The Maeght Family - A Passion For Modern Art

The Maeght Family - A Passion for Modern Art (2007) by Yoyo Maeght – Abrams

Some families collect stamps.

Some collect photographs.

The Maeght family collected modern art, artists, galleries, exhibitions, foundations and enough cultural history to make the average family photo album look disappointingly underambitious.

The Maeght Family: A Passion for Modern Art by Yoyo Maeght, published by Abrams in 2007, is an intimate and richly illustrated account of one of the most important families in the story of twentieth-century European art.

And when your family circle includes people such as Miró, Giacometti, Chagall, Calder and Braque, Christmas cards presumably become quite competitive.

The book traces the extraordinary story of Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, whose enthusiasm for modern art grew into something far larger than simple collecting. Through their galleries, friendships and patronage, the Maeghts became deeply involved in the artistic life of post-war France and helped bring some of the century’s most significant artists to a wider public.

This was not art appreciation from a respectful distance.

These were relationships.

Artists became friends.

Studios became familiar places.

Exhibitions were organised.

Ideas were exchanged.

And somebody somewhere was almost certainly trying to work out where to put another enormous sculpture.

Yoyo Maeght writes from within the family itself, which gives the book a particularly personal quality. This is not merely a formal history of dealers and exhibitions, but a story about people whose private lives became intertwined with the development of modern art.

That makes the famous names feel rather less remote.

The giants of modernism stop being figures reproduced solemnly in textbooks and become people who visited, talked, argued, worked, ate, collaborated and occasionally behaved like artists.

Which generally means not making life particularly straightforward.

The Maeght family’s story is inseparable from the celebrated Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, created as a home for modern art and built through close collaboration with artists.

The result was not simply a building containing paintings.

It was conceived as a place where architecture, sculpture, landscape and art could exist together, which is the sort of idea that sounds obvious only after someone sufficiently determined has actually done it.

The book is packed with photographs, artworks, documents and personal material, giving it the satisfying richness of both an art history and a family archive.

You can approach it seriously.

You can study the development of modern art patronage.

You can examine the relationships between artists and dealers.

Or you can simply turn the pages and marvel at how many famous painters one family apparently knew personally.

There is also something refreshing about the title’s use of the word passion.

This was not casual interest.

Nobody was merely saying, “We quite like modern art.”

They built lives around it.

They supported artists.

They created exhibitions.

They founded institutions.

They collected work that many people at the time probably regarded with the traditional response to modern art:

“My child could do that.”

History has not been especially kind to that argument.

For anyone interested in twentieth-century art, this is a particularly appealing book because it shows the machinery behind the masterpieces — the friendships, support, risk-taking, exhibitions and personal relationships that helped shape artistic careers.

Art does not simply appear fully formed on museum walls.

Somebody has to believe in it first.

Preferably somebody with a gallery.

This copy is in Very Good condition, making it a handsome example of a beautifully produced modern-art book.

Ideal for collectors, artists, gallery enthusiasts, students of modernism or anyone who enjoys books in which family history occasionally involves internationally significant sculpture.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where passion for modern art is encouraged, although acquiring several Mirós remains outside the current stock budget.

ISBN: 9780810930803
Condition: Very Good

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