A Place on the Riviera

To the French Riviera last week came a new attraction that is guaranteed to win $00 in anybody's Guide Michelin of artistic treasures. After five years of work, the museum put up by Flemish-French Art Dealer Aime Maeght (pronounced Mag) is finished, furnished and open to the public.

Perched on a high, verdant ridge at Saint Paul de Vence above Nice, the museum is the elegantly terraced product of Jose Luis Sert, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Its ochre fieldstone walls blend into the slope; atop the roof, flying scoops shaped like quarter-cylinders trap the harsh Mediterranean light, diffuse it through milky glass, and bounce it off vaults inside to soften it further. Six galleries are devoted respectively to Bonnard, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Chagall, Braque and Miro; the paintings are from Maeght's collection or gifts from the artists.

Green Bird. Most of the artists created new works for the museum, and they came to the opening to purr over their work. Miro built a cluster of giant terra-cotta and cement sculptures, including a huge green bird, a giant pitchfork, and a Miro-size ceramic egg in a pool. As the opening festivities for 150 select guests wore on into the flower-scented twilight, he could not tear himself away and sat on a wall, clucking like a proud hen: "Look at that egg! It's the largest egg in the world."

Giacometti has taken to applying paint to his febrile bronze figures, and explained to visitors that he had never liked the metal's brown color anyway. He rhapsodized that life was more valuable than art, saying, "Even if a rat gnawed on a Rembrandt, I would refuse to kill it to save the painting." The artists had a ball.

Hammer Blow. Chagall designed the menu for the opening banquet; Miro designed scarves and handed them out to the ladies. Maeght's granddaughters presented the keys to the museum--the first public foundation of its kind in France--to Culture Minister Andre Malraux on a red satin cushion.

After dinner, Malraux gave a lofty address en art to the guests, who included James Baldwin, James Johnson Sweeney, Poet Saint-John Perse, Baron Alain de Rothschild, Mmes. Kandinsky and Leger, Ludmilla Tcherina, Yves Montand and Ella Fitzgerald. He called the museum "an important step in the history of the spirit" and concluded: "It was on a night like this that we heard the last blow of the hammer that completed the Parthenon. It was on a night like this that sounded the last blow of the hammer to Michelangelo's St. Peter's." -Yves Montand followed with some Parisian chansons, but he could not top that.

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