Changer Les Idees

After a family tragedy, Aimé and Marguerite Maeght turned their summer house near Nice into a gallery and haven for artists. Today, it has one of the best private collections of modern art in Europe.

- Mary Gaudin

The Maeght Foundation sits in the hills surrounding Saint Paul de Vence, 30 minutes from Nice on the Côte d’Azur. The building is striking, but it’s the umbrella pines that you first notice on approach. These tall Mediterranean trees are far more glamorous than their Nordic cousins: with their free form, bending trunks and Dr Seuss tops, umbrella pines have something of the sculptural about them.

Aimé and Marguerite Maeght started their foundation in 1964, not so much as a museum but as a place for artists to work together and exchange ideas, as well as exhibit their work. Aimé was a French gallerist, collector and publisher and the collection assembled at the museum before his death in 1981 reads like a survey of 20th-century modernist art. The pieces in the sculpture garden include work by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Jean Arp; inside, there are pieces by Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. Being a fan of Ellsworth Kelly, it was so good to see his bold painting ‘Red, Yellow, Blue’, accompanied by a delicate lithograph outlining a cyclamen, both made during a stay in 1963.