Maillol, Aristide

Maillol, Aristide (1861–1944). French sculptor, painter, graphic artist, and tapestry designer. He was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, in the south-east of France, near the Spanish border, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study painting (he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1885). His early career, however, was spent mainly as a tapestry designer, and he opened a tapestry studio in Banyuls in 1893. He first made sculpture in 1895, but it was only in 1900 that he decided to devote himself to it after serious eyestrain made him give up tapestry. In 1902 he had his first one-man exhibition (at the Galerie Vollard in Paris), which drew praise from Rodin; in 1905 came his first conspicuous success as the Salon d'Automne; and after about 1910 he was internationally famous and received a constant stream of commissions. With only a few exceptions, he restricted himself to the female nude, expressing his whole philosophy of form through this medium. Commissioned in 1905 to make a monument to the 19th-century revolutionary Louis-August Blanqui, he was asked by the committee what form he proposed to give it and replied ‘Eh! une femme nue.’ More than any other artist before him he brought to conscious realization the concept of sculpture in the round as an independent art form stripped of literary associations and architectural context, and in this sense he forms a transition between Rodin and the following generation of modernist sculptors. This was acknowledged in his lifetime. In 1929 Christian Zervos wrote in Cahiers d'art: ‘With other premises and a very different effect, Maillol was a precursor of today's Constructivism. All his figures create an impression of massive structure, of a search for beautiful volume.’ Maillol himself said ‘My point of departure is always a geometrical figure', and that although ‘there is something to be learned from Rodin … I feel I must return to more stable and selfcontained forms. Stripped of all psychological details, forms yield themselves up more readily to the sculptor's intentions.’ He rejected Rodin's emotionalism and animated surfaces; instead, Maillol's weighty figures, often shown in repose, are solemn and broadly modelled, with simple poses and gestures. Although it was forward looking in many ways, Maillol's work also consciously continued the classical tradition of Greece and Rome (he visited Greece in 1908); at the same time it has a quality of healthy sensuousness (his peasant wife sometimes modelled for him).

Maillol settled at Marly-le-Roi on the outskirts of Paris in 1903 but usually spent his winters in the South. In 1939 he returned to his birthplace. He took up painting again at this time, but apart from his sculpture the most important works of his maturity are his book illustrations, which helped to revive the art of the book in the 1920s and 1930s. His finest achievements in this field are the woodcut illustrations (which he cut himself) for an edition of Virgil's Eclogues (begun 1912 but not published until 1926), which show superb economy of line. He also made lithographic illustrations. A museum dedicated to Maillol opened in Paris in 1995, and there are examples of his work in many important collections of modern art.