Sert on the Riviera

Between courses, in truly Lucullan meals, the diner may be served a bit of sherbet "to refresh the palate." Yet in feasting on art, the viewer usually plunges from room to room, and his retinas, unrefreshed between rich courses, cry for cool relief. Such, at least, seems to be the art-gastronomy theory of Jose Luis Sert, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design; as the architect of a new museum in the south of France, he solves this and a number of other gallerygoers' problems.

The builder is Paris's Flemish-French Art Dealer Aime Maeght (pronounced Mag), who had long owned a wooded hilltop a mile from Saint-Paul-de-Vence, on the Cote d'Azur, a perfect site for a museum. He consulted assorted architects, who suggested amusing and cavalier plans for a subterranean museum or one soaring on stilts, but he eventually chose Sert. For consultants he enlisted artists whose works he sells: Braque, Chagall, Miro and Giacometti.

Begun in 1959, the museum is now filling up with a heady collection of modern masters: soon there will be a dozen Miros, Giacomettis by the ton, Chagalls, Kandinskys and Braques -- all from Maeght's famous collection. The museum will open next year.

Light is the most vexing problem in any museum. Sert & Co., after long thought, have built quarter-cylinder "traps" that concentrate light the way a radar antenna gathers in radio waves. The effect is to eliminate streaks and reflections. To thwart "artnaping," that ever-popular Riviera crime, alarms flash and doors snap shut like those in a sub marine if any art object is touched.

Sert's design uses concrete, native stone and small bricks, and his plan stretches the museum along the irregular curves and rises of the hill. Rooms are devoted to works of different artists, and the sherbet is provided by "reposing spaces" between galleries, where visitors can "wash their eyes" of Chagall, say, before attacking Kandinsky. For a few minutes' peace, they may gaze into pools filled with rain water caught by gigantic rooftop scoops.

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