La plage à Nice

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Nadal.

In 1954 the Belgian art dealer Luis Manteau lent Nadal and his Belgian sculptor wife, Florette, his house on the Côte d’Azur near Vallauris for a long painting holiday. It was here that Manteau introduced them to Picasso, whom Nadal had previously met as a very young child at his father’s studio in Paris. Nadal would eventually return to Belgium but continued to visit and paint the landscape and characters of the Côte d’Azur and Provence. Just as the move to Vallauris, with its many traditions, its bullfights, its rich history and its light had invigorated Picasso, the Mediterranean held the roots of Nadal’s existence and nourished the freedom and joie de vivre of his Catalan identity. He would put down permanent roots on the Mediterranean coast again in the 1950s building a summer residence in the village of Sitges, near Barcelona.

La plage à Nice is the quintessential embodiment of Mediterranean joie de vivre. The influence of Picasso is clear in the sensual, humorous nudes while the boats and huts on the beach are reminiscent of Braque’s 1920s beach scenes. The scattered peaks and reflections on the deep ultra-marine sea, the sketchy outlines of sailing crafts and the flags of many nations owe a debt to the other great Fauve artist, Raoul Dufy. Nadal has been called ‘the Spanish Dufy’ and he did meet him as a young painter. Just like Dufy, Nadal found and embraced his Fauvist style early in his career and did not deviate, following only his instinct, on and above all, pleasure and the joy of seeing.

Nadal’s work could be said to embody Nadal the man. As his long-standing friend and dealer Juan Anton Maragall [Sala Parés] used to say: ‘Each of Carlos Nadal’s paintings was like a self-portrait, at different moments of his life. He didn’t paint particular landscapes or interiors: the subject was only the starting point of his creation, because he always overcame the theme – the anecdotal – to reveal the essential of his personality, his emotions and his states of mind. In this sense all of his work has a great unity, because every one of his paintings is overall a Nadal, and this is one of his greatest achievements.’ (J.A. Maragall Garriga quoted in J. Duncalfe, Carlos Nadal: An English Perspective, Harrogate, 2010, p. 27).


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