Marc Chagall, André Malraux and Aimé Maeght on the evening of the inauguration of the Maeght Foundation, July 1964. Aimé Maeght, orphaned during the First World War, was taken in by the Red Cross from his northern region and moved to the Cévennes. He turned his father's death and uprooting into a strength and worked intensely to live out his passions. After years of struggle with illness, his son Bernard died at the age of 12. Instead of complaining, crying in public, isolating themselves in the ease they had acquired after years of work, with Marguerite, my grandmother, they chose life and wanted to leave an immortal work. This is how, from the death of their beloved son, the Maeght Foundation was born. That is why there is a chapel dedicated to Saint Bernard in the Foundation. Their friend Marc Chagall, for this life, for the Foundation, made his greatest painting, he will never make a larger, more intense, more important one. Marc Chagall, in his studio, working on what will remain as his greatest painting, La Vie, which he completed for the opening of the Maeght Foundation in 1964.
Marc Chagall, La Vie, 1964.
For the Maeght Foundation, Marc Chagall created a mosaic representing Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, which faces the entrance of visitors, as if the Maeght couple were welcoming everyone.
