The current loan of over 70 prints and lithographies by 20th century masters to Musée d’Art de Toulon encapsulates the Maeght Foundation’s origins and history
Modern art is a curious ecosystem. No matter how talented the artist, their fate often depends on the smallest of serendipities. The current exhibition at the Musée d’Art de Toulon, titled “Braque, Calder, Chagall, Giacometti, Miró… Les Ateliers de la Modernité” is proof of this. It is the story of a war orphan’s chance encounter with a celebrated painter at a small printmaking workshop in Cannes, and how it led to one of the great art stories of the twentieth century – and ultimately to this show, on through 3 May.
The Concert Programme that Started it all
In 1930, the painter Pierre Bonnard walked into a small print shop in Cannes with a simple request: he needed a programme printed for a Maurice Chevalier concert, illustrated with one of his own works. The shop owner, a young lithographer named Aimé Maeght, did the job, and then put the print in his display window. It sold almost immediately. Bonnard came back with more. And Maeght, who had grown up with nothing, and had trained as a craftsman rather than a connoisseur, suddenly understood that he was standing at the threshold of something much larger than a print shop.
That threshold, crossed over the following decades, would lead to one of the most remarkable partnerships between an art dealer and a generation of artists that the twentieth century produced. It would lead to a gallery in Paris, a foundation built into the hills above Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a publishing house that produced more than twelve thousand titles, and a printmaking workshop on a quiet street in the 14th arrondissement of Paris where Chagall, Miró, Giacometti, Calder, Braque and Tàpies came to do things they could not do anywhere else. And it would lead, eventually, to an exhibition now on view at the Musée d’Art de Toulon, ninety minutes down the coast from Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where much of this story unfolded.
Video courtesy Musée d’Art de Toulon
But to understand why the Toulon exhibition is more than a handsome survey of modern prints, one needs to understand who Aimé Maeght was, why the artists whose names appear on those works trusted him the way they did, and what his eponymous foundation actually represented.
Friendships Forged in Wartime
Aimé Maeght was born in 1906 in the flat, industrial north of France. He trained as a lithographic draftsman and poster designer, and eventually settled in Cannes, where he met and married local beauty Marguerite Devaye, and in 1929 opened a small print shop called “L’imprimerie des Arts” – the same store that Bonnard walked into a year later. It later became known as Arte (ARt et TEchnique graphique), before closing in 1946.
The WWII years were when the real relationships were forged. When the German occupation came, the Maeghts stayed in the unoccupied south, and a small, improbable community formed in the Niçois hinterland: Matisse, Bonnard, Rouault, Picasso, the poet Pierre Reverdy – people thrown together by geography and circumstance, sharing the particular intimacy that wartime isolation creates. Maeght was not a passive bystander in all of this. In 1943 he and resistance leader Jean Moulin opened a gallery together in Nice, using art dealing as cover for Moulin’s clandestine activities.
Photo © Quentin Rigal
When liberation came, it was Maeght’s old friend Bonnard who accompanied the printer to Paris and helped him open a gallery there. Matisse, another longtime friend, offered his own artwork for the inaugural exhibition. The timing was extraordinary. Maeght had the relationships, the trust, and the momentum, and he used them to curate the abundant creations that artists had produced during their years of isolation. Individual exhibitions devoted to Braque, Miró, Léger, Calder, Chagall, Giacometti and Kandinsky followed in quick succession through the late 1940s and early 1950s, confirming the gallery’s prestige. But prestige was never quite the point. What Maeght was building, was something closer to a family.
Grief, and What It Built
In 1953, Aimé and Marguerite lost their eleven-year-old son Bernard to leukaemia. They had bought land in Saint-Paul-de-Vence so that the boy could breathe fresh air. When he died, they found themselves standing on a plot of land with an old ruined chapel at its centre, dedicated to Saint Bernard. It was Marguerite who saw this as a sign, who felt, in that coincidence of names, some kind of direction.
Georges Braque told them to create something that would live after them. Fernand Léger said: “If you do that, I would even paint the rocks.” And so the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght was created… not from ambition or the desire for a monument, but from grief and the counsel of friends.
Video via By Béton on YouTube
It opened in 1964, designed by the architect Josep Lluís Sert, who modelled it on the idea of an artist’s studio: airy, open, integrated into the Mediterranean landscape, with no imposed route and no sense of institutional distance. At its inauguration, André Malraux declared: “Here, an attempt is being made to do something that has never been attempted before: to create a universe in which modern art can find both its place and that background once called the supernatural.”
