Their man in Pari: How Aimé Maeght changed the face of 20th-century art

I am sitting in the café of the Fondation Maeght, a private art foundation in the hills above Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera, listening to Isabelle Maeght, the granddaughter of its founder, Aimé Maeght, reminisce about her very special friendship with the artist Georges Braque, co-founder of Cubism with Pablo Picasso. "Though only a child, I was in love with Braque," she tells me. "He was so tall and so elegant. I was his ideal granddaughter..."

The wind is gently jostling the tops of the umbrella pines beyond the window. The painfully beautiful chairs on which we are both sitting were designed by Diego Giacometti – in fact, my hostess confides, "he designed the entire café, in eight days flat, the first purpose-built museum café in the world."

As I watch, Maeght's eyes begin to brim with tears at the memory of the death of her dear old departed friend, and of the state funeral that followed. Her golden Labrador noses up to my crudités in the friendliest way imaginable as she draws deeply on her Marlboro, and stares down at her long, carmine nails to steady her emotions. She is a soignée woman, and drives a customised pink Fiat Seicento soft-top, one of only two produced in that particular colour, with wicker seats.

The Maeght Foundation is partially an outdoors sculpture park – works by Chillida, Calder, Germaine Richier, Miró and others cry out for attention from the lawns (and woe betide you if you step on to those lawns) – and partially a series of indoor gallery spaces, and it was all designed by the Spanish architect Josep Lluis Sert, who was also responsible for Miró's studio in Mallorca. But Sert did not work alone. What is so special about the Fondation Maeght is that its buildings and gardens were designed and created in collaboration with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century because its founder, Aimé Maeght, was not only a dealer in their work, but also a personal friend of so many of them. Each artist put his own particular stamp on a part of it – Miró designed an intricate, outdoors labyrinth, and peopled it with his nightmarish mythological figures. Braque bequeathed to the foundation an elegant pond in which his deathless ceramic fish swim forever. Giacometti helped to design the generously open, mercilessly sun-beaten courtyard in which his alienated, attenuated beings pace or stand side by side like rows of the condemned.

The Foundation was opened by André Malraux, then France's minister of culture, in 1964. Isabelle felt rather cross when she was informed that the keys had to be handed over to Malraux during the opening ceremony – in a purely symbolic gesture, of course. Georges Pompidou was a regular visitor – and you can see that the Centre Pompidou, which opened several years later, would not have been quite the building that it was without Pompidou's love of the Fondation Maeght.

Why is it that Isabelle Maeght can remember Georges Braque and all the others with such intimate affection? Because, in her view, they were all members of an extraordinary extended family, and this family created many of the thousands of works – paintings, sculptures, prints – that now belong to the Foundation.

On Saturday, many of those works – by the likes of Giacometti, Braque, Miró, Calder and others – will go on show at the Royal Academy in London. The show itself will tell the story of the creation of the Maeght Foundation, and the story of Aimé Maeght's long relationship with so many of those artists. For more than a century, this area in the south of France, so close to the Italian border, has been over-run with artists seeking out the once dozy, bucolic charms of the South, and the fabled Mediterranean light. The gorgeous light is still here, but these days it is also bathing the highways, the car dealerships, the miles and miles of unlovely concrete, and all those idling Russian yachts.

The list of those artists who came down here from the second half of the 19th century onwards seems endless: Renoir, Matisse, Bonnard, Signac, Chagall, Braque, Picasso. But every artist needs something in addition to the light. They also need, marooned so far away from Paris, a canny dealer. Aimé Maeght was such a man.

The go-between. The fixer. The enabler. The opportunist. The celebrated gallerist. Aimé Maeght was all of these things. A lithographer by training, from the north of France, he travelled south in the 1920s. In Cannes he met a young woman, Marguerite, who became his wife. They opened a small shop in Cannes, selling furniture, radios and what-nots. When the supply of radios dried up, they were offered a couple of paintings by a local artist called Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard was so impressed by the price that Marguerite, a canny and persuasive woman in her own right, managed to persuade a collector to pay for his canvases that a healthy working relationship was struck up which deepened into a lifelong friendship. In fact, Bonnard, who had no children of his own, used to speak of Maeght as his surrogate son.

Through Bonnard, Maeght met Matisse, who was also living in the area. Maeght did Bonnard a great favour during the Occupation. His paintings had been left behind in his studio in Paris. How could he possibly get them back? Maeght, who as a northerner had more legitimate reasons to travel to the north of the country than Bonnard, offered to fetch them for him. But how to prevent their being seized? Maeght deftly over-painted them in gouache, and when they were safely back in the south, the gouache, which is a water-based paint, could be washed away to reveal the originals, unharmed.

Matisse and Bonnard persuaded Maeght to buy and open a gallery in Paris. The timing – 1945 – could not have been better. Many dealers had fled, or been liquidated by the Nazis. Maeght seized his chance, and his contacts grew and grew. The exhibitions he staged after the war not only established his reputation as a dealer, but also helped to disseminate his stable of artists more widely. In 1947, he staged a major show of Surrealism, which not only revived the fortunes of the movement, but also drew back from exile in the US a number of its key figures – André Breton, for example. Through this show, Maeght met Alexander Calder and Joan Miró, with whom he would later develop long-standing relationships.

Like the great dealer Ambroise Vollard, Maeght also nudged his artists in directions that they might not have chosen – in the direction of print-making, and the making of artists' books, for example. Maeght, a man who was passionate about contemporary poetry, brought poets and artists together. Some of the livres d'artistes he published are among the greatest literary/artistic collaborations of the 20th century. He had the largest etching press ever made for Joan Miró, where Miró, working as furiously as ever in his extreme old age, made some of the largest works of his entire life. That press is still at the Foundation. Miró baptised it in white paint: PILAR, it reads, after his late wife, followed by her dates in Roman numerals.

But the most powerful presence at the Fondation Maeght is that of Georges Braque. The central building feels as if it pivots, dream-like, about his exquisite pool. Some of his great, late works belong to the collection – those darkly sombre, semi-abstract bird forms that seem to float across each other, like shadowy palimpsests. The largest of these will be on view at the Royal Academy.

"I could not believe it when he died," Maeght tells me as we stare together into Braque's sun-dappled pool. "You know, when Satie died, Braque bought his piano. I was the only one who could play it. We used to spend our Easter holidays at his house in Varengeville. He came here each winter. He made drawings of flowers. I was just eight years old when there was that national funeral. 'How could that man, so tall and so elegant, be in this box?' I kept saying to myself."

But the very fact that Braque is so present here means that another local titan, Pablo Picasso, is conspicuous by his absence – in spite of the fact that Vallauris is close by. I mention this fact to Adrien Maeght, Isabelle's father, and he gives me an impish smile. "Well, you know how it is," he tells me as we stand in his garden just up the hill from the Fondation, admiring his extraordinary range of cacti. "We cannot have Braque and Picasso together. I liked him, of course, but he was not of the family, and my father made a choice. It was just not possible to have the two in the same gallery – just as it was not possible to have Ernst and Miró together."

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Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists runs at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (020-7300 8000) from 4 October to 2 January; 'The Independent' is media partner for the exhibition, and 'Independent' readers are offered a special discount of £2 off full-price tickets of £9 throughout the run of the exhibition. Offer can be redeemed through 0870 848 8484 (booking fee applies). You can also book in person at the Royal Academy ticket desk. Quote 'Independent ticket offer' when applying.