L JANUARY 20
PVeter Mayle, who wrote the best-selling memoir A Year In Provence, has died at the age of 78, his publishers announced. Following a short illness, the British author died on Thursday in a hospital near his beloved home in southern France, publishing house Alfred A Knopf said.
A Year In Provence, about Mayle’s first 12 months after relocating to the south of France, was released in 1990 with an initial print run of 3,000.
The witty tale of moving into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the lavender-scented, remote countryside, and adapting to the slower Provencal way of life, went on to sell six million copies in 40 languages.
Its infectious warmth for the south of France and the local lifestyle and culture fired up the imaginations of thousands of Britons and others to seek the same romantic dream.
Alfred A Knopf announced on Twitter late on Thursday that Mayle, who had written “multiple best-selling books about life in Provence, died early today at a hospital near his home in the south of France”.
Mayle wrote several follow-on books, including Toujours Provence and Encore Provence.
Film director Ridley Scott, his friend and neighbour, directed the 2006 film A Good Year, starring Russell Crowe and Marion Cotillard, ienna is marking 100 years since the death of a string of luminaries from its fin-de-siecle glory days with an avalanche of exhibitions of modernist art, design and architecture that still inspire and shock today.
The year 1918 did not only mark defeat in World War I and the end of the AustroHungarian empire, but also saw artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser and architect Otto Wagner pass away.
Klimt died from a stroke at 55, an infection claimed Wagner’s life at 76 and cancer killed Moser aged 50. Schiele survived being conscripted into the war only to die in the Spanish flu pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife Edith.
He was just 28. All were leading lights in the revolutions in art, literature, architecture, psychology, philosophy and music that made the imperial city on the Danube the buzzing intellectual hub of the world at the time.
“It was a unique collision of all forms of art and science — the literature of Hofmannsthal, the atonal music of Schoenberg, psychoanalysis with Freud and even economics with Schumpeter,” HansPeter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum, said.
“Vienna was not always a trend setter, but always good at making something special out of something which already existed,” said art historian Alexandra Brauner. “We made something really special out of it.”
The Leopold kicked off the anniversary which was based on Mayle’s book of the same name.
“It was all that humorous competitive spirit between the French and the English that Peter captured brilliantly,” Scott told BBC radio.
“It was quite true about the French — and it was quite true about the British.”
He was made a knight in France’s Legion d’ Honneur in 2002 for his services to French culture.
“Peter was a very kind and successful man... You could feel whatever he did, whatever he touched was going to work,” Scott said.
Mayle started out writing a series of educational works for children, such as sex education books including Where Did I Come From?. The writer, who for millions of Britons epitomised the “European dream” of living in the sun, said in 2016 that the UK’s exit from the EU was a “disaster for them and for Europe.
“I am sad for the future of my year this week with the first of its six special exhibitions — in Vienna and around there are around 20 — focusing on Klimt, Moser as well as Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka.
It also showcases examples of classic 1900-era design such as furniture, artisan craftwork and posters created by Moser and others in the Wiener Werkstaette community of artists that he co-founded.
From February a special Leopold show shines the light on Schiele, whose tortured eroticism still causes blushes to this day — as witnessed by the prudish covering up genitals on advertising posters in London last year.
The Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) will from December 19 show off some of its Wiener Werkstaette treasures and from May 30 looks at the influence of Wagner’s influence on contemporaries, pupils and subsequent generations of architects and designers.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum will next month erect again its “Stairway to Klimt” allowing visitors to examine up close some of the works painted by the artist between the pillars and arches of the building early in his career.
The Bank Austria Kunstforum will explore Japanese influences, the Jewish Museum will from May hark back to the artistic salons of the time, while the Klimt Villa will look into the looting of many works by the Nazis and what happened later. Vienna’s thriving Jewish community were big drivers in the city’s flourishing intellectual, scientific and artistic scene, not least in buying up artworks to fill their homes.
In his later years Klimt’s studio had “two separate entrances.
One for models who would then wait in an antechamber, often with next to no clothes on, and another for his rich customers,” said Baris Alakus, Director of the Klimt Villa.
By 1918, Vienna was already starting to be eclipsed, and 20 years later Hitler — rejected as a young man by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts — annexed his native country, first robbing and then destroying the Jewish population.
The postwar restitution of artworks to their former owners’ descendants, now spread around the globe, has been tortuous and in some cases incomplete, with many paintings controversially ending up in state hands. It took until 1998 for the Austrian parliament to pass a law allowing some 10,000 works to be returned.
In one of the biggest cases, five Klimt masterpieces were returned in 2006 to the descendant of the Jewish family they were stolen from after a legal battle with Austria’s Belvedere Museum. English friends,” said Mayle, who took French nationality as Britain’s EU membership referendum approached.
In September 2016, he reflected on his website of ways in which both he, and Provence, had changed or stayed the same, 25 years since his landmark memoir came out.
“I am still easily lured from my desk by interesting distractions,” he wrote.
“A wine tasting, a promising young chef, the rumour of truffles to be found under a nearby oak, a murky hammam in Marseille, a vicious game of petanque in the village and, of course, the spectacle of daily life as seen from the cafe terrace.
“I don’t want to go anywhere else. I’m happy where I am.
That, I suppose, is contentment, and I shall always be grateful to the literary accident known as A Year In Provence for helping me to achieve it.”
Mayle died in a hospital close to the village of Vaugines, where he had his home.
At the height of his fame, Mayle bought another home in Long Island, New York, in order to avoid the hordes of tourists that came to see his French house.
“We had people coming up the drive from Japan, from Australia, from Germany, from Sweden, from England, from America,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 1996.