At the end of the Second World War, Aime Maeght (1906-81) opened the gallery in Paris that continues to bear his name. The Galerie Maeght – the history of which is told in a new exhibition at the Royal Academy – embodied a spirit of stoic, joyful resistance to the forces of darkness that had descended on Europe during the long years of war and occupation. “Le Noir est un couleur”, “Black is a colour”, proclaimed the title of one early show. The Galerie Maeght also exhibited many of the Surrealists, as well as giving one-man exhibitions to many of the leading European – and American – artists of the postwar period. But the very first exhibition was devoted to the work of Henri Matisse, who had been bedridden following an operation for stomach cancer in 1941. Despite that, he continued to work within the constraints of his own weakness, developing a new form of collage – series of cut-outs formed from bright, contrastingly coloured paper – which would culminate in a radiant series of images to which he gave the exuberant title Jazz.

 

In 1936, the young Aime Maeght and his wife, Marguerite, had opened a little shop called Arte on the Rue des Belges in Cannes. He was a lithographer by trade, whom Bonnard approached to make some prints for him (the artist would later describe Maeght as the best printmaker he ever had). But during the war years, when Aime Maeght was away in Toulon, and the printshop inactive, the business nearly went under. To get by, Marguerite Maeght sold radios, furniture and bric-a-brac. Then one day she got her big break, as her daughter, Isabelle, has recalled:

 

 

 

 
Ever since its creation, the Maeght Foundation has housed the considerable collection of paintings, prints and sculpture built up by the Maeght family since the Second World War. It is from that collection that the Royal Academy’s new exhibition, comprising more than a hundred works of art, tightly packed in a way that recalls the displays at the foundation itself, has been drawn. The emphasis is firmly on the artists with whom Aime and Marguerite Maeght felt the strongest affinity, so the opening gallery is devoted to the art of Bonnard and Matisse. There are sketches of various members of the Maeght family by both artists. Those of Bonnard are almost evanescent evocations in faint hatch and scribble, while those of Matisse, created in bold strokes using black charcoal, have a solemn air of monumentality about them. Matisse is also represented by the poignantly abbreviated oil painting – almost more of an oil sketch – entitled The Bush. It is a depiction of a plant that has been made to look like a candelabra, a work painted in black and white but filled with energy and luminescence – symbol of light and life, defiantly brandished by the artist in the face both of his own, impending mortality and the bleakness of the postwar years.

The most extrardinary painting in the opening gallery, however, is Bonnard’s great decoration, Summer, which he had painted in 1917, when the First World War was in its last throes. Bonnard created the painting for his Swiss patrons, the Hahnloser family, but it had turned out to be too large for the space intended to house it, so it eventually entered the Maeghts’ collection. It is a monumental vision of an impossible Arcadia, an oil painting that almost has the feel of a tapestry. In a world formed from blooming, buzzing patches of colour so densely interwoven the visual effect is almost intoxicating, two reclining nudes – a distant memory, perhaps, of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe – occupy centre stage. In the context of the Maeht collection, and the circumstances of its founding, it is tempting to regard this – like Matisse’s The Bush – as a kind of manifesto for their belief in art as an affirmation of humanity in an often dark world

The show comes to an end with a gallery devoted to the lithographic and printmaking activities of Edition Maeght. One wall is entirely papered with the covers of the Galerie Maeght’s in-house periodical, Derriere le Miroir (“Behind the Mirror”), which are typographically vibrant and which also testify to the breadth of support the Galerie Maeght once gave to a whole host of major post-war artists, from Francis Bacon to Yves Klein. This small and at times uneven exhibition serves a timely reminder that the commercial imperative has not always been a corrupting force, in the world of contemporary art. The founders of the Galerie Maeght showed that it is possible to market artists’ work and promote artists’ reputations without sacrificing a genuine, idealistic belief in the power and importance of art itself.