A French Export : Collector Adrien Maeght says L.A.’s emergence as a major art center led him to choose Beverly Hills as the site for a U.S. branch of his Paris gallery.

A little of the Left Bank has opened on the Westside.

The new Benedicte Saxe Gallery in Beverly Hills is the first American branch of Maeght Graphics, the French art publisher whose Paris gallery became world famous for its posters and other graphics by Matisse and Miro, Calder and Chagall.

At an opening soiree earlier this month, Adrien Maeght, the collector who heads the French art empire, and Benedicte Saxe talked about their decision to settle in Beverly Hills. It was a party that might have been in Paris--except that hardly anybody smoked.

In a prepared statement that smoothed out the rough edges of his English, Maeght noted that the climate and landscape of Southern California are much like that of Southern France, where his parents opened first a lithography shop and later a gallery featuring the work of such friends as Miro, Kandinsky, Chagall and Leger.

As the eldest son of a family of art collectors and patrons occasionally compared to the Medicis, Maeght grew up among artists as well as thousands of works of modern art.

Between bonsoir s and hellos at the opening event, Maeght recalled that Pierre Bonnard helped him with his Latin homework as a child. Georges Braque was best man at his wedding. And a laughing Maeght attributed his imperfect command of English to a four-month stay in the United States in 1949. He spent most of the time with artist Hans Hofmann, then living in Provincetown, Mass., who grew up speaking German.

As a businessman, Maeght said he chose Los Angeles over New York, in part, because the West Coast is so far from the firm’s French operations. Serious East Coast collectors can fly to Paris to see what the Maeght Gallery, or the firm’s new gallery for young artists near the Georges Pompidou Center, is offering. Even more important, Maeght said, was the recent emergence of Los Angeles as a major art center. “We thought it was the right time to come here.”

Saxe, who has worked with Maeght in France for a decade, agreed. Saxe said she had been coming to California for years, initially to visit relatives. She was increasingly impressed with the art scene but said she believed the local galleries had not yet caught up with the museums or the sophistication of American art patrons.

“California museums are perfect,” Saxe said. “Americans are perfect. But the galleries are not perfect.”

She told Maeght she was ready to “work for you, but alone” in Southern California.

In looking for gallery space, Saxe considered but rejected such hot spots as Santa Monica. Although Maeght continues to represent new artists, it has also come to be identified with the cutting edge of an earlier era. Saxe decided she didn’t belong among the utterly contemporary galleries that seem to multiply daily in several Westside neighborhoods.

“If I sold young painters, I would have to be in Venice or on Colorado Boulevard,” she said. “But now I am not avant-garde, I am classic.”

Unlike Maeght’s Paris galleries, which sell paintings as well as graphics, the Beverly Hills operation sells mostly lithographs, etchings, art books and other relatively affordable art graphics. New posters start at $20, but a visitor could also take home a 1976 Miro lithograph, “Contrebalancee,” for $58,000.

Saxe’s rhetoric is populist, despite the presence in the gallery of two $30,000 Braque plates. “Art graphics are for everyone,” she said. In California, Maeght wants to cater to the person who loves art, not to the art speculator. “They want to sell to the passionate people, not to the millionaire,” she said.

But the passionate penniless don’t pay the rent. Saxe said she chose Beverly Hills because it attracts browsers who have educated tastes and enough money to buy the lithograph, sometimes even the Braque plate, they fall in love with.

“I need rich people, classic people, people who go to the theater, to the opera, who travel to Europe. I can’t be far from them.”

The gallery is at 434 N. Bedford Drive, not on Rodeo Drive, which she rejected for aesthetic reasons and because of stratospheric rents.

Los Angeles’ growing economic and cultural clout was a favorite topic at the opening. Californiaphiles with French accents were everywhere. Gerard Coste, the French consul in Los Angeles and himself a painter, pointed out that Maeght was one of several French institutions that had recently invested in the city. Christian Dior is another.

“New York is decaying, and there is no other center in the world ready to take the challenge of New York,” he said. “The European capitals of Paris, London, Rome are interesting but not powerful enough to take the challenge. Tokyo is very special, but they don’t want to share their culture. I do believe Los Angeles is going to become the metropolis of the world.”