Passadoc Gazette - No 186

The weekly 186

Art...

If one wants to define it, one hundred pages of this gazette will not suffice! Especially as it is necessary to evoke all the arts, painting but also architecture, sculpture, music, literature, etc.

Let's stop by a few quotes:

Alain (Philosopher – 1868-1951): All the arts are like mirrors where man knows and recognizes something of himself that he did not know.

Words of artists :

Alberto Giacometti (Painting – 1901-1966) : The great adventure is to see something unknown, every day, in the same face. It's bigger than any trip around the world.
Pablo Picasso (Painting 1881-1973): I've spent my whole life drawing like a child.
Auguste Renoir (Painter 1841-1919): This drawing took five minutes, but I took sixty years to get there.
Claude Monet (Painter – 1840-1926) in Provence: I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, the boat are located. The beauty of the air where they are, and it's nothing but the impossible.
Paul Cézanne (Painter – Aix-en-Provence 1839-1905): Drawing and colour are by no means two different things. When you paint, you draw... When the color is at its strongest, the shape is at its maximum.

A final selection (for André Abbe!), attributed to Ingres* (1780-1867) :

Photography is better than a drawing, but it must not be said.

Jeanne Monin

*This page : David Hockney then goes back to Ingres, evoking the system of the clear chamber, which allows to place these parts of the face so difficult to represent, but he specifies that this technique requires extreme precision, and therefore that an artist like Ingres, for whom the detail was very important, could quite have used this kind of technique.

Searches on different sites.

Henri Pertus (Nîmes 1908 – Toulon 1988).
Professor at the École des Beaux-Arts (now the Toulon Provence Mediterranean School of Art and Design),
for 30 years, The elite young artists from the Toulouse school.

In Provence, many names of places, whose origin seems incomprehensible, come in fact straight from the Provençal.

On this magnificent lithography of the painter Henri Pertus, we see the silhouette of the Baou de Quatre Heures which dominates Toulon.

Why four hours?

It's actually the Bau.* dei Four Auro (or Auras), i.e. the four winds: the mistral, the east wind, the ponant and the labech must blow strong...

Jean-Philippe Tinois
But what does it mean? yawn ?

Claude Boyer

In Wikipedia:
« Babau (or Babaou, barbaou, barbecu, and other variants) is the name of the croque-mitaine in many parts of France and other European countries while in Quebec he sometimes called himself Babou and threatened to attack in groups during the night.

The origin of the name is subject to controversy. Its origin could come from the onomatopoeia of a dog barking, an animal cry, the rapprochement with a bearded being, or even a evolution of the Russian Baba Yaga witch. In occitan, babau means a very small beast, an insect, but also a kind of dragon that eats men. In Italy, he was brought from Arabs and Saracen invaders. In his Infernal Dictionary (1828), Collin de Plancy indicated that the Babau was a « A species of dog or ghost, whose nannies threaten little children in the southern provinces of France, as they are terrified in Paris du Croquemitaine. But Babau doesn't just whip, he eats the bad kids in salad."

Personally, I've always heard someone treat babaù with the "unbelievable or stupid" connotation... For example, if someone breaks something, we'll tell him "Babaù, you could have been careful!”

Giselle Penat-Lorde
I actually know that expression with that meaning of nonsense, stupid, nigaud. I had to, child, after some resounding exploits, get treated with « babaù » by my maternal grandfather, for not forgetting the word!

Is there not a story of croquemitaine also among Catalans and Piedmontese, using this term babau, babao? The Niçois would have turned into a chapa-can, the croquemitaine who came to pick up the unwise children as well as the dogs without a collar... But... That's far away.

I also remember the term » lou garri-babaou », the surprise rat and also the expression of « Make babou, make babou pincho » : to look, to suddenly show ..

I may also make a clever mix with other words a little identical... a real summer macedon, under the effect of the heatwave!

Guy Cavhavetore
I think it's from Babaou (Babau), the croquemitaine, the imaginary being... in Provencal. We also have the Babaou Pass in the Moors, between Bormes and Collobrières (83).

* The bau is an escarpment, a hill that has a pentuous face.

The Echoes of the Week
The Fréjus arenas
Macau buildings
Hot!
Echinocactus grusonii
80 years ago...

Passadoc
September 23rd!

The Fréjus arenas

André Abbe
What a pleasure today to find this photo, thanks to digitization, of the Roman city of Timgad in Algeria. My friend and travel companion Pepe and I were alone in this huge site in autumn 1976. Great privilege!

We were only passing through, going to Bangui, Central African Republic.

Looking at this view, I think of the Roman arenas of Fréjus, disfigured by a murderous restoration, before which I pass quite often; I get an anger every time.

Claude Boyer – Jean-Philippe Tinois – Aline Niccolini Wavrin all agree:

– The restoration of the Fréjus Arenas? A massacre!

Macau buildings

Crop theft poses enormous problems for farmers...

Everything must be fenced, including truffle oak plantations.

André Abbe

I had been impressed by the view of this salad plantation in the middle of imposing residential buildings.

It wasn't in Provence: I was in Macau that day, in 1980.

In a few days, all the vegetables would have disappeared!

I returned to Macau thirty years later. I couldn't find any more vegetables between the buildings.

Hot!

To refresh yourself, nothing better that a beautiful dive from the rocks of La Gaillarde!

Echinocactus grusonii...

…also called « Mother-in-law cushion » Hey!

François Abbe :

– We are in Fréjus (between Cannes and Aix-en-Provence). Capitou Cactus (Mr Maccario) was once one of the largest producers of cactus in Europe.

André Abbe was there for a newspaper specializing in agriculture.

[Photo A. Abbe]

Jean-Philippe Tinois
I don't know if it's the « garden » that I visited; It seems to me that the last name had more Germanic consonance.

If it is he, I had loved very much, the old house with its large trees, the old greenhouses with the old mechanisms of ventilation and watering, adjacent to the new installations... and the owner who was willing to talk about his ascendants who created this business. A nice way out.

80 years ago...

André Abbe says:

Friends took me to the 80-year-old Liberation parade in Sainte-Maxime (Var). The city offers the advantage of allowing vehicles to cross onto the avenue.

I attended the Muy (Var) one a few years ago. I had met an American veteran who had landed in Normandy.

Survivors are now centenarians.

À chaque fois, j’ai été admiratif du travail que font des passionnés pour entretenir les tanks, les camions, les jeeps, les motos, les armes, les vêtements d’époque.

Un grand merci à tous les acteurs qui ont joué leur rôle à la perfection. On était revenus en 1944 !

September 23rd!

Provence intime… Entre culture, agriculture et voyages

55 ans d’archives photographiques
et des récits qui retracent l’histoire provençale.

Un rendez-vous à ne pas manquer !

Assistez à cette création artistique empreinte de gaieté et de douceur avec la présence de :

La chanteuse Nazpari Azari, qui arrive de Dubaï.
Le chorégraphe Flavio de Brito, qui vient de Londres avec une partie de sa troupe.
Le trompettiste Emmanuel Collombert, qui nous rejoint de Montpellier.

Vendredi 23 août : 18:30 à 20:30 à l’Espace Robert Manuel – Roquebrune-sur-Argens.
Réservations gratuites : Inscription obligatoire (nombre de places limité).

Tout est dit à cette page.

Cited in The Gazette : André Abbe – François Abbe – Claude Boyer – Guy Cavatore – Jeanne Monin – Aline Niccolini Wavrin – Giselle Penat-Laborde – Jean-Philippe Tinois.
Editor in Chief : Jeanne Monin.