Aristide Maillol

This is the most important exhibition of the work of Aristide Maillol (Banyuls-sur-Mer, 1861 – Perpignan, 1944) ever held in Spain. This show, curated by Michael Peppiatt and Dina Vierny, the artist’s last model and President of the Musée Maillol in Paris, contains over 100 works and includes monumental bronzes, little statuettes along with paintings, drawings and engravings that illustrate the brilliant career of the French master. The artist managed to get a small pension to move to Paris to study art in 1881. His discovery of Gauguin’s work had a crucial influence on Maillol’s artistic career. Very soon the artist, who at that time wanted to become a great painter, fell in line with the Nabis, the prophets, followers of Gauguin’s postulates. In 1895, almost for fun, Maillol started to experiment by carving wood and firing little terracotta pieces in a home-made kiln. These small dimension works already contained the ingredients of what turned out to be a veritable revolution in the conception of sculpture. Maillol constructed his sculptures relinquishing narrative intent and naturalism and concentrating exclusively on the fundamental creation of the form. His works were made, therefore, as exercises in pure form, that is to say, stripped of narrative artifice and symbolic or allegorical references. Maillol is universally hailed today as one of the fundamental sculptors in modern art; not in vain did he have a momentous influence on the work of artists like Arp, Laurens or Henry Moore. Although Maillol was always a figurative sculptor, the process of formal synthesis he developed in his statues brought his work to the verge of abstraction. No one has expressed more clearly than Dina Vierny the importance of this French master: ‘Maillol is the sculptor who broke away from the 19th century –even the great Rodin had not abandoned the 19th century. So Maillol was the first sculptor who discovered the simple plane, who simplified and abolished movement and revealed silence, in other words, the interior. “I want to sculpt the impalpable,” he would say. And that is how the first moments of modern sculpture arose.’