Fiona Scott Lazareff talks to Patrizia Nitti, Director of the Musée Maillol*

5 April 2015

Patrizia Nitti, director of the Maillol Museum in Paris, explains how she has taken over the reins from Dina Vierny

If Dina Vierny was alive today she would doubtlessly be thrilled to see that the museum which she fought so hard to create is in the hands of an equally capable woman: Patrizia Nitti. She explains, “The Museum is the fulfillment of the dream of Dina Vierny, an exceptional personality, who modelled for the sculptor Aristide Maillol when she was 15 years old, as well as for many of his friends such as Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Raoul Dufy.

In 1980 Vierny succeeded in buying an hôtel particulier (private house)  in the seventh arrondissement and after 15 years of renovation, working with architect Pierre Devinoy, the Maillol Museum officially opened its doors. Dina Vierny’s dream of creating public awareness of Arisitide Maillol had come true. “Although Vierny gave Arisitide Maillol’s work to the State, she didn’t want the museum to be state funded, because shewas determined not to lose control of it. Vierny was the first person to expose Freud and Warhol in France” says Nitti.

Today there is over 4250 m2 of space which includes, not only Maillol’s sculptures but a permanent collection, temporary exhibitions, a shop and a restaurant. Spread over several floors, with smallish rooms the museum feels more like the private house that it once was. Patrizia Nitti is also somewhat exceptional and is definitely not your typical French museum director. “There are a lot of women who work as researchers or in restoration in the museum world in France” she says. “But the management of museums is generally a man’s job in France”.

She comes from a bicultural Italian/French background. As anti-fascists, her family left Italy and took refuge in France in the 1930s, where a branch of the family remained.

Unlike most of her counterparts and rather conveniently for the job in hand, Nitti’s career started in banking. “My family encouraged me to do something serious”, she says. But in 1987, when she was beginning to lose interest in banking, she was invited on a delegation with the bank for which she worked to Pompei, by the Italian Minister of Culture,  Nini Bulotti. And there she became aware just how little understanding the Italians had of the concept of funding art. Soon after, she left the world of banking to help create awareness for the plight of Pompei with the objective of bringing in funding. “Italians don’t know how to present culture”, she says.

So in the official role of  Finance Director, she organised a huge international festival in Rome to create awareness. “They asked me to turn Rome into a centre for opera” she laughs.  “It has never been a centre for opera, but I rang Pavarotti and much to my amazement he agreed to come and we staged a co-production of Tosca”. And that was that: the Festival became a huge international success and Patrizia’s career  in the arts world received a kick-start.

Being bi-cultural has been a huge help for Nitti: from this moment onwards she has been the official go-between, not just for bringing important works of art to France from Italy but also for the official negotiation between the French and Italian ministries on all kinds of subjects ranging from the exchanges of works of art, to theft.

After a stint in Italy she then started to work for Jaques Toubon the French Minister of Culture organising Ingenieurs de la Rennaissance,  an exhibition that she brought from Italy to the Vallée d’Aoste in France, which attracted almost 500,000 visitors in a year.

In the 1990s, using her expertise and her connections in the area of the Italian Rennaissance, she worked as joint curator with Marc Restellini at the Luxembourg Museum organising a series of blockbuster exhibitions. The first one, which took place in 1999, included 220 Italian paintings ranging from the 14th century “primitifs” to the impressionists, all of them coming from a German art collector,  Dr. Gustav Rau. A series of hugely successful exhibitions followed, such as Raphaël, Modigliani, Botticelli and Véronèse and finally Titien, each attracting over 300,000 visitors and some of them close to half a million.

In 2009, shortly after Dina Vierny died,  Patrizia Nitti was appointed directrice artistique of the Fondation Dina Vierny. “I reflected with her sons on the future of the museum. There were also problems of succession to sort out”.

Her first exhibition at The  Maillol took place in February 2010. "C'est la vie!! - Vanités de Caravage à Damien Hirst!" It included over 160 works, paintings, sculptures, photos, videos jewellery and other objects. This exhibition was followed by Trésor des Médicis, Miró,  Pompéi, Artemisia, Canaletto (1697-1768), Les Étrusques and Le Trésor de Naples. The most popular of all the exhibitions was (perhaps not surprisingly), Pompéi which attracted over 300,000 visitors. “My ideas come from Italian research which I then adapt to the French public”, she says. “A museum should be a place where people can relax, unwind and forget about their day-to-day preoccupations”.

*Ms. Nitti was director of the Musée Maillol until 2015.