Stones for the Spirit

Artists have long loved southern France, and some, like Picasso, have become year-round residents. Usually their paintings were shipped north to the big art galleries of Paris; only in recent years has a host of small museums displaying works by resident greats in a leisurely ambiance sprung up along the Mediterranean. Most recent and best is the small but elaborate Maeght museum (see color), which opened last summer on the French Riviera, has already drawn over 80,000 visitors.

Strolling Ghosts. Tucked away in the hills high above the Mediterranean at Saint-Paul-de-Vence and commanding one of the most breathtaking views on the entire coast, the new museum is a gift to France from Paris Art Dealer Aime Maeght (rhymes with jog). Having made a fortune in the postwar boom selling the works of Chagall, Miro, Kandinsky, Braque and Giacometti, Maeght decided to enlist his artists' aid in building a showcase for their paintings and sculptures. Thus Giacometti was able to help plan the ideal courtyard for his wasted bronze figures, which today are in the open air looking like ghosts out for a stroll. Alexander Calder contributed a 41-ton stabile, a great black dog, for the front yard. Miro filled his section, a rock-wall garden, with droll ceramics, one a giant egg nesting in a quiet pond. And in typically glad ribbons of red, green and blue, Chagall laid out his first mosaic.

The six rooms displaying paintings have no windows; the brilliant light of Provence streams through filters in the ceiling. "I had a holy horror," says Maeght, "of trying to look at a painting streaked by rays of the sun." So that visitors may "wash their eyes" between, say, a room of Braques and a room of Miros, spacious views open out onto a grassy patio or a lily-padded pool. Blending all these delightful and special touches into a bold structure that wholly integrates architecture with painting and sculpture was Catalonian Architect Jose Luis Sert, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Explosive Encounters. In inaugurating the Maeght museum, France's Minister of Culture Andre Malraux predicted: "When in a million years men stop by at this place, they will surely say, 'Something undoubtedly happened here which had to do with the spirit.'" Maeght hopes to make Malraux's prophecy come true. "From the very first sketch drawn, from the first stone laid," he says, "what came before all else was the spiritual climate to be created, not something dead where relics are kept, but a center of intellectual life away from the trite problems of daily living."

To make the museum a center for young artists, Maeght had a cluster of cottages erected, complete with music rooms, studios, servants' quarters and a fine French chef. Given a trial run last December by a trio of Americans, the project proved a great success. One, Painter Ellsworth Kelly, so responded to the luxuriant Riviera landscape that his style underwent a major transformation. Maeght eagerly awaits his next group of artists-in-residence in September: "I hope to produce explosive encounters by putting them in contact."

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