France’s Fondation Maeght Celebrates Its sixtieth Anniversary This Summer season

The French Riviera has lengthy been a haven for artists. Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent his last years, from 1907 to 1919, right here in a house in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Pierre Bonnard settled in Le Cannet in 1920. Pablo Picasso lived and labored in Vallauris from 1948 to 1955. And lots of the twentieth century’s most necessary artists would keep at La Colombe d’or, an iconic lodge that’s the coronary heart and soul of Saint-Paul de Vence. The opposite crown jewel of this city, simply west of Good, is the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght, which is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary this summer season—with the opening of an growth.

Within the Sixties, artwork sellers and publishers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght determined to create a non-public basis that might showcase their assortment, based mostly on fashions they’d seen in the USA. They have been inspired by Cubist artist Georges Braque who noticed within the undertaking a approach for them to deal with the lack of their son Bernard, who died of leukemia in 1953. The primary of its variety in France, the Fondation Maeght opened in July 1964. At its inauguration, then minister of tradition André Malraux mentioned, “This isn’t a museum, however a spot produced from love and for the love of artwork and artists.”

At present, the museum is house to some 13,000 objects, together with 2,000 works by Joan Miró (the most important assortment in France), in addition to site-specific installations by Braque, Pierre Tal-Coat, Marc Chagall, Pol Bury, Germaine Richier, and Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptures fill the courtyard.

Closed on and off for the previous seven months, the Fondation Maeght reopened its long-awaited growth final month. “We had the concept for the growth in 2004. It was what my grandfather needed, however we couldn’t discover the appropriate individual for the job,” mentioned Isabelle Maeght, the Maeghts’ granddaughter, throughout a press convention.

Designed by Paris-based agency Silvio d’Ascia Structure, the brand new part provides 5,005 sq. toes to the museum’s footprint, with out disturbing the unique structure by Josep Lluís Sert, who additionally constructed Miró’s studio in Mallorca. As a substitute, d’Ascia selected to dig 4 additional galleries below the present constructing; the most important of which lies under the Giacometti courtyard. (They’re solely seen from the Chemin de Rondes, which runs behind the museum.) The biggest one lies under the Giacometti courtyard.

“That is an extension undertaking by subtraction,” d’Ascia mentioned in the course of the press preview. “As an architect you will need to know when to set one’s ego apart, particularly within the face of an invisible undertaking. I needed to undertake a silent method to not disrupt the muse’s already good steadiness.”

These new underground galleries overlook a pine forest and the Mediterranean Sea, thus retaining alive the dialogue between artwork, nature, structure that served as the muse to the Maeghts’ imaginative and prescient for his or her museum.

Adrien Maeght, 94, the Maeghts’ son and present president of the muse, added, “The basement rooms designed by Silvio d’Ascia have introduced the location into the twenty first century.”

The growth will now permit the muse to show its everlasting assortment (downstairs within the growth) alongside non permanent exhibitions (upstairs within the authentic constructing), like its present one for Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The brand new “Galerie de la Bibliophilie” opens the renovated constructing, showcasing choices from the 45,000 books within the basis’s assortment. Down a dozen steps are work by Pierre Soulages, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Messager, Fernand Léger, and others. The ultimate room is devoted to latest acquisitions, together with a figurative portray by Hélène Delprat, who would be the topic of a solo present on the basis by subsequent spring.

The finances for the growth undertaking quantities to €5 million, together with €1 million from Adrien Maeght and €500,000 every from the French state, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur area, and the Alpes-Maritimes division. The Dassault household additionally gave €1 million, by way of their “Historical past and Heritage” fund, managed by the grandchildren of Marcel and Madeline Dassault who have been buddies of the Maeghts and attended the muse’s 1964 opening. The corporate Triverio, which oversaw the unique constructing’s development 60 years in the past, participated as company sponsors. “With out friendship this basis wouldn’t even exist,” Isabelle Maeght mentioned a number of instances all through the preview.

The theme of friendship additionally performed a task within the Bonnard-Matisse exhibition, as each artists have been buddies with the Maeghts. “Bonnard and my father first met in Cannes in 1936 by way of a lithograph to be printed,” Adrien Maeght writes within the exhibition catalog. Bonnard then launched Aimé Maeght to Matisse in 1943, however they solely turned shut after Matisse and Marguerite randomly met in a health care provider’s ready room; “a person sat down subsequent to her and requested her to pose for him,” and he or she quickly turned his “lively agent.”

At present, about 40 drawings of Marguerite by Matisse stay; a number of of them are featured within the new assortment hold. “On the age of fourteen,” Adrian continues within the catalog, “I had the privilege of attending considered one of these posing periods and of constructing an eight-minute movie—the one doc I do know of exhibiting Matisse drawing.” Additionally on view is Matisse’s Le Buisson (The Bush), which hung above Bernard’s mattress throughout his sickness.

That includes each artist’s landscapes and visions of Saint-Tropez’s gentle, self-portraits and several other portraits of their recurring fashions, the exhibition principally avoids pairing works by Bonnard and Matisse facet by facet. That’s intentional, in line with the present’s curator, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Sévigny, a former conservator at Good’s Musée Matisse. The main target right here is on the Maeghts and their relationship to the artists: Bonnard inspired them to open a gallery in Paris, and Matisse was chosen for the inaugural present in 1945. “What issues right here is the synergy between the three, which served as a springboard for the muse,” she mentioned.