The Draguignan Museum of Fine Arts is currently offering a very special exhibition with an incredible history.
Indeed, originally from the south of France, Marguerite Maeght knows the story of Saint Roseline well, whose miracles are famous in this region. She then decides to ask him for a grandson (she already has several granddaughters). Her wish granted, the collector and patron feeling indebted, called on her closest artist friends to tackle the restoration of the chapel dedicated to the saint, located in Arcs-sur-Argens. Giacometti, Chagall, Bazaine and Ubac will participate in this project and will give this building a celestial dimension.
Marguerite Maeght’s wish is presented at the Draguignan MBA until September 22.
An order of its time, a universal message
“During the decades following the Second World War, the Church profoundly revised its idea of the liturgy, that sacred art was no longer a production isolated from other subjects, but that it spoke to us of transcendence, of something greater than ourselves, through the mysterious gesture of the artist,” underlines Yohan Rimaud. Since the message of Saint Roseline was always that of the table open to all and in particular to the poorest, would the Sainte-Roseline Chapel, like the Maeght Foundation, succeed, as André Malraux underlined during its inauguration in 1964, in “creating through love the universe in which modern art could find both its place and this afterworld that was once called the supernatural”? The symbolism deployed in the Sainte-Roseline Chapel would therefore embrace both the faith of a practitioner and the very foundations of artistic creation.
