Aristide Maillol

1861 - 1944
France

Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer in the Pyrenees. A great sculptor and painter, Maillol began his career as a painter, winning a prize for drawing in Perpignan and then going on to the Beaux-Arts to study with Gerome and Cabanel. Maillol soon rebelled against the academic teaching he received, became associated with the Nabis group, Bonnard and Vuillard, and began to paint as an Post Impressionist, in the Symbolist manner.

In 1897, then thirty-six, he returned to Banyuls and opened a tapestry workshop, drawing cartoons in which figures of musicians foreshadow the style of his future sculptures. At this time, influenced by Gauguin's Tahitian paintings, Maillol made his first sculpture in wood. He then returned to Paris to make statuettes and ceramics. In 1900, his great career as a sculptor began.

Maillol's work is a testament of praise to the female body that combines a grandly classical archaic Greek style with a more detailed modern understanding. Maillol was a slow, careful worker whose solid forms and defined volumes give his work a tone of serenity. His statues are restrained, supple but full, sensuous, and harmonious. After beginning his career as a sculptor, Maillol designed no more tapestries, but continued to draw and to work as a graphic artist. His drawings and graphics show the same simplicity of form as his sculpture.