and the modern art looked intriguing. The exhibit at the museum was called Nuage (cloud) and the building had clouds coming out of its windows.
The best part of the exhibit for me was the small booklet we were given that was written by the curator of the exhibit. Printed on cloud-like vellum paper it gave a focus for the art in each room and explained her motivation for the way she had curated the show.
“Tendering the visitor a wave of words from under the stooping Gleditsia. Stones are the roots of the clouds, a Chinese poet once wrote….The dense and the impalpable, the immutable and the moving.”
“Open up to the turbulence of Andy Warhol, to his light-filled utopias, the former studio of Jacques Reattu, his famous ‘room of clouds’ cradled in the Mistral, in the sky’s intensity and the bend of the river as it rushes towards the sea.”
“…Jean Arp, who imagines the navel is directly connected to the clouds.”
“…tools and utensils should be elastic, pliable or with springs, precarious, gentle or negligible to suit. In any case, they should be concrete,-and tinged with melancholy.”
“Tethered Sky”
“Drift from one continent to another. When you’re in the cloud business, Asia is never far away.”
“Scaffold the sky. You’re only a stair case away, the only truly celestial partition in the whole exhibition: a fugue, the winds, quavers, between photography and painting, and a jellyfish which, for 51 seconds, thinks it is a cloud.”
“Find the keys to unlock innumerable elevators that will sweep you up into the clouds—by far the ideal way of escaping gravity.”
“Marvel in the den of an artist-collector, at the mind-blowing fragment of a meteorite, which the stratosphere took pains to fashion into the shape of a cloud. A stone from another world, whose composition we do not understand. A token of infinity.”
“…the cloud is capable of embodying anything.”
“Tremble at the clouds of crisis, menace, submersion, the funeral drum, disorder or vertigo.”
“Capture the impossible garden with clouds. Arp was one of those nurserymen.”
“Mould the movement of the clouds.”
“Sift the swaying of the clouds the interrupted passage of light.”
After that I became obsessive with taking photos of the skies and clouds of Provence. Van Gogh’s paintings really did depict the light of Provence. Our new goal in traveling will be to evaluate the skies we see on a scale of 1 to 10 (with Provence at 10). Is it possible that some places just have better clouds than others? A miniscule portion of my sky photos:
Lois Reynolds Mead 
July 11, 2013 at 3:45 am
WOW! Thanks for sharing this over at BPC. These are gorgeous pictures, and what an interesting place you were able to visit! I do believe that some places have better clouds than others, too : )
July 11, 2013 at 3:50 am
Thank you for coming for a visit! At any rate, it is a nice quest to be on: looking to find great clouds…