Dina Vierny. Art and Freedom

In 1934, Dina Vierny was only fifteen years old when she met Aristide Maillol, becoming his last great model. Their relationship seems to reverse the Pygmalion myth: after inspiring the sculptor, she would dedicate a large part of her life to defending his work, eventually founding two museums in his memory. A trajectory almost without equivalent in the history of art, where the model becomes in turn the guardian of the artist's work. But her destiny goes far beyond this meeting. A figure of the Popular Front youth, a resistance fighter during the Second World War, imprisoned for her commitments, Dina Vierny became a gallery owner and a passionate collector after the war. From Matisse to Duchamp, from naive painters to Poliakoff, she defended artists with very different worlds. From the 1960s, she traveled to the USSR, from where she contributed to smuggling out works by non-conformist artists, including Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov.

For Dina Vierny, art was not limited to galleries or museums. One evening, after a day spent at her gallery, she replaced a singer in a Parisian cabaret, accompanied on guitar by Serge Poliakoff, who had come to introduce himself to show her his painting. Amazed, she exhibited him and offered him his first major success. A bookseller when she closed her gallery in the evening, an insatiable collector, she built over the course of her life more than eighty collections, testifying to a curiosity that seemed to know no limits. Among them, a remarkable collection of dolls and automatons, recognized internationally, but also antique carriages that she rented to film productions. So many passions that reveal a personality difficult to confine to a single definition.

Through a collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and numerous unpublished archival documents, the exhibition traces the many facets of Dina Vierny and the encounters that shaped her path. It creates a dialogue between the works of the artists she inspired, collected and defended, offering a crossing of the artistic and political history of the 20th century. The curatorship is entrusted to Thierry Dufrêne, professor of art history at the University of Paris Nanterre, notably curator of the Surrealism exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2024.

This exhibition opens a new stage in the history of the Musée Maillol – Fondation Dina Vierny. After fifteen years of delegated programming, Pierre and Alexandre Lorquin, grandsons of its founder, are taking over the artistic direction of the museum with the ambition of reaffirming Maillol's modernity and creating a dialogue between modern art and contemporary creation. New graphic identity entrusted to the Z-O-O agency, reception areas redesigned with designer Nathan Baranes, opening to the public of a 300 m² paved courtyard previously inaccessible: the museum is being transformed to become a place of life and discovery in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In the basement, PADAM, the festive restaurant run by Laurent de Gourcuff (Paris Society), in a setting signed by Daphné Desjeux, also revives the musical spirit of the former dressing rooms of the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, a famous Left Bank cabaret.