Nantes – Follow the Green Line in a City Saved By Art
Travel to Nantes and you arrive at a city which, over the course of the last 35 years, has worked hard to turn its fortunes around by putting its faith in culture. Risks have been taken but they have paid off handsomely, completely transforming the city's once run down industrial district from wasteland and bringing a whole new way of thinking as to how a modern city might operate.
At the end of the 1980's, with the collapse of its centuries long relationship with manufacturing, shipping and the sea, Nantes faced a starkly bleak future of decline and decay.
The then mayor and future Prime Minister of France, Jean-Marc Ayrault, took a brave decision to give carte blanche to art director, Jean Blaise to put in place a long term strategy to drastically reduce the city's reliance on industry and commerce and to instead nurture art and culture.
Blaise's outlandish plan to save the city has brought art and culture to the forefront, making it one of the most important aspects of life in Nantes.
He introduced a number of very successful free arts events in the city for over 20 years. Then, in 2011, Le Voyage à Nantes, an initiative of the Nantes Métropole, a public company which promotes Nantes through culture, was created, with Blaise as its director, cultural entrepreneur and curator. Le Voyage à Nantes has succeeded in making Nantes a dynamic and attractive city for tourists and locals alike.
Le Voyage à Nantes has three main components, a permanent artistic showcase of more than 100 artworks throughout the city, which reveal the cultural and historical heritage of Nantes, from the medieval castle of the Dukes of Brittany to the contemporary installations of the Machines de l’Île; a citywide summer arts festival, instigated in 2012, which invites artists from around the world to create site-specific works in public spaces; and a museum network that includes five metropolitan museums: the Musée d’Arts de Nantes, the Musée d’Histoire de Nantes, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, the Musée Jules Verne, and the Musée Dobrée (due to re-open in May 2024) which offer a rich and varied collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, natural specimens, historical objects and literary works.
The annual, two-month long arts festival, which takes place every July and August (with a six week Winter Festival from November to January having been introduced in 2022) saw visitor numbers to Nantes increase by over 50 per cent in under ten years.
It has succeeded in creating an ever growing cultural tourist trail, “The Green Line”, with many temporary exhibits becoming permanent features of a portfolio of open air attractions for townsfolk and visitors.
This “dispersed monument” of over 130 works of art is open to discovery all year round by following the Green Line (literally a 12 kilometre green line painted on the ground), through the alleys, streets and districts of the city.
Each year, the trail is reinvigorated by new input from artists, architects, designers and gardeners, as visitors from all over France and the rest of the world flock to the city.
Of his ideas for Nantes, Blaise has said “The important thing is to understand that culture is fundamental for the life of a city. In fact, it cannot exist without it. The idea of the festival is to colonise every part of town with artistic creation.”
Free public art events have transformed the city, returning the investment made in huge multiples. The Socialist Party, which gave the green light to Blaise's plans, has held a majority in Nantes since 1983 and one of the main reasons for this is the success of the city's transformation. Every year, the city's arts budget passes without opposition, as the opposition knows how well it works for the city's inhabitants and that to oppose it would only weaken their chances of ever governing again.
The success of Blaise's plan and the drawing power of the city's art and culture offering has resulted in Nantes becoming a fun and creative city, revitalised by cultural tourism. While the initial goal was merely to make the city more attractive to those living there, creating alternative opportunities for its younger citizens, enticing them not to emigrate, Blaise's transforming ideas proved so successful, that the city's regeneration attracted the attention of the rest of France and, indeed, the world.
Three decades on from plan commencement, Nantes is often cited as the number one French city for quality of life and the strategy might well serve as an example to other cities around the world as to how to cope with what might seem like the existential threat of the loss of an industrial base.
Thanks in no small part to Voyages a Nantes, the city's population increases each year by around 1.4%, and it's a youthful population, with 41% of inhabitants under 40.
As well as artworks around the city, Estuaire Nantes, an open air museum of some 30 works inspired by the river’s industrial and shipping heritage, stretches the open air collection for a further 40 miles along the banks of the Sèvre Nantaise, a left-bank tributary of the Loire, from Nantes to neighbouring St Nazaire, with the two cities having now cemented a cultural bond.
Attractions include Tatzu Nishi’s “Villa Cheminee”, a house perched 15 metres up on a chimney stack, Jean-Luc Courcoult’s “La Maison dans la Loire”, a house sinking into the water, Huang Yong Ping’s “Serpent d’Ocean”, a 120-metre long metal skeleton of a giant sea snake and Erwin Wurm’s “Inconceivable”, a boat melting Dali-like over a quay.
This last piece, when first installed, was very unpopular with the locals but, 3 years later, when it was to be removed, having experienced an influx of visitors while it was in place, those self same locals fought to have its presence made permanent – and won.
This is a perfect example of how Nantes has facilitated economic growth in and around the city by the use of art and culture.
Local Muscadet wine manufacturers have also seen their sales grow hugely since the installation, over the area where they cultivate their grapes, of an art piece which doubles as a viewing platform. The influx of visitors since its completion has been huge, with the local economy's return on the city's investment being some 30 times the 2 million euro cost of the project.
Long before Le Voyage à Nantes, while Nantes was thriving industrially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, art was present, albeit in the background, with the Musée d’Arts de Nantes, the main art museum of the city, having been founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801 by way of a huge gifted collection of paintings, sculptures and drawings, from antiquity to the then present day.