Not just content with contributing works to the Foundation, the artists shaped it. Giacometti filled the courtyard with his elongated bronze figures. Miró designed a labyrinth in the gardens that he worked on for nearly a decade. Braque created a monumental mosaic pool. Chagall made a mosaic for an exterior wall. Tal-Coat designed a mural for the garden boundary. Raoul Ubac created the stained-glass windows for the chapel. Calder installed an immense stabile in the sculpture garden. The Foundation was, in the most literal sense, a collective artwork… the physical expression of what this community of artists and their dealer had built together over twenty years of friendship.
The Workshop in Paris, Rue Daguerre
That same year, 1964, Aimé and Marguerite’s son Adrien bought the Duval printmaking and bookbinding workshop on rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement and renamed it Arte, in honour of his father’s shop in Cannes. The Maeght gallery and foundation now had their own dedicated printing house, and because Aimé himself had started his working life as a lithographic draftsman, this wasn’t a business decision so much as a homecoming.
Arte was different from other Parisian print workshops less through its equipment but more through its culture. Artists didn’t commission the shop to execute their ideas. They came to work there themselves, to experiment, to fail, to discover. The technical staff were collaborators rather than service providers.
Photo © Quentin Rigal
Miró came regularly, working at a scale that would have been impossible elsewhere, printing on burlap and producing lithographs several metres long. Calder, who produced nearly two hundred lithographs for Maeght over his lifetime, used a fascinatingly indirect process: he would paint gouaches, which a chromiste – a specialist craftsman – would then transfer onto zinc plates for printing. Tàpies, fascinated with texture and materiality, pressed rice grains into paper and glued horsehair onto prints, inventing techniques as he went. The workshop said yes to all of it.
Running alongside all of this was another Maeght creation that deserves to be better known: a publication called Derrière le Miroir (Behind the Mirror) which ran from 1946 to 1982, producing 253 issues over 36 years. Each issue was simultaneously an exhibition catalogue for the Galerie Maeght and an art magazine, and each one contained original lithographs made specifically for it by the exhibiting artist. Not reproductions – originals. The idea was explicitly democratic: to make the work of the greatest living artists accessible to anyone who could afford a magazine. A Miró lithograph in your hands for the price of a journal. It was a radical proposition, and it worked: Derrière le Miroir became one of the most important art publications of the twentieth century, and a platform that could make or break an artist’s reputation.
What Prints Tell Us: The Artist, Still Thinking
This background matters because the Toulon exhibition centres around it, bringing together more than seventy works from the Fondation Maeght’s collection: prints and lithographs by Braque, Chagall, Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Tàpies, Riopelle, Rebeyrolle and others. Its central argument is deceptively simple: printmaking was not a secondary activity for these artists, not a commercial sideline or a licensing exercise, but a genuine laboratory where ideas were tested, pushed, and sometimes arrived at that could not be found through painting or sculpture alone.
Photo © Quentin Rigal
The exhibition is structured in six sections, each anchored by a major artist but always showing their prints alongside work in another medium — a sculpture, a painting. The juxtapositions are deliberate.
The show opens with Chagall, and rightly so: he is in many ways the Maeght story made visible. The centrepiece of his section is a decorative paravent covered in lithographs, a form Chagall adopted after seeing a Bonnard screen. Around it hang a series of lithographs of Paris made in 1954, when Chagall returned to the city after years of wartime exile and rediscovered it almost as a stranger would. These works were made as preludes to paintings – sketches, essentially, done in the most demanding medium possible – and were published in Derrière le Miroir. They have the quality of a man seeing something beloved for the first time again: tentative, luminous, emotionally raw.
Miró was practically a resident at Arte. He worked at scales that would have been impossible elsewhere: multi-metre prints on burlap, formats that turned the lithograph into something approaching mural painting. The works in Toulon show him at the point where his pictorial vocabulary of biomorphic forms, black marks of startling authority, and explosions of primary colour had become so thoroughly his own that the medium almost disappears. The visitor is not looking at a lithograph that resembles a Miró. They are looking at a Miró that happens to be a lithograph. The distinction matters, because it is exactly the argument the exhibition is making.
Photo © Quentin Rigal
At the centre of the Giacometti section stands Femme au chignon, a 1948 bronze rarely lent by the Foundation. The statue is surrounded by lithographs of the artist’s own studio, drawn from life with the directness of a sculptor working a surface rather than a painter composing a picture. He approached the copper plate exactly as he approached clay or plaster: working, reworking, never satisfied. The lines in these prints and the wire-thin figures in his sculptures come from exactly the same impulse. The print is not an illustration of the sculpture but its sibling.
