Fondation Maeght: How One Couple Created France's First Art Institution

T here was a time, perhaps 30 years ago, when it would be almost impossible to go into a kitchen or dining room in the more bohemian bits of London or New York, without encountering a framed mid-century poster of an exhibition from Paris’s Galerie Maeght. Those bold blobs of Joan Miró, Georges Braque birds, swirls of Alexander Calder, wispy, enigmatic profiles by Marc Chagall and the rest became a byword for a certain sophistication. And the proceeds and that contemporary cool from the seemingly ubiquitous French gallery seeded one of the first museums of Modern art anywhere: the Fondation Maeght, in Saint-Paul de Vence.

Together, the commercial and the cultural institutions presented a picture of art world “insiderness”. The Parisian gallery and the Provençal gallery: the former a chic cipher of savoir faire, the latter a herb-scented, blue-skied, Mediterranean antidote to the big city; a paradise garden populated by abstract sculptures.

With its eccentric roofs, brilliant light and shady trees surrounding the building, the Fondation Maeght became a defining Modernist art experience in the 1960s, more intense than MoMA, more than a decade before the Centre Pompidou. And this year it turns 60, an event which is being celebrated by a major expansion. It’s a good moment then, to reflect on this Modernist landmark.

Its founder, Aimé Maeght (1906–81) came from a modest background. He trained as a lithographer and had a small shop in Cannes where, one day, the artist Pierre Bonnard popped in to get him to print a programme for a Maurice Chevalier concert illustrated with one of his works. Maeght then put the lithograph in his display and quickly sold it, encouraging Bonnard to return with more.

At the end of the Second World War, Maeght opened a gallery in Paris and was there to scoop up the works artists had made during their isolation, notably an outpouring of work by Henri Matisse and also Chagall, Calder, Miró, Alberto Giacometti and Fernand Léger – a virtual roll call of the cool, continental art of the era. Maeght became, arguably, the first major dealer in Modern art, building a stable of artists and developing a global profile. His wife, Marguerite, played a crucial role in this, as well as the decision to build a foundation to display the couple’s burgeoning – and era-defining – collection of 20th-century European art.

In 1953, Aimé and Marguerite lost their young son Bernard to leukaemia, and set about thinking about how they might quell their grief, sublimating it into a project. I spoke to the couple’s granddaughter, the current chairman of the foundation’s council, Isabelle Maeght. “They had bought this piece of land to build a house for Bernard, who was already ill, so that he could breathe fresh air,” she tells me. “When he died they looked around the site and found a ruin: it was an old chapel, only its walls left, and they found it had been dedicated to Saint Bernard. It was the sign they needed.”

The site was in the village of Saint-Paul de Vence, a picturesque heap of red-tiled-roofed buildings tumbling down a hillside between the Alpes Maritime and the Cote d’Azur. It was already a bohemian hangout: its famous hotel, the Colombe d’Or, was the regular haunt of artists and poets including Pablo Picasso, Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

“It was Léger who suggested that my grandparents should go to the US to visit the art foundations, which were something that did not exist in France [at the time],” says Maeght. They visited the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, as well as the Phillips Collection (Washington DC) and the Guggenheim (New York), and they returned to build “the first art foundation in France”.

It was on a visit to the Mallorca studio of Joan Miró that they found the architect. The studio’s Catalan designer was Josep Lluís Sert, a key figure in Modernism who had fled the Franco regime for the US (where he became the influential dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design). The Maeghts were enchanted by the light and the quality of space, feeling that the Balearic conditions were similar to their site in southern France.

Sert was already friends with most of the artists he would call upon to collaborate in the creation of Fondation Maeght. It was a remarkable array of 20th-century greats: Léger, Braque, Calder, Giacometti and Miró. Sert’s closeness to the artists meant they played a pivotal part in the design, notably of the landscape, with their work integrated into the whole rather than being used as ex post-facto ornament, turning the foundation into a Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work.

There is a pool with mosaics by Braque, a courtyard populated by Giacometti’s etiolated figures including the 1960 Walking Man I and II, chunky and surreal sculptures by Miró, a fountain by Pol Bury and a mosaic by Chagall. The spindly furniture was designed by Diego Giacometti, Alberto’s brother, and is still in use. It is a remarkable landscape of art.

Sert’s building for the Maeghts is almost certainly his finest work. Rather than designing one monolithic structure, he created a complex cluster of buildings constituting something like a village with its lanes and piazzas. The main structure, meanwhile, was characterised by an inversion of the vaults he designed for Miró’s studio – in turning them upside down he created a motif reminiscent of the bull or minotaur’s horns which haunt Spanish Modern art, most notably the work of Picasso and Miró. The new buildings were arranged around existing trees (unusual for that era) and their incorporation led to a more integrated place, closer to nature, shaded by the dark green pines.

There is a strict dividing line between commerce and culture: the foundation is completely separate to the Paris gallery but, as Isabelle Maeght says, “without the gallery there would never have been a foundation”. While it may be located in an area known as a playground of the wealthy, the foundation works hard to ensure it is not exclusive. “We can’t imagine it as a museum in a bunker,” Maeght tells me. “We try to help museums around the world and to spread the work around,” she adds, referring to the way the foundation loans works and organises shows elsewhere.

There is plenty to spread around. The permanent collection has grown over the years to include major works by Wassily Kandinsky, Barbara Hepworth, Eduardo Chillida, Anna-Eva Bergman, Ellsworth Kelly, Wifredo Lam and Christo, alongside pieces by all the old friends from Giacometti and Bonnard to Léger and Calder.

To coincide with the 60th anniversary this summer, a major exhibition, Bonnard-Matisse: a friendship, draws on work from the permanent collection as well as pieces on loan to celebrate these two French artists, their contributions to Modern art and their pivotal role in establishing the Maeghts in the art world.

But the biggest moment for the anniversary is the new extension by architect Silvio d’Ascia, opening in June. Comprising a large new gallery beneath the Giacometti courtyard and another, smaller room beside it, the extension will greatly expand the foundation’s capacity to display works from the permanent collection, as well as host events. All spaces, says Maeght, have views of nature and the landscape, and “try to respect the old building”.

The Fondation Maeght remains one of the great pilgrimage sites of Modern art and architecture; a place there to be explored by each subsequent generation. As it begins a new chapter, it looks like it is about to be rediscovered yet again.

_{Cover image: Alexander Calder, Les renforts, 1964. Photo: Olivier Amsellem. Artwork © 2024 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York}