I came to the Maeght Foundation in St. Paul de Vence on France’s Cote d’Azur on a chilly and wet April afternoon, searching for the spirit of my late mother, who loved museums, who understood art, and who may well have loved this museum most of all.
I wanted to hear her voice again. She passed six years ago and I hear her speaking only in dreams. We bonded over art, music, and books. She didn’t just go to museums because cultured people were supposed to go to museums. She went because she had a sixth sense for what painters and sculptors were trying to say.
My mother never studied art in a formal sense but she could stand before an artwork and point out a choice the artist had made – a patch of color, a line, something left in or left out. She wasn’t simply going to a museum to tick a box – I saw a Picasso, I saw a Monet. She wasn’t saddled with the typical blinding reverence most of us possess for the celebrity of famous artists. Instead, she could see what the artists saw. When I took her to museums, I delighted in the joy she found in the grace of the works they made.
The Maeght Foundation isn’t a museum tourists in nearby Nice visit to get out of the sun or the rain, unlike the three-hour admission line the day before at that city’s Chagall Museum. Instead, you have to really commit to getting there. It’s a half hour taxi or Uber ride from center city, at the top of a high hill, surrounded not by cafes and boutiques but by ancient stone farmhouses with nothing for visitors other than quiet charm.
So I seized a chance to visit the Maeght, which Mom adored, not so much to look at art but instead to seek my mother’s spirit, the intensity of her gaze as she studied a sculpture or a painting and saw things far beyond anything I could see.
The Maeght was founded by a wealthy Frenchwoman after the death of a young child. She toured the world looking at private collections, including the Barnes Foundation and Guggenheim Collection in the United States, before settling on a Spanish architect friendly with Joan Miro to design her monument to art. The collection is replete with mid-century brand-names – Chagall, Miro, Picasso, Braque, Calder, Giacometti, Fernand Leger.
I never visited the Maeght with my mother. So I had no personal memories of her admiring the art. I simply went to see if I could sense her presence, standing quietly before this work or that, noticing the things the rest of us didn’t see, couldn’t see.
I wondered as I entered, as I often wonder, when we visit a place, whether we leave a particle of our own existence behind, to be revisited by ourselves or others at a later date. Or once we’ve cleared out, do we leave nothing of ourselves behind?
I confess that most of the pieces at the Maeght left me, well, confused. I found myself nodding in recognition of the styles of many of the great artists, but more in the sense of, “Oh, that’s a Calder,” or “Oh, that’s Chagall.” Try as I could, I lacked the ability to see beyond the brand names, beyond the box-checking of a typical museumgoer. When it comes to art, as to many other things, I’m not Mom.
Call me crazy, call me left coast. But after I got over my own inability to perceive the greatness of the works, I invoked the spirit of my mother. And before long, I felt Mom standing beside me, lost in a painting or in the lines of a sculpture. I waited for her to say something to me, to point out a patch of color, a line, something left in, something left out.
And instead, I heard her say just one thing.
“I wanted this for you.”
I waited for more, but that was the extent of the transmission from the great gallery in the sky. I thought about those words, I wanted this for you, as I contemplated the same works she had admired years earlier. She wanted me to appreciate beauty, grace, the greatness of the human spirit as revealed in creative works.
When I was a teen, there were always a few dollars if I wanted to go to a museum, sit upstairs at the opera or the ballet, or buy a standing room ticket on Broadway. She wanted me to have the same love of beauty that she had developed. She was European. It’s who she was. It’s how she rolled.
I’ve been an author, ghostwriter, and columnist my whole adult life. There’s no question that I love language, words, and aiming for clarity and even beauty to my mother’s sharing with me her love for the arts. Every day I’m working on a manuscript for one of my ghostwriting clients, my mother’s love of creativity drives me.
So perhaps I’ll never be the same connoisseur of fine art as Mom was. But for one moment in St. Paul de Vence, in a place she treasured, I could hear her voice as clearly as if she was standing beside me.
I wanted this for you, she said. And she gave it to me. Thank you, Mom, one more time.