Illustrated book about the Côte d’Azur – culture

If you look at Edward Quinn’s photographs, you cannot get rid of the suspicion that the height of glamor life on this planet took place between the summer of 1954 and the summer of 1963 on a narrow stretch of coast between Monte Carlo and Marseille. To terminate that a little more precisely, between Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of “Above the Roofs of Nice” with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant and the appearances of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis at the jazz festival in Juan-les-Pins. And what was going on there. Brigitte Bardot was discovered. Grace Kelly married the Prince of Monaco. Hollywood’s future legends strolled the waterfront promenades, hung out on the beach and on the tennis court. Winston Churchill and wife performed the callas. In the evening, of course, we went to one of the bars in a very large cloakroom that showed the culinary still underexposed Anglo-Saxons why the saying God is based in France and not in London or California. And above it all hovered the true spirit of the south of France, Pablo Picasso, who was entering his late phase in his inland estate.

Edward Quinn was the only one who had something like real friendship with Picasso. As close as he got to glamor over the years, this sparkle of the beautiful, the smart and the rich always remained aloof for the young Irishman. He grew up in poor conditions in Dublin. In Belfast he made his way as a guitarist in a band and survived a German air raid in a church. He became a radio operator with the Royal Air Force and after the war worked for the French airline Chartair on the shuttle flights between Africa and Europe. In 1949 he moved to the place of his dreams, the Côte d’Azur. In Monaco he was still working as a musician and press photographer. It was then a packet with sample pages from the magazine National Enquirer, which made it clear to him what the editors expected from this corner of the world on behalf of the readership: “As you can see, we prefer the bikini swimsuit and the type of figure that fills it out perfectly.”

He regularly struck gold at the Cannes Film Festival. And the pictures of stars and figures of power also sold extremely well, even if he much preferred to take pictures of artists and intellectuals. Even then, this glamorous world was not as innocent as one might think today. Quinn often stood on the other side, and that’s how you see the photographers swarming around pin-ups and celebrities. There was even fake news back then. Even Quinn was not immune from that. The picture of Marlon Brando in 1954 in a striped sailor shirt and a jacket strolling across the pier in Bandol, the small village between Marseille and Toulon where he allegedly fell in love with the 19-year-old daughter of a local fisherman and became engaged to her , illustrated a fairy tale. He really got to know Josanne Mariani-Bérenger when she was working as an au pair for a well-known psychiatrist in New York and taking acting lessons from Stella Adler. They lived together in an apartment above Carnegie Hall. They were visiting Bandol. Her mother had married the fisherman there whom the gossip press made her father. Because the story of the Hollywood star and the fisherman’s daughter was just as much nicer than the story of the drama student and the professional.

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Edward Quinn not only had an eye for beauty and glamor, but also for talent. While filming the comedy “Monte Carlo Baby” in 1951 he discovered the still unknown Audrey Hepburn. In the hinterland he took photos of her, which she sent to her agent. He got her the lead role in “A Heart and a Crown” with Gregory Peck, which earned her an Oscar. Quinn also took pictures of the young Bardot when she was still one of the countless hopeful people who roamed the southern French coast.

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“Riviera Cocktail” is now appearing in a new edition, which, with its larger format, is even more splendid than the first editions. The volume may slightly distort the complete works of Edward Quinn. A total of nine photo volumes have already come out about his friend Picasso, books about Max Ernst, James Joyce and Georg Baselitz. But that’s the way it is in his world, in which bikini pictures have always sold better than studies on painter’s studios and writers’ paths. With the passage of many years, however, the shimmering Mediterranean sun over these people turns into the light of a pantheon that has little to do with the lowlands of the press landscape in which these images first appeared.

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