It is with great pleasure and admiration that we were able to visit the Maeght Foundation, which, for the first time since its opening on July 28, 1964, had been closed for a few months due to renovation work and updating of the structures.
We did so in the company of Isabelle Maeght – granddaughter of the founders Marguerite and Aimé Maeght and daughter of Adrien, the president of the Foundation – and many Friends of the Foundation in an atmosphere that was both convivial and emotional.
The emotion came from witnessing the efforts made to keep the flame of “a family adventure” alive, as Isabelle Maeght passionately calls it, by telling us how it all began: the story of a Parisian art gallery initially and subsequently a foundation that has become essential in the panorama of European, if not global, contemporary art.
“And everything was done for the artists but especially with the artists,” Isabelle Maeght tells us, reminding us of the friendships that tied her grandparents to the various artists exhibited at the Foundation, particularly with Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor, painter, and draftsman to whom this exhibition, marking the “second birth” of the Foundation, is dedicated, and about which we will return later in these notes.
A “second birth” that therefore further highlights the work of its designer, the Catalan architect José Lluis Sert (successor to Walter Gropius at the head of the Faculty of Architecture at Harvard University in 1958), who, as a true visionary, knew how to design a place of pure beauty that still today gives the impression of projecting you into the future! And all this in the 1960s, working with “humble” materials such as brick, plaster, concrete, and ceramic. Natural materials that we could classify as respecting sustainable development standards!
Isabelle Maeght, who is also the curator of this exhibition, the majority of the works of which come from the Foundation’s permanent collection or the Maeght Collection, talks to us about this “place of memory” created with the complicity of the artists and with their precious moral endorsement.
Words of faith remind us of the place (Saint-Paul de Vence lending itself to it…) one of the most touching expressions of the apostle Saint Paul (a true warrior like Isabelle) to the faithful: “It is not important to know your path when you have faith.” And certainly, Isabelle Maeght is imbued with this “faith” that makes her the worthy heir of this “family adventure” she wants to continue, despite the difficulties, with the certainty of always finding her path…and that of happiness for lovers of contemporary art!
