Aimé Maeght

Aimé Maeght was an influential French art dealer, publisher, and collector. Through the multifaceted activities of his gallery in Paris after the Second World War, he championed some of the best-known protagonists of early twentieth-century modern art, including Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Vassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, and Joan Miró, as well as emerging artists such as Eduardo Chillida, Ellsworth Kelly, and Pierre Tal-Coat. With his wife Marguerite, in 1964 he established France’s first private art foundation, the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which houses the large collection that Maeght built over many years.

Maeght trained as a lithographic draftsman and poster designer, beginning his career at the press Robaudy in Cannes in 1926. After marrying Marguerite Devaye in 1928, the couple opened a shop selling radios and electronic goods in 1932 while Aimé continued working as a designer. Encouraged by the painter Pierre Bonnard, Maeght opened the Galerie Arte in Cannes in 1937, where he exhibited the work of area painters such as Jean-Gabriel Domergue and André Marchand, in addition to artists from elsewhere in France, including Roger Chastel, Jean Pougny, and Georges Rouault. During the Second World War, the Maeghts stayed in the “free zone” in the southern regions of France where Aimé strengthened his friendship with Bonnard. Through the artist, he broadened his network in the South of France to include Henri Matisse, among others. In late 1945 Maeght decided to expand his business to a larger market. Closing Galerie Arte, he left the South to settle in Paris, where he opened the Galerie Maeght at 13 rue de Téhéran with a solo exhibition of work by Matisse. However, neither Bonnard nor Matisse could commit exclusively to Maeght, as they both had preexisting arrangements with other dealers.

The Galerie Maeght initially mounted thematic exhibitions such as Le noir est une couleur (1946) and Le Surréalisme en 1947, organized in collaboration with the Surrealists André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Sur 4 murs (1946) featured large-scale paintings and sketches for mural decorations, revealing Maeght’s interest in forms of artistic expression beyond the easel. In subsequent years, individual exhibitions devoted to artists such as Braque (1947), Miró (1948), Léger (1949), Alexander Calder (1950), Chagall (1950), Alberto Giacometti (1951), and Kandinsky (1951) confirmed the prestige of Maeght’s gallery. The dealer focused not only on established painters but also on young emerging artists, including Kelly (1953), Pablo Palazuelo (1955), Chillida (1956), Jean-Paul Riopelle and Francis Bacon (1966), Paul Rebeyrolle and Antoni Tàpies (1967), Pol Bury (1969), and Valerio Adami (1970). Maeght later opened new branches of the gallery in Zurich (1970) and Barcelona (1974). Through his relationships with this large circle of artists, Maeght purchased works for his gallery’s stock and for his personal collection, which grew considerably over the years.

Maeght never lost his passion for art books and after opening his gallery embarked on ambitious publishing initiatives. Each of the catalogues that accompanied his 253 exhibitions also functioned as an issue of a magazine titled Derrière le miroir, which Maeght designed as a lavish, large-format album illustrated with original lithographs as well as reproductions and contextual materials. The gallery’s publishing arm actively fostered collaborations between artists and writers that resulted in, for example, Tristan Tzara’s Parler seul (illustrated by Miró, 1950), Pierre Reverdy’s L’Aventure méthodique (illustrated by Braque, 1950), and the 1945 series Pierre à feu, which combined illustrated poems and prose works by a variety of artists and authors. In 1959 he established his own lithographic workshop and began publishing monographs and catalogues raisonnés on Braque and Miró, among others. He also founded three short-lived but influential periodicals: L’Ephémère (twenty issues, 1966–72), a quarterly literary journal edited by the French writers Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Dupin, Michel Leiris, and Gaëtan Picon; L’Art vivant (fifty-seven issues, 1968–75), a monthly magazine supervised by the art historian Jean Clair, which covered the latest developments in contemporary art, film, music, and dance; and Argile (twenty-four issues, 1973–81), a poetry review edited by the writer Claude Estéban, focusing on translations and previously unpublished works.

After the untimely death of their second son, Bernard, in 1953, Aimé and Marguerite Maeght decided to radically transform their home at Saint-Paul-de-Vence into a foundation designed by the Spanish Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert. A friend of Miró, Sert modeled the structure on the artist’s studio as a living cultural forum integrated into the surrounding Mediterranean landscape. Reflecting the vision of the Maeghts, the multifunctional building, completed in 1963, features airy exhibition halls opening onto gardens and patios, artists’ studios, a cinema, a concert hall, and a reference library. Commissioned artworks were incorporated throughout the site, with an ensemble of sculptures by Giacometti in the courtyard, a labyrinth by Miró, monumental mural mosaics by Chagall and Tal-Coat, a pool designed by Braque, and a mechanical fountain designed by Pol Bury. The Maeghts financed the entire project and bequeathed a significant part of their private collection, comprising more than thirteen thousand paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, to the foundation. The Galerie Maeght still operates in Paris.