Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol (French:[mɑjɔl]; December 8, 1861 – September 27, 1944) was a French sculptor, painter, and printmaker.[1]
He began his career as a painter and developed an early interest in the decorative arts. He became primarily interested in sculpture from his early 40s. Maillol was one of the most famous sculptors of his time. His work inspired artists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse and Henry Moore.
Biography
Maillol, Bas Relief, terracotta. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, New York, Chicago, Boston. Catalogue image (no. 110)
Gauguin encouraged his growing interest in decorative art, an interest that led Maillol to take up tapestry design. In 1893 Maillol opened a tapestry workshop in Banyuls, producing works whose high technical and aesthetic quality gained him recognition for renewing this art form in France. He began making small terracotta sculptures in 1895, and within a few years his concentration on sculpture led to the abandonment of his work in tapestry.
In July 1896, Maillol married Clotilde Narcis, one of his employees at his tapestry workshop. Their only son, Lucian, was born that October.[3]
Maillol's first major sculpture, A Seated Woman, was modeled after his wife. The first version (in the Museum of Modern Art, New York) was completed in 1902, and renamed La Méditerranée.[1] Maillol, believing that "art does not lie in the copying of nature", produced a second, less naturalistic version in 1905.[1] In 1902, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard provided Maillol with his first exhibition.[4]
The subject of nearly all of Maillol's mature work is the female body, treated with a classical emphasis on stable forms. The figurative style of his large bronzes is perceived as an important precursor to the greater simplifications of Henry Moore, and his serene classicism set a standard for European (and American) figure sculpture until the end of World War II.
Josep Pla said of Maillol, "These archaic ideas, Greek, were the great novelty Maillol brought into the tendency of modern sculpture. What you need to love from the ancients is not the antiquity, it is the sense of permanent, renewed novelty, that is due to the nature and reason."[5]
His important public commissions include a 1912 commission for a monument to Cézanne, as well as numerous war memorials commissioned after World War I.
Maillol served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal (1919–1954) a grant awarded to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.[6]
He died in Banyuls at the age of eighty-two, in an automobile accident. While driving home during a thunderstorm, the car in which he was a passenger skidded off the road and rolled over. A large collection of Maillol's work is maintained at the Musée Maillol in Paris, which was established by Dina Vierny, Maillol's model and platonic companion during the last 10 years of his life. His home a few kilometers outside Banyuls, also the site of his final resting place, has been turned into a museum, the Musée Maillol Banyuls-sur-Mer, where a number of his works and sketches are displayed.
Three of his bronzes grace the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City: Summer (1910–11), Venus Without Arms (1920), and Kneeling Woman: Monument to Debussy (1950–55). The third, the artist's only reference to music, is a copy of an original created for the French city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Claude Debussy's birthplace.
A photograph from May 24, 1946 shows "Six men, members of the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives section of the military, prepare Aristide Maillol's sculpture Baigneuse à la draperie, looted during World War II for transport to France. Sculpture is labeled with sign: Wiesbaden, no. 31."[14]
^ abcdLe Normand-Romain, Antoinette . "Maillol, Aristide". Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web.
^Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930. London: Tate Gallery. p. 148. ISBN1-854-37043-X
^"Aristide Maillol sculpture recovery, 1946 May 24, from the James J. Rorimer papers, 1921-1982, bulk 1943-1950". www.aaa.si.edu. Archived from the original on 2015-09-06. Retrieved 2021-06-18. Title: Aristide Maillol sculpture recovery Date: 1946 May 24 Physical Details: 1 photographic print : black and white; 12 x 09 cm. Description: Six men, members of the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives section of the military, prepare Aristide Maillol's sculpture Baigneuse à la draperie, looted during World War II for transport to France. Sculpture is labeled with sign: Wiesbaden, no. 31. Identification on verso (handwritten): Restitution shipment to France. Creator: Unidentified Forms part of: James J. Rorimer papers, 1921-1982, bulk 1943-1950
^"Germany denies Jewish heirs; Cologne returns art". www.lootedart.com. Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2016-08-17. Retrieved 2021-06-18. City counselors voted late Tuesday to hand six drawings by Karl Hofer, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ernst Barlach, Aristide Maillol and Wilhelm Morgner to the heirs of Jewish collector Alfred Flechtheim, who fled to France in 1933.