Here be dragons: work, wealth and art on the French Riviera

Jacques Couëlle was an old-world Gallic eccentric. He was tall and stately, with a penchant for wearing cravats. His heaving silver hair flowed down below his shoulders. Described by the poet Jacques Prévert as ‘an-architect’, at once aristocratic and fiercely non-conformist, Couëlle is seldom photographed without an ostentatious pose, like a minor prince of a 17th-century city-state. Couëlle’s architectural projects were as eccentric as he was. He was attracted to the Castellaras region, situated in the hills behind Cannes after he was commissioned by an American mining millionaire to build a château there. Then, in the early 1960s, he designed five ‘landscape houses’ on the same Riviera tract of land, including Dragon Hill, which looks like a sensuous modernist sculpture big enough to live in. A friend of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, Couëlle still remains on the margins of modernist histories of architecture and sculpture, and was nicknamed ‘the architect of billionaires.’ I have a feeling that Dragon Hill is a place which can tell us a lot about art and wealth today.

It’s unclear how Unit, the enfant terrible of Mayfair galleries, has acquired this six-bedroom sea-view property, with its Gaudí-esque structure set in 5,000sq m of lush, landscaped garden. Dragon Hill was on the market for €4.85m in 2021; perhaps, as the past year’s interest rates bite, they got a discount. But acquired it they have. Unit’s owners Joe Kennedy and Jonny Burt have decided to turn the estate into an artist’s residency, where emerging artists get to frolic about, with a glass of Chablis in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, and tour the surrounding area with its open-by-appointment private art collections and modernist villas. The Fondation Maeght, which houses more than 12,000 works of art and has an unparalleled collection of Giacomettis as well as its own brand of mad-cap architecture (the roof curves inward, like a skate park, against all logic of rooves), is just down the road in Saint-Paul de Vence. Unit’s entrance into the scene feels like new money getting a seat at the table with the old. And for the artists on the residency, it is fair to say that landing a place on the residency offers a slice of paradise to create work.

Earlier this spring, I visited Dragon Hill to find out what was going on. As I arrived at the first gate that protected Couëlle’s five landscape houses from the outside, I was greeted by a gruff Frenchman who manned the traffic barrier: ‘Quoi?’ he asked. I told him I was here to see Kennedy, and he directed me left down the hill as an open-top 1961 Jaguar E-Type Series 1 snuck in and swerved off right, up towards the hazy sun. The gate to Dragon Hill itself is decorated with––yes, you’ve guessed it––a gigantic fire-breathing dragon sculpture in wrought iron. It’s so wincingly kitsch that it looks pretty cool. Fresh from a dip in the pool, Kennedy lets me in and sets out his vision for the residency, as well as his desire to ingratiate himself in the old-money art foundations in the region. Dragon Hill is a wonderful place to make work, if you are the kind of artist who can work in a place overwhelmed by an unremitting atmosphere of leisure.

“Dragon Hill is an invitation-only residency for artists and writers who uphold the visionary, pioneering values of the house’s architect, Couëlle”, Kennedy tells me. ‘Cravats mandatory, then?’, I think to myself. “The residents are defined”, he explains, “by their strong visions and resistance to conformity.” Yet perhaps Dragon Hill offers the kind of non-conformity that only really those with an aristocratic temperament, like its architect, can enjoy. Kennedy explains that the residency was always something Unit wanted to create: “a space where artists can freely make, develop and show their work without the constraints or limitations of a gallery and the traditional ecosystem.” The residency programme, which lasts around six weeks and offers three or four slots a year, provides artists with fully equipped studios out in the courtyard. The residents do not pay to participate in the residency, and at the end get to participate in an annual summer exhibition at the historic castle of Château de Castellaras (the American mining millionaire’s old place), which looks out with a panoramic view of the sea and the Esterel. “We want to foster a community in the region – a family of artists, collectors, curators and collaborators who have shared experiences together at Dragon Hill”, Kennedy goes on, “and who can enrich each other creatively.” Dragon Hill is extremely private, if my point on the gruff Frenchman wasn’t fair warning enough, but is open to members of the public by appointment. What is particularly striking about this residency is the emphasis on the relationship between writers and artists. The plan is to have six writers, nominated by the editorial team at ArtReview, who will have an opportunity to be published in the magazine. “We want to foster a community in the region – a family of artists, collectors, curators and collaborators who have shared experiences together at Dragon Hill, and who can enrich each other creatively”, Kennedy tells me: “We are passionate about the work of Couëlle, and feel a responsibility to champion his work, but there is no specific goal… we are just excited to see how things unfold and develop over time.”

I asked Kennedy who the first cohort on the residency would be: “Rex Southwick, one of Unit’s best young talents.” I had seen Southwick’s third solo exhibition, ‘Topia’, at Unit last year. It was an exceptional show that depicted the invisible labour of construction workers, gardeners and labourers who build the obnoxious mega-mansions of Palm Springs. Southwick spent months documenting and living in this Old Hollywood city on the Sonoran Desert, shadowing family-run installation companies and construction crews to gain access to private homes. He then worked from photographs and observation to paint luridly-coloured interior scenes in which work–hard, manual work–is foregrounded against the garish spectacle of the 1%’s real estate portfolios.

