Maillol, Aristide

Aristide Maillol, (born December 8, 1861, Banyuls-sur-Mer, France—died September 27, 1944, near Banyuls-sur-Mer), French sculptor, painter, and printmaker whose monumental statues of female nudes display a concern for mass and rigorous formal analysis.

Maillol began his artistic career as a painter and tapestry designer; his early work reflected his great admiration for the Nabis, a group of artists in France whose work was composed typically of decorative patterns. Maillol was almost 40 years old when an eye disease forced him to give up tapestry weaving, and so he turned his attention to sculpture.

In his mature work, Maillol rejected the highly emotional sculpture of his contemporary Auguste Rodin, preferring to preserve and purify the sculptural tradition of Classical Greece and Rome. The Mediterranean (c. 1901) and Night (1902) show the emotional restraint, clear composition, and serene surfaces Maillol employed in his sculpture for the rest of his life. Most of his work depicts the mature female form, which he attempted to imbue with symbolic significance. He wanted to remove literary and psychological references from his sculptures; the resulting generalized figures emphasize form itself.

After 1910 Maillol was internationally famous and received a constant flood of commissions. Because of his strict economy of aesthetic means, he turned out the same subject repeatedly, sometimes varying little more than the title from work to work. Only in Action in Chains (1906) and The River (c. 1939–43) did he vary his basic formula and represent the human form in turbulent activity.

Maillol resumed painting in 1939, but sculpture remained his favourite medium. He also made many woodcut illustrations for the work of ancient poets such as Virgil and Ovid during the 1920s and ’30s, doing much to revive the art of the book. Though Maillol’s connection to the art of the past was strong, his interest in form and geometry helped pave the way for abstract sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp.