.Aimé Maeght - 1906 1981 - biography

1906 - 1945

Aimé Maeght was born on April 27, 1906 in Hazebrouck in the Nord department. His father, Ernest Maeght, an engineer for the Chemins de fer du Nord, was requisitioned at the start of the First World War. He won't come back. His wife and four children were removed from the combat zone and taken by the Red Cross to Holland.

For a year, Aimé, his brother, his sisters and their mother suffered the horrors of war, experienced famine then were forced to flee again. After a grueling journey of several weeks which took them through Holland and Switzerland, they were directed to Nîmes then, finally, to a village in the Cévennes: Lassalle in the Gard. There, a peasant, Milou Berbiguier, a young widower, agrees to welcome them.

Recognized by his teachers as a student with a lively and intelligent mind, Aimé was sent to a technical college in Nîmes at the age of 12 and a half. There he learned industrial design and obtained a diploma as a lithographer engraver. Aimé is funny, attentive, passionate about music and art, he takes care of his appearance and his taste for meeting people. In 1926, he found work as a typographic designer at the Robaudy printing company in Cannes. Very quickly, he made his place and was entrusted with delicate work. In 1927, Aimé Maeght met the woman who would become his wife and his alter ego, Marguerite Devaye, born August 25, 1909 in Cannes. Aimé and Marguerite married on July 31, 1928. In 1930, their son Adrien was born.

In Cannes between the wars, Aimé opened a business selling radios and “modern” furniture under the name Arte .

ARTE , The first “Galerie Maeght”, in Cannes.

In the back shop, Aimé sets up a printing press. He has a decisive meeting, Pierre Bonnard. In 1939, while Aimé Maeght was mobilized in Toulon, Marguerite ran the store alone and took initiatives by hanging up paintings and pictures to sell. In the middle of the war, in 1942, the couple Aimé and Marguerite Maeght had a second son, Bernard. As the supply of radio equipment became disorganized, the store soon only presented paintings which sold rather well. Cannes being in a free zone. Loved, through his sympathy and his enthusiasm attracts young talents who entrust him with their works: André Marchand, Geer van Velde, Jean-Gabriel Domergue, Dany Lartigue (the son of the photographer), Kees Van Dongen… Already, with prescience, he plays the discoverers. Aimé Maeght entered into a close relationship with Jean Moulin, with whom he opened a gallery in Nice on February 6, 1943. The Maeghts frequented, met and crossed paths with most of the reclusive painters on the Côte d'Azur. In 1943, the Maeghts were forced to leave Cannes because Aimé was printing identity cards and food tickets for a group of resistance fighters from Grenoble and Jean Moulin was arrested. They retreated to Vence in the Nice hinterland, above Henri Matisse's property.

Jacques Prévert, Pierre Bonnard and Aimé Maeght in 1945.

Around the Maeghts living in Vence, a small community has formed which meets and helps each other on a daily basis: Matisse, Bonnard (who lives in Le Cannet), Rouault (who lives in Grasse), the Dutchman Geer van Velde and the Russian Jean Pougny (in Cannes) then Picasso (in Vallauris), Tristan Bernard, Thadée Natanson of Revue Blanche, the poet Pierre Reverdy, the musician Reynaldo Hahn. There, in 1944, Aimé Maeght, with the help of the young poet Jacques Kober, founded the literary group Firestone . At the Liberation, Pierre Bonnard and Aimé went to Paris and decided to open a gallery there. Encouraged by Henri Matisse who offers himself for the opening exhibition.

This is how, under the protective eye of Bonnard and Matisse, on December 6, 1945, the inauguration of the Galerie Maeght took place with an exhibition of recent drawings by Matisse.

1946 - 1963

After the chaos of the war, Paris was rebuilt, the Galerie Maeght, inaugurated on December 6, 1945 with an exhibition of drawings by Matisse, created an event, it was the meeting place for artists, poets and writers. Aimé and Marguerite Maeght have the talent to bring together those who invent the era to come. The great masters, Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, showed their support for Aimé's audacious projects.

The Maeght Gallery, in Paris, in 1947

The second exhibition is entitled “Black is a color”. There are works by Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Rouault, Manessier, Geer van Velde, Atlan, Chastel. The first issue of the magazine Behind Le Miroir , illustrated with six lithographs by Geer van Velde, accompanied by a text by the poet Jacques Kober, is published on this occasion.