When I sat down with Southwick at the end of his residency, he told me he’d taken a similar approach this time round. “There is undeniably an uplifting quality to the prettiness of everything, however what I found most interesting is the concentration of wealth”, Southwick says: ‘I’ve been visiting Monaco a few times a week to photograph boats and goings on; because of Monaco’s size everything is compacted, and so sourcing images is easier and self-perpetuating.” As in the Californian palaces of opulence in his ‘Topia’ exhibition, Southwick’s Monégasque yacht paintings capture the hard graft behind extreme wealth. In Something Princess, St Tropez (2024) we find two maintenance workers mopping up the wooden entrance step on a mega-yacht whose whimsical title seems to be an ironic play on royal prestige (as though we’ve forgotten which princess might be joining us this evening). Tuiga YCM (2024) depicts workers on board the flagship sailboat of the Yacht de Monaco in sweltering heat, while As Above So Below YCM (2024) features hospitality staff hurrying across three floors of a pristine luxury superyacht. It’s like a scene from Below Deck envisioned by Gustave Courbet, if Courbet had a telescopic lens to prepare his pictures. These are paintings of elite luxury that never make it look like it’s worth having. It looks like hard work.

Southwick’s historical sense is interested, like Gustave Courbet and Caillebotte before him, in shining a light on the exploited. In the 19th century, both artists depicted the vagrant manual labourers of their time in highly stylised history paintings; Caillebotte was most famous for an 1875 interior in which he depicted three floor-scrapers in a high-end Parisian apartment, with their backs arched and bent over and their faces almost totally obscured. Southwick is a French Realist trapped in the Instagram age; a social painter of conscience for today’s world, where in Britain yawning wealth inequality is demonstrated by the fact that the 50 richest families in the country hold more wealth than half of all citizens (33.5m people). So, who buys these works? “I think with collectors it’s very personal; some understand the ambiguous nature of the work and appreciate my highlighting of these ‘invisible jobs’, says Southwick.

I wonder what Southwick’s collectors do in fact think, given the high prices his works command. I wonder if the paintings shake their sensibilities, even for a moment, and those same collectors look at the waiter serving their Louis Roederer. I wonder if they look at that waiter’s smile while serving them; no, not quite a smile, rather a grimace, as he worries about housing security, or his frail mother’s inadequate care, or the hope of a loophole that might mean he can stay in the country after all. I wonder if these paintings command the same effect that they have on me. Like Courbet before him, I see Southwick’s paintings as reminders of art’s ability to jolt us out of our subject position and to see someone else for who they are. I see these paintings as confrontations that challenge us to think about the grotesque wealth inequality that blights us all (or at least those of us who, regrettably, cannot pay for armies of precariously employed workers to man our superyachts when we aren’t even there).

Reflecting on the idleness of the super-rich, and with his tongue firmly in cheek, Southwick tells me that “these yachts aren’t used as much as you’d imagine so getting images through yacht brokers or crew is far more efficient than trying to explain the series to the owners, who are also usually very private people and might not be so open to having someone showcasing or exposing the goings on below deck.” Well, you wouldn’t, would you? And what do the workers think? “To the workers in [my paintings], perhaps the paintings are mundane as they have never viewed their job as a prompt to question ownership, hierarchy or class structures but from experience, especially from talking with subjects in my work, they are generally excited to have recognition; this was especially the case with landscape installers and gardeners.” Invisible no more, Southwick brings these workers into view. But what are the contradictions of making Southwick’s kind of work in this kind of setting? Do we need class-critical artists to be working in a vacuum, far from the market and the wealth that is both their subject and their means of supporting their work? Would this make them more pure? Perhaps, but the truth is none of us can live outside of capitalism. I would prefer Southwick’s penetrating observations to be in the world than not at all.

While on the residency, Southwick has struck up tight friendships with Kristy Chan, a brilliant abstract artist who makes staggeringly gestural works, somewhere between Jean-Paul Riopelle and Tianyue Zhong, as well as Lydia Figes, ArtReview’s designated writer. “The conditions for art-making were very inspiring, especially because of the organic architectural design, furnishings and surrounding nature, all of which immediately makes you feel more relaxed and at ease with the world”, Figes tells me. “The constant, ongoing dialogue with artists also inspired me to pick up a paintbrush and attempt to fill a canvas with colour and texture, which curiously aided my writing and ability to think more openly.” Perhaps, in the fullness of time, writers and artists will collaborate on the residency together, recalling Aimé Maeght’s enthusiasm for pairing poets with painters to work on artists’ books.

Chan tells me that she has been mainlining Cetirizine and coffee on the residency, “painting until the paint cannot take any more wet on wet”, and describes the Cote d’Azur as “lots of bugs and lots of roundabouts.” Like Southwick, Chan has been inspired by Castellaras Le Neuf, especially the wacky interior of rabbit-warrens, low ceilings and curvilinear pillars–any or all of which might be walls, or doors, or frankly serve absolutely no purpose at all. The young compatriots have been opening a bottle or two of Chateauneuf Du Pape in the fresh spring evenings and painting until gone midnight. When it gets too cold to paint in the make-shift studios out back, they light a fire in the living room. Inspired by the embers and charred kindling in the fireplace, Chan’s painting, A Flame’s Shadow (2024), is a riot of crimson, grey, and burning orange, belying its careful composition with what looks like hyper-bursts of splayed paint. Southwick and Chan have even collaborated on a painting together, entitled Couëlle: an untitled representation of the exterior of Dragon Hill. It has a touch of Van Gogh’s absinthe-ravaged nocturnal visions of Arles and something of the Cubist flattening of the picture-plane, and even a little bit of Manoucher Yektai’s rapid brushstrokes in the foreground. As Southwick and Chan return to London from the residency, they’ve clearly had a productive and hedonistic six weeks. Whether Dragon Hill will succeed as the Fondation Maeght for the millennial nouveau riche remains to be seen. For now, it’s clearly nice work if you can get it.