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1861 - 1944 • French • Sculptor • Modern Classicist
"[Rodin] sometimes says, "It's decorative." And he passes by. He's not interested in that. It's decorative! Me, I'm quite the opposite-that's my point of departure, from the great decorative line." - Aristide Maillol
Maillol began sculpting when he was nearly 40, after working as a painter and TAPESTRY designer and exhibiting with the NABIS. Trouble with his eyes led him to modeling in clay. Defining himself very much in reaction to the EXPRESSIONIST brutalism of RODIN, Maillol concentrated on a restatement and modernization of CLASSICAL idealism, expressing harmony and balance and working to a highly polished finish. "I wanted to see how the ancients came to terms with reality. I looked at a woman's head outside, in the street, then I went into the Louvre and looked at an antiquity, and I saw how they had come to extract the beauty from life," he said. With little diversion he concentrated on portrayal of the female nude in large scale, and usually in bronze, though his wealthy, gay, German patron, Count Harry Kessler, encouraged him to sculpt the male nude, which he did on a couple of occasions. Among Maillol's best-known female figures is an example of Classical equilibrium and restraint, The Mediterranean (c. 1902-05), a seated woman whose crooked arm holds her head while her elbow rests on a bent knee. The River (c. 1938-43) challenges equilibrium spectacularly to become, in a sense, its epitome: the huge ( 71/ 2 feet long) lead figure of a reclining woman rests, or pivots, on her hip. The work is simultaneously stable and unstable, achieving a moment of eternity between the two, much as a river expresses the dichotomies of constant flow and eternal change.
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