MAILLOL, ARISTIDE

born Dec. 8, 1861, Banyuls-sur-Mer, Fr. died Sept. 27, 1944, near Banyuls-sur-Mer Young Woman Seated, bronze sculpture by Aristide Maillol, c. 1936. Height 104 French painter, printmaker, and one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, whose monumental statues of female nudes restored to early 20th-century sculpture a concern for mass and rigorous formal analysis; his works paved the way for the radical experimentation of the various schools of modern abstract sculpture. Maillol began as a painter and tapestry designer whose work reflected his great admiration for the Nabis, a group of artists whose work was composed typically of decorative patterns of colour. He was almost 40 years old when an eye disease made him decide to become a sculptor. His mature style of sculpture rejected the highly emotional sculpture of his contemporary Auguste Rodin, and he attempted to preserve and purify the tradition of sculpture derived from classical Greece and Rome. The Mediterranean (c. 1901) and Night (1902) show the emotional restraint, clear composition, and serene surfaces he employed in his sculpture for the rest of his life. Although most of his work depicts the mature female form, a notable exception is the lean Cyclist (190708), which greatly influenced subsequent developments in figurative expressionistic sculpture. After 1910 Maillol was internationally famous and received a constant flood of commissions. Because of his strict economy of aesthetic means, he managed successfully to turn 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. 193943) did he vary his basic formula and represent the human form in turbulent activity. Maillol resumed painting in 1939, but sculpture never relinquished preeminence in his affections. He also made many woodcut illustrations for fine editions of Latin poets during the 1920s and '30s, doing much to revive the art of the book.