Braque merits equally close attention. Two distinct bodies of his print work are shown here: The first one, Théogonie d’Hésiode, is a series of sixteen etchings illustrating the founding myths of the Greek gods, commissioned in 1932 by the legendary art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Vollard died before the project could be published, then Aimé Maeght retrieved the plates and finally published the series in 1953. Rescuing a masterwork from obscurity twenty years after it was made is itself a measure of what Maeght understood his role to be.
The second body of work is the bird lithographs, including L’Oiseau dans le feuillage, the image used as the exhibition’s poster: a flat black silhouette of a bird hovering over columns of newsprint, simultaneously familiar and strange. Braque painted directly onto limestone before printing onto paper. “The process appealed to me,” he wrote, “so I tried to approach it in a new way and ended up creating something almost like a painting.” The medium gave him something the canvas could not.
The final room of the exhibition holds a genuine surprise. Titled “Dépasser la Gravure” (Beyond Printmaking), Arte’s culture of unlimited experimentation becomes most visible here. References to comics and cinema appear. Tàpies’s footprint lithographs, made by pressing physical objects into paper, blur the boundary between print and sculpture. The room asks a question the rest of the exhibition has been building toward: what exactly is a print? And by extension – what exactly is an original work of art?
Photo © Quentin Rigal
This question has real philosophical weight. The works in Toulon exist in editions, sometimes of hundreds of copies. German art critic Walter Benjamin famously argued that mechanical reproduction strips art of its “aura,” its unique presence in time and space. But these prints were made on exceptional papers like Arches vellum or Mandeure rag. The artists directly participated in their creation, using techniques that involved acid eating into metal, needles scratching copper, or stone accepting the mark of a greasy crayon. They are craft objects of extraordinary refinement but no guarantee of success: failure was always possible. For artists accustomed to mastery in their primary medium, that vulnerability must have been both terrifying and generative.
Why Toulon, and Why Now?
The Fondation Maeght, which still operates in Saint-Paul-de-Vence under the stewardship of the Maeght family’s third generation, regularly loans from its collection of thirteen thousand works to museums across France and beyond.
Its partnership with the Musée d’Art de Toulon is a natural one: geographically, Toulon and Saint-Paul-de-Vence are a short ninety-minute drive apart. But there is a deeper logic. This is a story that belongs to the south of France: Aimé Maeght himself spent a part of the war years in Toulon, but – as is well-known – the light, the landscape, the particular quality of life of the Côte d’Azur drew Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Bonnard, Léger and Miró to the Côte d’Azur and, more importantly, kept them there. Showing this work in Toulon is, in a sense, bringing it home.
The Musée d’Art de Toulon — a magnificent building opened in 1888, modelled on the Italian Renaissance, recently fully renovated — has built a serious track record for ambitious exhibitions. A Banksy show in 2025 drew seventy thousand visitors. The current exhibition is more quietly demanding than that, but no less rewarding. Alongside the main Maeght show, the museum’s own Cabinet d’Arts Graphiques hosts a companion exhibition called Gravé, drawn from its own print collection and spanning from the late eighteenth century to today.
Marguerite Maeght died in 1977. Aimé followed in 1981. The artists they championed are all gone. Arte still operates on rue Daguerre, still publishing editions, still working with artists, although the names are different now, and the founding generation’s particular combination of trust, creative risk and personal friendship is unrepeatable. What the Toulon exhibition offers, in a sense, is a window into that world: the workshop, the magazine, the Foundation, and the friendships. The prints on the walls are beautiful in themselves. But they are also documents of a way of making art – collaborative, experimental, craft-rooted, unhurried – that has largely disappeared.
There is one question the exhibition cannot answer, and that haunts its edges. The chromiste who transferred Calder’s gouaches onto zinc… the pressmen who pulled Miró’s monumental sheets through the press… the craftspeople whose hands were on every work in this exhibition alongside the famous artists’ hands – their names appear nowhere. They are the invisible collaborators in a story that is told, as these stories always are, through the names above the door. Walking through the exhibition in Toulon, it is worth pausing to think about them: the anonymous artisans of rue Daguerre, without whom none of this would exist.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Braque, Calder, Chagall, Giacometti, Miró… Les Ateliers de la Modernité
Musée d’Art de Toulon | Through 3 May 2026
Admission €7 per person (reduced rates available)
VENUE DETAILS
Musée d’Art de Toulon
113 boulevard Maréchal Leclerc
83000 Toulon
Tel: +33 (0)4 94 36 81 15
Web: https://musees.toulon.fr/
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photos and images courtesy Musée d’Art de Toulon and as credited
- All videos as credited
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