Press - Yoyo played with art giants
The youngest of the Maeghts spent her childhood surrounded by Mirò and Chagall. It recounts the successes and tears of a dynasty and its Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
Florence Millioud Henriques
Photo caption (right): Dynasty Family photos are rare. Crazy about their granddaughters, grandparents Aimé and Marguerite Maeght (left in 1956) rarely saw their daughter-in-law Paule (right) and their son Adrien. DR.
The rosy life of the golden youth of Saint-Germain-des Prés has bad taste, very bad taste at the beginning of The Maeght saga, a story in the privacy of a family. Coming from this blood of daring pioneers, talent accelerators (Braque, Duchamp, Miró), adventurers of the art market, the author begins with the bad joke told by his parents at his birth. Too “ugly” to be a Maeght, they present her as a foundling. Very tangy, this candy, Yoyo Maeght sucked it all his childhood, swallowed it all his adolescence.
Half a century later, the Maeght Foundation and the most famous of its bodyguards – The Walking Man by Giacometti – welcome more than 200,000 visitors per year to the hill of Saint Paul-de-Vence. But nothing is going well with the heirs. We tear each other apart. We are suing each other. Isolated, Yoyo Maeght slammed the door on this clan war and chose to take up her pen to catch up with the past and the extraordinary destiny of Marguerite and Aimé, the grandparents.
This man “of the present and the future”, her “grandpa”, her pillar, her umbilical cord, she tells about him in private. In that of Bonnard, too. He was the first to trust him. From Chagall, the neighbor, from Matisse, from Calder, from Giacometti or from Miró. She brings them all back to life outside the studio, at openings, with family. Celebrities? Perhaps... Almost... To the point of perverting the gaze, of blurring the reading levels, of seeing the artist before the work, of thinking about his life before receiving his emotions? “Never,” insists Yoyo Maeght. And I say thank you Mirò! It was he who taught me to see the flowers in the garden before those in the books. The work must be sufficient in itself, but the intimacy of the creative act can complete the vision. »
The Maeght epic was nourished by this communion, this trust between each other, it was even she who signed the birth certificate of the Foundation of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Marguerite and Aimé had just lost a son, Braque forced them to react: “Bernard’s death is your failure. We don't risk touching life. Why don't you make a place for us here? A place that is beyond you.” This close bond, woven in intimacy, which allowed artists like his grandparents to surpass themselves and create a common work. Yoyo Maeght is convinced of this: “ Today, we endow museums with extraordinary architecture, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao for example, but we are in an art of commission and a dimension is missing. Before, it was intimacy that guided art.”
Looking to the future
Tempi passati? Tracking down a hint of nostalgia in the voice of Yoyo Maeght, 55, would be in vain. Professor, publisher and exhibition curator, she looks straight in the eyes of a contemporary scene that is as diffuse as it is globalized: “Even if the model still exists, I think that the art gallery as my grandfather conceived it is obsolete, and I can't wait for the younger generation to invent a new one. We need solutions for artists who need to produce large dimensions, for architects whose works we consider but not the act of creation. We must also , she continues, respond to the extraordinary rush towards art. The Maeght Foundation has been open seven days a week for fifty years. French museums are thinking about it…”
The Maeght Yoyo Maeght saga Ed. Robert Laffont, 330 p. autographed by Yoyo Maeght.
“I wait every summer for Mirò to return”
“Every summer I wait for Mirò to return to Saint-Paul, I long for his teasing gaze, for the long moments spent with him in the Foundation garden or in the engraving workshops but above all in our dreams.
“When Braque died, I was four and a half years old; France offers a national funeral to its favorite painter. It's one of my only memories of my father and grandfather together, mourning the passing of the great man. »
“I was fourteen years old on the day of the inauguration of the Foundation, I discovered that my grandfather had a role in the world of art, previously, I only thought that he lived surrounded by what he loved . »
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