Fondation Camargo

The Camargo Foundation, located in Cassis, France, and founded by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill, is a residential center offering programming in the humanities and the arts. It offers time and space in a contemplative environment to think, create, and connect. The Foundation encourages the visionary work of scholars, artists, and thought leaders in the arts and humanities.

The Camargo Foundation honors the legacy, artistic interests and humanistic concerns of founderJerome Hill.

Jerome Hill, the grandson of railroad builder James Jerome Hill and the son of Louis W. Hill, Sr., was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating from Yale, where he majored in music and composition, he traveled to Europe and began studies in painting. During these trips, he started experimenting with still photography, influenced by what he had learned as a student of Edward Weston.

Beginning in the 1930s, Jerome Hill made his main residence in Cassis, a scenic port town on the Mediterranean Sea, in front of the dramatic cliffs of Cap Canaille. Even though he maintained a residence at Sugar Bowl, a ski resort in California, and lived for long stretches in New York City, Cassis became the heart of his creative life, the inspiration for many of his paintings, a backdrop for his films, and the center of his social and artistic life.

In Cassis, Jerome Hill began experimenting with film and motion picture cameras. Filmmaking soon became his main artistic activity, in addition to painting and music composition. At first, he explored the documentary genre with Grandma Moses (1950), a short film about the renowned American folk artist, and Albert Schweitzer (1957), which received an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Broadening interests took him beyond the documentary format with his first "story" film, The Sand Castle (1961). Inspired by the ideas of C. G. Jung, it was a feature length, low-budget, comedy-fantasy in black and white with a dream sequence in color that introduced a novel form of stop motion. Self Portrait (1972), his masterwork and cinematic memoir, is a diary film in which he presents his life and milieu through old home movies and newly-staged scenes, many hand-colored and animated.