Page 418 - Christian Maas Full Book

Cocktails were tailored depending on your astrological sign. The Jet set flocked into that elegant
place, if only to admire the waiters endlessly going back and forth, often mixed up, going to get hot-

dishes on the cold-dish floor. Ensued a genuine bustle and a mess worthy of Charlie Chaplin’s movies.

Employees went up and came down, went down and came up, bringing the wrong dish to the wrong
floor or the wrong table... They were called to order with shouts or even with butt kicking. Some were
dropped dishes, others, plates, and others stumbled against each other on the great staircase, and some,

at last, forgot to serve, too busy filching in the kitchens. The Beverly Hills could not survive a surrealistic

management, and in 1985, it went bankrupt. Never mind that, Christian has more than one string to
his bow! In 1986, he arranged charters in St Tropez on a 19 meters long Dutch sailboat, paid per day
or longer, with visits of villas belonging to celebrities, lunches on the sea, and full sun tanning sessions

especially in the company of the Club Mediterran?e members, several times a week.

He cooked the meals himself and a German hostess served them. The tourists wanted strong
sensations, he would give some to them, they would have their money’s worth ! He attributed the villas
to artists and political figures of the current trend. A humble dish became a great banquet under his

nimble fingers, and a few vegetables, sculpted so as to become sceneries on the plates, did the trick. Most

of these vegetables were recuperated at the St Tropez market’s closing...

However, the first contact with art had remained vivacious; so in 1988 he resumed his relationship

with the milieu. He was drawn toward the studios, he liked this atmosphere. Nevertheless, he did not

give up travelling and went twice to Lebanon by car. One foot in France, an other outside the frontiers,
he could not resolve himself to remain too long at the same place. He kept his sense of anti-conformism
and his taste for extravagance. Thus in 1983 he would appear in a famous restaurant of Saint-Etienne,

dressed in a luxurious bathrobe and waders. Outside, his Rolls Corniche Cabriolet waited for him, the

same car through the windows of which he would make his market purchases !

But it would be short-sighted to talk about his eccentricities alone, because in parallel, the
sculptor dozed within him. Already, at the end of the eighties, he had made a first bronze series.

The material being very expensive, he appealed to a patron to finance his works. Therefore the
plaster cubist sculptures had become bronzes, foreshadowing every subsequent works. The choice

of material deserves a halt : Known since the very beginnings of civilization, praised by Homer

Christian Maas CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ Vol. II 427

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