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Homage by Janet GREENBERG
O
wner, Gallery MARTIN-CAILLE MATIGNON

"I met MAX-AGOSTINI in 1969 in Aix-en-Provence where I was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-arts, when Pierre MARTIN-CAILLE, who had just retired, asked me to help him open a painting gallery in his former auction house location.

I have managed the contract with MAX-AGOSTINI and his work ever since – twenty-seven years!

Even though MAX-AGOSTINI's paintings at that time were much smaller, more somber and not as completed as today, his talent as an Impressionist was already present – like a rough diamond that needed "cutting and polishing" by years of work.

This artist, passionate of  "real painting", lived only to be able to complete his next canvas.  He traveled far and wide, looking for brilliant red poppy fields, a sun-filled beach, or gardens and lakes gleaming with light's reflections.

Who today still has this talent of the Impressionists, to translate Nature by light, shadows, and colors, and can evoke our emotions to its beauty? I think MAX-AGOSTINI is the last of this race of great geniuses of figurative Impressionist painters.

Though he was also a musician and a composer, he chose painting to express himself and up to his very last days, I saw him at his easel. While painting, he no longer thought about his difficulty to breathe. Our professional relationship – nearly thirty years! – is a rarity in this profession (which hasn't always merited good press).  MAX-AGOSTINI's personality was certainly one of the main reasons for this longevity:  he only lived to paint.

MAX-AGOSTINI existed by the flame of a "sacred fire" that illuminated only the truly great painters; it consumed his genius at age eighty-two.

"We will miss him ..."

Janet Greenberg