Art: What an Artist!

A curt dispatch came last week out of France: old Aristide Maillol, one of the leaders of modern sculpture, had been killed in an auto accident near his home in Banyuls, on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border.

Bearded, blue-eyed Aristide Maillol (pronounced Ma-yoll) had reached the great age of 82. For a generation and more he had held an artistic eminence taken over from his friend and early supporter, the late, great Auguste Rodin. Maillol’s serene, monumentally detached sculpture was the antithesis of Rodin’s flowing, literary, romantic work. Greece was Maillol’s spiritual home—”Is this not Greek?” he once exclaimed of his studio, strewn with broken casts, plaster limbs, stony shards. But Maillol was no antiquarian copyist; the resemblance of his work to the Greek rested in his feeling for purities of structure and mass, never in appearance.

Inconsolable. Maillol was descended from a family of fishermen and smugglers of Banyuls. The sculptor spent much of his life in the pink stucco house where he was born. As a youth he studied painting in Paris, but he was unsuccessful with the brush. Not until he was 40 did he have any working knowledge of sculpture. Then one day he picked up a fallen tree trunk, from it carved a woman’s figure. For the next 42 years he devoted himself almost entirely to carving and modeling female forms. “I am inconsolable,” he once said, “not to have seen the figures of all the women of my native province.”

In Paris last week the name of Maillol was under a cloud. The aged sculptor had exhibited his work to Germans during the occupation. The huge Autumn Salon, which opened during the week, had sent him no invitation to contribute. Aristide Maillol had never followed public events or cared about politics. He refused even to discuss the war. He merely worked on in his Banyuls house, and when plaster became scarce he sent his son to ask the neighborhood dentists for more. In leisure moments, the old man listened to music. Few modern artists have evoked such critical acclaim. Wrote Britain’s Augustus John: “We can never tire of a style so pure . . . have enough of a vision so consummate. …” Highest praise of all came from Auguste Rodin, who said of Maillol’s little Leda: “In all modern sculpture I do not know of a piece which is as absolutely beautiful, as absolutely pure, as absolutely a masterpiece. . . . What an artist!”