As soon as the war ended, Aimé set sail for New York to meet Marcel Duchamp, to whom he suggested organizing an exhibition on Surrealism. Under the aegis of André Breton, Aimé succeeded in bringing together at the Galerie Maeght, for the last time, all the main actors of the major artistic movement. The gallery becomes the scene of the most extravagant installations. The scandal caused by a naked woman and a misused crucifix triggered the wrath of the press but ensured repercussions well beyond borders. Six exhibitions took place in 1947, including “On 4 Walls”, which showed paintings by Braque, Léger, Bonnard, Matisse, Rouault but also Picasso and Gris.

Surrealism exhibition in 1947, exhibition at the Maeght Gallery

As much to affirm and share his artistic and aesthetic choices and requirements as to introduce the public, Aimé Maeght does not hesitate to organize, in his gallery, exhibitions worthy of the best museums: The first masters of abstract art or six exhibitions of Russian masterpieces… Collective exhibitions allow the revelation and entry into the Gallery of new artists. Among these, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Ellsworth Kelly, Roger de La Fresnaye, Marc Chagall, Hans Arp, Pierre Tal-Coat, Pablo Palazuelo, Saül Steinberg, Jean Bazaine, Alexander Calder… Each exhibition is an opportunity to edition of an issue of Behind the Mirror, with prestigious signatures: René Char, Paul Eluard, Samuel Beckett, Francis Ponge, George Limbour, Raymond Queneau, Louis Aragon, André Frénaud, Jacques Prévert, Michel Leiris, James Sweeney, Pierre Reverdy, Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Arland, André du Bouchet , Jean paul Sartre…

Aimé never forgot his first job, printer. If the Maeght Gallery has become both a gallery of great modern masters and young talents, it is also an important publishing house whose publications are all produced in the workshop that Aimé opened in Levallois: works by bibliophily, catalogues, posters, lithographs and original engravings…

In 1953, a tragedy disrupted this success. Bernard, the youngest son of Marguerite and Aimé, died of leukemia at the age of twelve. The couple then retired to Saint-Paul-de-Vence where the affection and presence of the artists, their second family, helped them overcome their grief.

Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, supported by André Malraux, suggested to Marguerite and Aimé Maeght that they launch a new business. A madness: the creation, ex-nihilo, of a place of an entirely new type. Marguerite and Aimé Maeght undertake a trip to the United States. Braque and Malraux's idea of ​​creating a public place is gaining ground.

In 1955, they visited American foundations: Barnes, Phillips, Guggenheim. Little by little, the desire to create a place where their collection could be brought together and where their artist friends could work and exchange became clear. Aimé wants to rediscover the light that illuminated the works of Picasso, Miró and Calder in the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris, designed by Josep Lluis Sert, so he goes to Harvard to meet the Catalan architect who is developing the theories of a new Mediterranean architecture. Together, they draw the broad outlines of an “ideal gallery”, they reject the idea of ​​a confined museum, with an imposed route.

Aimé Maeght appeals to artists, he wants to know their needs, their desires. Work began on September 5, 1960. The artists visited the site regularly. The buildings rise from the ground, they follow the slope of the ground, thus avoiding any monotony. Aimé's greatest desire was fulfilled by creating a site that was at once a museum, a center for creation and meetings, where all forms of art came together. Aimé Maeght offers artists the best tools for creating and disseminating their art. It provides them with its galleries, its printing press, its publishing house, its magazines and journals and finally its Foundation.

Without any support from the State, the Maeghts are fully financing their project. It is the first building in France designed and built to house contemporary art. Previously, museums and art centers took over old unused buildings, as is the case for the Jeu de Paume, the Orangerie, the Grand Palais or the Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris. Four years were needed to construct the whole constituting what would become the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation.

1964 - 1981

On the evening of July 28, 1964, André Malraux, then Secretary of State for Culture, received from the hands of the granddaughters of Marguerite and Aimé Maeght the keys to the Foundation which had just been recognized as being of public utility. His speech delivers a perfect vision of this new site which is revolutionizing the French artistic landscape.

Aimé Maeght, Florence, Yoyo and Marguerite Maeght and André Malraux, 1964.

"(…) Madam Sir, I would like to try to make it clear beyond all the services you have rendered to the country throughout your entire life – because all this is the end of a life, not a kind of accident – I would like to try to clarify in what way this seems to me something quite other than a foundation and, if you allow me, in what way this evening perhaps has a historical character (…) You have just tried here, by the fact that you have tried to probably summarize the series of loves of a life, by the fact that the painters who are there all happen to be, to some degree, either poets or men who powerfully express the poetry of our time, you have attempted to make something which is in no way a palace, in no way a place of decoration and, let's say it right away, because the misunderstanding will grow and embellish, in no way a museum. not a museum.

When we were looking earlier at the piece of garden where the Mirós are, the same thing was happening as when we were looking at the room where the Chagalls were. These little horns that Miró reinvents with their incredible dreamlike power are creating in your garden with nature in the sense of trees, a relationship that has never been created.

When we talk about the most famous American foundation, that is to say Barnes, if it were here, it would have no connection with what you have done, it would be fifty years behind, because it is admirable as it is. is, she is a museum. But, here, something is attempted, with a result that we do not have to judge and which belongs to posterity, something that has never been attempted: to create the universe, to create instinctively and through love. the universe in which modern art could find both its place and this back world which was once called the supernatural.

This is barely over and we are in the silence which follows the last blow of the hammer. I think of Shakespeare: “It’s such a night, Jessica…” Good. It was on such a night that we listened to the silence which followed the last hammer which had made the Parthenon, it was on such a night that Michelangelo listened to the last hammers which built Saint-Pierre.

Madam, Sir, I raise my glass to the one who, later, when in the place that was Paris the murmuring and leaning people bow, having written "here the painting grew between the paving stones" will come here and say "this report which is now our relationship with life and which is born from painting, it was perhaps obscurely born this night. " And when this no longer exists, then the man to whom I raise my glass will make a little inscription "perhaps something of the spirit happened here."

Aimé responds by thanking his wife, Marguerite: “ She has always been my companion in good days and bad days. The relationships she had with the artists helped me a lot, she always supported me. I find it logical that the Foundation bears his name as much as mine."

The inauguration continues with a dinner in the central courtyard populated with sculptures by Giacometti. All the Maeght artists are present among the poets, filmmakers, actors, politicians and construction workers... TV and radios capture everyone's impressions. Chagall confides: I am very moved and I feel that something fantastic is happening tonight. It's not a museum, it's something else and only Maeght could do that. I am happy that my paintings appear here.

Yves Montand at the Maeght Foundation on July 28, 1964.

The evening, under the stars, ends with a round of singing where Yves Montand performs a song by Prévert, “Dans ma maison”. Ella Fitzgerald, in her chiffon dress, charms and seduces the audience. Already, Aimé Maeght mixes all artistic expressions. That night, the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation became the first place dedicated to Living Art.

Duke Ellington and Aimé Maeght at the Maeght Foundation in 1966.

In 1965, Aimé Maeght organized the “Nuits de la Fondation Maeght”, a major event for contemporary music and dance. Aimé finally has its ideal tool to present contemporary creation in all its forms.

With Marguerite, they endowed the Maeght Foundation with an exceptional collection comprising several thousand works. They will continue to enrich this fund. Aimé wants the public to discover new trends in living art without forgetting the foundations of modern art.

From 1964 to 1981, each year at the Maeght Foundation there were three to five exhibitions, accompanied by a catalogue, which in the 1960s was unusual.

In 1972, following the exhibition Meeting Pierre Reverdy The Pierre Reverdy Committee was created, responsible for promoting the work and memory of the poet. For the first time, a President of the French Republic makes an official visit to the Foundation. Georges Pompidou admires the Nicolas de Staël exhibition there. The Maeghts and the Pompidou discuss the project of a large art center in Paris... the Georges Pompidou Center will see the light of day in Paris in 1977, thirteen years after the opening of the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation. It is directly inspired by the model of the Maeght Foundation which brings together in a specifically designed contemporary building, permanent collections of modern and contemporary art, temporary exhibitions, library, music with IRCAM, artist residencies and workshops.

Francis Bacon who exhibited at the Maeght Gallery, visiting Saint Paul de Vence in front of The Walking Man by Alberto Giacometti, in the courtyard of the Maeght Foundation.

In 1964, a few months before the opening of the Maeght Foundation, the ARTE Printing Company (Art and Graphic Techniques) opened in Paris. From then on, all Maeght documents will come out of the ARTE presses (Catalogues, Derrière Le Miroir, books, magazines and journals, engravings, prints, posters, postcards and reproductions). For the first time, a workshop brings together all techniques, from the most traditional to the most sophisticated and avant-garde. In this “printing-laboratory”, according to Aimé’s expression, all the processes and the hundred technical workers are at the service of living art. The artists from Aimé Maeght's team stay there regularly: Joan Miró has a dedicated workshop there, Bran van Velde explores the paths of transparency in lithographic inks. Calder spends long hours there; to find the freedom of one's mobile , it cuts metal shapes which are welded to the printing plates in order to be inked and put under press. Chillida continues series from year to year, engraving and re-engraving the drawing with his sculptor's hand. Rebeyrolle, Riopelle, Ubac, Tal Coat, Tàpies, Kelly, Bury… all create original lithographs and engravings there. From 1936 to 1981 approximately 12,000 titles of engravings, lithographs and other original prints were published, totaling 600,000 works. Aimé Maeght is thus the most prolific publisher of original works in the world.

Aimé Maeght between Louis Aragon and Marc Chagall which he brought together in 1975 in a magnificent bibliophile book printed in a few dozen copies. Then in 1977 at the Maeght Foundation, in the exhibition " Marc Chagall, original engraving books for Aragon and Malraux".

Maeght becomes the largest publisher of bibliophile books bringing together original creations by artists and unpublished texts or poems by writers. In the various published works, the verb confronts the artist's line, sometimes reveals it, or is revealed by it. It is not simply a question of illustrations which accompany a text but of a common experience.

From 1969, Aimé Maeght also produced films dedicated to “Maeght artists”. He asks filmmakers to discover and reveal part of the mystery of the artist at work, in the privacy of the studio. Under the lens of Clovis Prévost's camera, Miró creates an original lithograph; the photographer Catala Roca accompanies the Spanish master to Osaka to record the birth of a wall ceramic; Ernst Scheidegger, Alberto Giacometti's childhood companion and great reporter at Magnum, brings the sculptor to reveal the mysteries of his art. Chagall, Calder, Tàpies, Adami, Bury, Artigas, Chillida and even the discreet Ubac are enthusiastic about this new means of dissemination, not only of their work, but also of their will and their thoughts.

Aimé Maeght with his German shepherd and The Dog , bronze by Alberto Giacometti.

In 1973, Galerie Maeght was one of the top 500 French exporters. Each year, apart from the exhibitions taking place on its premises, it organizes more than 50 abroad. Thus, as soon as a new artist exhibits at Maeght, his work is presented through traveling exhibitions, financed by Maeght even in the production of the catalog.

In 1974, the Foundation had been a success for ten years. Aimé Maeght, aged 68, could have retired, it is not in his temperament, he is launching new projects. Barcelona was chosen to host a satellite gallery in 1974. The Maeght gallery in Barcelona, ​​installed in a palace in the Gothic Quarter, played an initiating role. Like the Chillida retrospective that the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim of New York and the Palacio de Cristal of Madrid will host following the Gallery. Just like the Swiss Galerie Maeght in Zurich, it also has its own programming and shows new artists: Saura, Taulé, Richard Hamilton…

Nothing stood in the way of the hard worker that Aimé Maeght was, he knew and loved building and for this, he always surrounded himself with enthusiastic and competent collaborators. And he never got discouraged.

Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, in the entrance garden of the Maeght Foundation, in front of a monumental Calder.

Marguerite Maeght died on July 31, 1977, a few days before her 68th birthday. She is buried near her son Bernard for whom Alberto Giacometti had designed the tomb in the small cemetery of Saint-Paul. And it is under the same cypress that rests Aimé Maeght, who died four years later, on September 5, 1981 at only 75 years old.

The book The Maeght Saga by Yoyo Maeght, with dedication. Link here