In 1810 the collection was further supplemented by a vast municipal purchase of over 1,100 paintings, 64 sculptures and 10,000 prints, bought for the city from the Nantais collectors Pierre and François Cacault.
Since then the collection has grown to the point where it is now one of the largest in France and the only one outside Paris with a collection spanning the 13th to the 21st centuries, presenting an unbroken timeline of the history of art.
The overall collection includes works by the likes of Delacroix, Monet, Picasso, Kandinsky, Ernst, Ingres, Chagall, Leger, Courbet, Dufy, Monet and many more. Since its reopening in 2017, after a long renovation and expansion project which saw it completely refurbished and with a new Modern Art extension added, it is now once again a thriving centre for the arts in the city.
The museum is unique in presenting art from different periods in the same spaces, for example by hanging an Old Master in a contemporary room or vice versa, creating a duality and juxtaposition between old and new.
While the Musée d’Arts de Nantes is a dominant player, there are many other other museums, galleries and exhibits of note all across the city, making an extended stay or even just a two hour journey on the TGV from Paris more than worthwhile.
In the city centre, Galerie Paradise showcases contemporary art by both emerging and established artists, while The Fine Art Gallery specialises in prints and engravings by old masters such as Dürer and Rembrandt.
Also in the centre you will find two statues by Philippe Ramette, offering off-kilter perspectives of the world. Returning to the codes of classical sculpture, his two Éloges (“Odes”) can be found on Place du Bouffay and Cours Cambronne, paying tribute not to glory but to attitudes.
In Cours Cambronne, “Éloge de la transgression” (Ode to Trangression) depicts a schoolgirl climbing onto an empty pedestal – or, perhaps she's climbing off – depending on your perspective, while, on Place du Bouffay, "Éloge du pas de côté" (Ode to the Side Step), a male figure in a business suit has one foot on its plinth but the other beside it in mid air, providing the allegory of the sidestep and paying tribute to the audacity of Nantes and its commitment to and close relationship with culture.
Taking its name from the initials of the founder and his wife of the former biscuit factory in which it is located, LU, or the Lieu Unique (Unique Place) is a sprawling cultural centre topped by the beautiful, tiled LU Tower, which features Pheme, the Greek goddess of fame, and signs of the zodiac. The former factory halls are ideal for displaying large scale contemporary works. The programme also includes theatre, dance, circus, music, literary gatherings and debates.
The last of the great Loire Valley castles before the Atlantic Ocean, the Chateau des Ducs de Bretagne, which re-opened in 2007 following 15 years of works and 3 years of closure to the public, hosts the Nantes History Museum, installed in 32 of the castle rooms and presenting more than 850 objects in its collection with the aid of multimedia exhibitions.
In addition, there's a changing exhibition programme. Past presentations have included the origins of Surrealism (the movement’s founder, Andrew Breton, was stationed in Nantes during WWI), pre-Hispanic Columbian gold treasures, Japanese engravings and the world of Ghengis Khan.
In the middle of the River Loire, the Ile de Nantes is the city’s creative quarter. Once the site of abandoned shipyards and run-down industrial buildings, it has seen architects vying to outdo each other with eye-popping new builds and whimsical refurbishments, from the severely slick-black Palais de Justice to the Manny building, clad haphazardly with aluminium strips to resemble a bird’s nest. It even emanates pre-recorded chirping sounds.
Along the quayside stand “Les Anneaux” by Daniel Buren and Patrick Bouchain, a series of 18 rings made of steel and coloured glass, which are illuminated in red, blue and green at night. The rings are aligned along the Loire river, creating a visual link between the city and the water, revealing both the architectural perspective created by the quay and the natural perspective, created by the Loire River estuary. The rings face the river, offering ready made frames around visitors' views of the water and the landscape beyond.
Located at the westernmost tip of Ile de Nantes is Hangar à Bananes, designed in 1949-50 to receive exotic fruit from Africa which was unloaded and stored in this air-conditioned hangar. It was renovated to host the first edition of the Estuaire Nantes - Saint-Nazaire art biennial back in 2007, where it was used as a vast exhibition space.
Renamed the HAB Galerie in 2011 and managed by Le Voyage à Nantes, it's dedicated to contemporary art. Exhibitions here offer an opportunity to explore works which are planned and executed by artists in-situ, featuring paintings, videos, sculptures, installations or combinations of, or indeed, all of those media. It also boasts an excellent bookstore/gift shop, with a wide array of publications on contemporary art, art history, architecture, design, graphic novels, children’s books, and a selection of original objects made by local creatives.
Finally, no visit to Nantes is complete without a visit to Les Machines de l’Ile (the Island Machines), a blend of Leonardo da Vinci mechanical universe, Victorian circus and Jules Vernes fantasy (Verne, who wrote “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” was born in Nantes). A former boiler-making factory is now the workshop of a team of madcap engineers who have built a mechanical menagerie, from an eight-metre high heron, flying passengers overhead, to a giant ant scurrying across the floor and the piece de resistance, a huge, steel and wood elephant which strolls around the island with visitors on its back. Add to that the three-tiered Carousel of Marine Worlds representing different levels of the ocean with passengers riding in creatures which inhabit each one, and you’ll feel like an extra in the latest Disney caper.
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