Aristide Maillol

Aristide Maillol
Aristide Maillol (1925), in a photograph by Alfred Kuhn
Born	Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol (1861-12-08)December 8, 1861 Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon, France
Died	September 27, 1944(1944-09-27) (aged 82) Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon, France
Education	École des Beaux-Arts
Known for	Sculpture, painting

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol (French: [mɑjɔl]; December 8, 1861 – September 27, 1944) was a French sculptor, painter, and printmaker.

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)

Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon. He decided at an early age to become a painter, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study art. After several applications and several years of living in poverty, his enrollment in the École des Beaux-Arts was accepted in 1885, and he studied there under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. His early paintings show the influence of his contemporaries Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin.

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.

Maillol, The River, bronze, 1938–1943, at the Tuileries Garden in Paris

In July 1896, Maillol married Clotilde Narcis, one of his employees at his tapestry workshop. Their only son, Lucian, was born that October.

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. Maillol, believing that "art does not lie in the copying of nature", produced a second, less naturalistic version in 1905. In 1902, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard provided Maillol with his first exhibition.

Air cast 1938, Kröller-Müller Museum

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."

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.

He made a series of woodcut illustrations for an edition of Vergil's Eclogues published by Harry Graf Kessler in 1926–27. He also illustrated Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (1937) and Chansons pour elle by Paul Verlaine (1939).

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.

Nazi-looted art

During the German occupation of France, dozens of artworks by Maillol were seized by the Nazi looting organization known as the E.R.R. or Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce. The Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume lists thirty artworks by Maillol. The German Lost Art Foundation database lists 33 entries for Maillol. The German Historical Museum's database for artworks recovered by the Allies at the Munich Central Collecting Point has 13 items related to Maillol. Maillol's sculpture "Head of Flora" was found in the stash of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Hitler's art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt together with lithographs, drawings and paintings.

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."

Jewish art collectors whose artworks by Maillol were looted by Nazis include Hugo Simon, Alfred Flechtheim and many others.

Aristide Maillol, The Night, (1902), Stuttgart

Works

• Mme Henry Clemens van de Velde (c. 1899)
• The Mediterranean (1902-05)
• Action in Chains (1905)
• Flora, Nude (1910)
• L'Été sans bras (1911)
• Bathing Woman with Raised Arms (1921)
• Nymph (1930)
• The Mountain (1937)
• L'Air (1938)
• The River (1938–43)
• Harmonie (1944)

Legacy and Contemporary Influence

Aristide Maillol's work has had a profound and enduring impact on both modern and contemporary art, particularly within the realms of sculpture, the representation of the human body, and the revival of classical forms in the 20th century. His restrained, monumental approach to the female figure influenced numerous artists, sparking discussions about form, abstraction, and the essence of sculpture itself.

One of Maillol's most significant contributions was his rejection of the exaggerated dynamism that characterized much of late 19th-century sculpture, notably the work of his contemporary, Auguste Rodin. Maillol's figures, with their serene and stable forms, marked a return to classical simplicity and purity. This approach resonated with artists like Henry Moore, who cited Maillol as an early influence on his own move toward abstraction and monumentality. Moore admired the way Maillol's work avoided excessive detail, allowing the essential form of the human body to take precedence. In his 1941 writings, Moore stated, "Maillol's influence was important to me because of the calm and permanence that his figures suggest, as well as his return to classical balance and volume." </ref>

Additionally, Hans Arp, a Dadaist and Surrealist artist, found inspiration in Maillol's organic forms, which he believed offered a “timeless universality.” Arp's abstracted, rounded sculptures share a kinship with Maillol's pursuit of essential, elemental forms, though Arp pushed these ideas further into abstraction.

Art historians such as Hilton Kramer and Albert Elsen have extensively discussed Maillol's unique place in modern sculpture. Kramer remarked that Maillol's works possess an "elemental calm" and reflect an anti-Romantic sentiment, contrasting sharply with the emotional intensity of Rodin. Elsen, in his study of Maillol's work, argued that his influence can be seen in the development of modernist sculpture, particularly through his focus on the essential harmony of form and space, a concept that paved the way for mid-century minimalism.

In more recent decades, Maillol's sculptures have continued to inspire contemporary artists exploring themes of memory, identity, and the body. The French-Lebanese contemporary artist Oliver Aoun incorporated Maillol's sculptures into his project Lisa Rediviva (2012), which juxtaposes classical representations of the female form with fragmented images of the Mona Lisa. Aoun's work engaged with the legacy of Western iconography, questioning the colonial and patriarchal structures embedded within these revered forms. In reinterpreting Maillol's figures, Oliver Aoun critiqued the traditional Western gaze and proposed a more inclusive dialogue around the representation of women in art.

Furthermore, exhibitions such as the 2011 show at the Musée Maillol in Paris, which focused on the dialogue between Maillol and contemporary sculptors, underscore the relevance of his oeuvre in ongoing conversations about the body, space, and abstraction. Artists such as Jean-Michel Othoniel and Louise Bourgeois have also been said to engage with the themes of solidity and fluidity in ways that echo Maillol's approach to form.

Maillol's influence persists not only in sculpture but also in broader conversations about the role of classical ideals in contemporary art, inviting ongoing re-evaluation and reinterpretation.

Sources

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Aristide Maillol, 1861-1944", New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975.
• Frèches-Thory, Claire, & Perucchi-Petry, Ursula, ed.: Die Nabis: Propheten der Moderne, Kunsthaus Zürich & Grand Palais, Paris & Prestel, Munich 1993 ISBN 3-7913-1969-8 (German), (French)

Further reading

• Lorquin, Bertrand (1995). Maillol. Skira. ISBN 9780500974179.
• Rewald, John (1951). The Woodcuts of Aristide Maillol. New York: Pantheon Books.

External links

• Works by or about Aristide Maillol at the Internet Archive
• Masters of 20th Century Figure Sculpture
• Maillol Museum
• Aristide Maillol in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
• Aristide Maillol in Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume