The Amazing (and Invisible) Expansion of the Maeght Foundation

The foundation, a pioneer in Europe, was founded by a couple of collectors and gallerists, Marguerite and Aimé Maeght. Over the years, they have built up one of Europe’s most important collections of modern and contemporary art, from great artists such as Miró, Calder, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Marc Chagall. All were great friends of the Maeghts. The foundation opened its doors in 1964 (it served as a model for the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, ​​from the same city of Sert), and this appreciation has been passed down to the artists’ descendants. “The 60th birthday dinner was a family reunion: the entire Chillida family attended, as well as Miró’s grandson, Joan Bonet-Miró,” says Fackenheim. Coinciding with the opening of the extension, an exhibition on the friendship between artists closely associated with the Maeghts, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, was also inaugurated.

At the origins of the foundation there is mourning: Marguerite and Aimé Maeght were devastated by the death of their son Bernard at the age of 11, a victim of leukemia, remembered in the 11th-century church of Saint-Bernat that Sert himself had rebuilt and which was also located in the same complex of Saint Pau near Nice. Artists such as Braque and Léger encouraged them to undertake the project. When the French Minister of Culture, André Malraux, inaugurated the foundation in July 1964, he stated that it was not a museum, but something unprecedented, a desire to “create instinctively and out of love a world in which modern art finds its place and this other world that was called supernatural.”

Recovery that goes unnoticed

Little by little, the first visitors of the day begin to arrive. The institution receives 130,000 a year. They would like to have more, but outside the high season, in spring and winter. “The quality of the visit is very important,” warns Fackenheim. One of the highlights of the tour is the Giacometti Square: it displays the collection of sculptures made by Alberto Giacometti for the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York on behalf of the architect, which had been rejected. When Maeght offered him the courtyard to install them, the Swiss artist painted them to enhance the dialogue with the pine forest surrounding the museum. Incidentally, the Maeght collection is the only one to have two copies of Giacometti’s legendary sculpture The walking man.

However, there is a very important detail in the well-executed courtyard that no one notices: it is a new courtyard, because the existing one was dismantled to build under it part of the foundation extension, the work of the Neapolitan architect Silvio D. “Asia.” With a building as emblematic and well integrated into the site as that of Sert, Daccia did an exercise in modesty and thought of expanding it from the inside. “The new courtyard is identical to the one that was there. It was necessary to be modest – emphasizes the Italian architect -. When you have a building like this, which is part of the architectural heritage of modern architecture, and which is by a great architect like Josep Lluís Sert, for me the only possible approach was to act in a very silent way, without wanting to impose anything. Not noticing the restoration of the courtyard is the best compliment they could give us.

“For me, the Sert building is an icon, because it has forms that serve at the same time for the building to function as a museum, for the rooms with natural light, and as landmarks – Dacia emphasizes – . “The building is a perfect example of a very expressive architecture structurally and at the same time multifunctional and with an artistic atmosphere, and there are not many buildings that have this strength.” More specifically, Dacia explains in detail how Sert combined brutalist forms with white, to be able to play with the works, and two large forms. heavy rain Which have become the building’s distinctive features and collect rainwater.

Long awaited expansion

The Maeghts themselves wanted to expand the museum about ten years after its opening, with a project also designed by Sert that was almost twice the size of the current one, but they couldn’t afford the land. All this was to accommodate a collection that today consists of more than 13,000 paintings, sculptures, engravings and artist’s books, reminiscent of Maeght’s work as a graphic publisher. “Previously, we were faced with the dilemma of either having a temporary exhibition or showing the collection; we couldn’t do both. Many audiences were unhappy,” says Fackenheim.

D’Ascia began working on the building’s rehabilitation project almost fifteen years ago. Later, he was commissioned with a proposal for an extension, but the project was halted for about ten years, until he resumed it in 2021. With the extension, the museum gained a 390-square-meter room under the Giacometti Courtyard, hence the name Nicole Dassault Room, and another 66-square-meter room under the Miró Courtyard, Alain N’Koncho. Both open onto the pine forest, and now in Nicole Dassault you can see a selection of large-scale paintings by artists such as Joan Miró, Pablo Palazuelo, Hans Hartung, and a spectacular mobile painting by Alexander Calder. Between the two is a 44-square-meter exhibition dedicated to explaining the history of the institution and how it was built with models and drawings.

The first phase of the works began in November 2021, and for seven months, excavation works for the future rooms were carried out, up to a depth of eight metres, and the foundations of the Sert building were reinforced. The structure of the new independent rooms of the Sert building was then built. The institution reopened in November last year while the works, which ended in June, continued. According to the Italian architect, the Maeght Foundation and the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona are both “different”: “The Maeght is in nature, you can walk everywhere, while the one in Barcelona is more urban. The Joan Miró Foundation has expanded it with new volumes, and I could not do that,” says Daccia.