Woman with a Dove or Bather, two bronzes from 1905, could serve as a public manifesto for the contained and circular art of Aristide Maillol, the Pyrenean painter who best knew how to transcribe the decline of classicism on the eve of the attack of the European avant-garde. An imaginative elaboration of sensitive form and exacting modeling distinguish Maillol’s artistic origins at the turn of the 20th century. He was born in Banyuls-sur-mer in 1881, where he would die in 1944, still in occupied France.
Dazzled by impressionist colorism, he bravely fought with the Nabis and began his activity as a painter, a practice he soon abandoned to focus obsessively on sculpture, fascinated by the work of Rodin and the disconcerting versatility of Bourdelle. Later, he will admire Gauguin and Maurice Denise, whose irrepressible dazzling he imitates for young girls, who will henceforth be his favorite model. Îlle-de-France dates back to 1925 and demonstrates the sovereign skill that will define Maillol into adulthood. A demanding and advanced follower of the volatile spirit of the Paris of his time, in search, as a solitary fantasist, of the secret charm of dream girls often covered in classic doping, like Pandora, and others, with a gentle, well-tempered body, of figurative intonation, like nymphs surrendered to the expression of an idea or a genuine feeling. Indices of the formal fullness that he flutters in the female body.
A well-thought-out and better-resolved exhibition of the art of Maillol’s volume has just been inaugurated at the Galerie Dina Vierny in the “city of adventure”, based on concise study models and dimensions that the visitor appreciates. The exhibition route has been brought to fruition by our Alex Susanna with a certain complicity that stimulates the viewer: the eternal voluptuousness of adolescent youth visualized in a blinding sequence of feminine variations, presented by a stinging text by the now curator who interprets the latent sensuality of the sculptor through the multiple ways of posing of models who sing the sonorous hymn of natural beauty and nudity without theory. The Catalan critic cautiously recovers the itinerary that mediates between the Venus Naturalis and the Venus Caelestis of the arcane canon behind the incisive reflection of the British historian Kenneth Clark, engaging Maillol in a skillful reconstruction of the original beauty through an ideal imaginary contemporary feminine. A bold move.
Maillol lavishes the constructive three-dimensionality of classical humanism, in effect, to revel in expressive singularization, in the challenge of naked beauty, which he now glimpses in the figurative plots of a timeless artistic legend and points to the legendary Mediterranean East. To the fertile Arcadia of daytime illusions, in short. An archaic world, without a doubt, that is abandoned to voluptuousness and the principle of pleasure that the worldly collector Count Kessler, patron and stimulus of Maillol’s art, perceived like few others. A “brave and voluptuous” work, yes, an early imprint of Maillol’s desire for form. That impressive quiet immobility that the artist imposes on his work and endows it with the energetic translucent vitality that breathes over time in the disconcerting figures of the Catalan sculptor.
Matisse’s nudes are, certainly, astral motifs for Maillol, like later the Egyptian, ethnic and Levantine experiences that the artist sensed at the Universal Exhibition of 1920 and sharpened his interest in primary imagery and the devoted subjection of volume to form. : the flat, rhythmic and bold composition that unequivocally qualifies the artist’s taste. A seated figuration, or standing firm, that represents the contagious journey and formal balances of great art to shape the artist’s taste and expressive conviction that turns into anecdotes the representations of Cézanne and Debussy and even the evocative stele to the victims of the Great War, in North Catalonia already in 1930.
The graphic energy of Maillol’s drawings and notes are set apart by their clarity and linear cleanliness, like the wood engravings that nourish their roots in Virgil –Georgics– and Ovid –Art of Loving– already in the twilight moment of the artist. Unusual passages without school or declared plastic faction: the subtle delight of the wind, of the free human figure trapped at random, almost carelessly, we could say. Seated nude in profile, freestanding drawing and barely known bistre, could close the story in decisive ways. Susanna made the right choice. The impressive primitive and classic veracity that relies on the experience of the hands and the secrets and traditions of an old craft sanction the result of its demanding task. The classic glorification of the form in a passionate note that fantasizes an eternal dream. Aristide Maillol combines the anxiety of the primitive with the wise security of the classicist who thoroughly knows the responsibility of the chisel and the equivocal directness of modeling. A conclusive work, such as Crouching Woman, bronze from 1900, is perhaps the conclusive example of the enviable maturity of a primitive and classical artist. “Maillol speaks with loquacity of grace and innocence,” André Gide confessed with admiration in 1905. A subtle warning in a stellar year for the Catalan artist.
