‘A working countryside is hardly ever a landscape’, Raymond Williams observed fifty years ago in his book The Country and the City; for to perceive it as such is to have both the leisure and the distance from it, to aestheticize it. This essay argues that, similarly, art practices have too often been understood ‘from the outside in’: that in Cubist representations of the Mediterranean, the picturesque quality of the Riviera insinuated itself—indeed that that the influence of the decorative was so far- reaching in the inter- World War years that it co- opted avant-gardism itself, and that the Riviera was one of its vehicles for doing so
