Maillol's paintings and sculptures in Rotterdam

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Kunsthal, Rotterdam has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. In October it was the site of one of the most valuable art heists of recent years, when thieves stole paintings by Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse and Monet from the venue. It is perhaps understandable that the thieves headed to the lower floor for the paintings from the Triton Foundation collection rather than going for the monumental metal casts by Maillol on the floor above. In spite of the theft, Kunsthal’s exhibitions will continue their scheduled runs.

Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) trained as a painter and tapestry designer and was initially attached to the Nabis (who depicted domestic scenes, employing shallow pictorial depth, strong colour and decorative patterns).  The show includes six versions of The Wave in different media: a tapestry, a preparatory drawing for the tapestry, an oil painting, a woodcut, a modelled relief and a light sketch in sanguine (chalk or crayon of a reddish colour). Sculpture (the art form he is best known for) came relatively late as a passion for Maillol – around the age of 40. Maillol is considered one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.

Once Maillol had turned his attention to sculpture, he moved away from the Nabis and towards the antique. Maillol lived much of his life in his birthplace, French Catalonia on the Mediterranean coast. A background steeped in Mediterranean nature and culture gave Maillol a feeling of kinship with Roman and Greek artists. Almost all Maillol’s mature art takes as its subject the female nude.

Maillol was the forerunner of a movement called ‘rappel de l’ordre’ (recall to order) which occurred during the First World War when artists – dismayed at the brutality of a war many of them had welcomed – turned their backs on Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism and took up Neo-Classicism. Along with Picasso, Derain and de Chirico, Maillol was a leading figure in the movement. Maillol’s sculpture was successful because his background, taste and abilities perfectly matched the classical sensibility. That said, few would mistake his sculptures for ancient art. Maillol simplified forms subtly both in essence and detail. This is a dramatic break with the paragon among modern figure sculptors, Rodin, who emphasized fluidity, action, dynamic line and a Romantic engagement with psychology. In his focus on form rather than sensibility, Maillol is defiantly modern while being classical.

The exhibition in Rotterdam brings together many of his masterpieces, the over-life-size cast statues, with small maquettes, cast reliefs, paintings and graphics, representing an overview of Maillol’s work. The Nabi paintings feature women’s heads in profile against brightly coloured backgrounds and give little indication of Maillol’s later concerns. Graphics include small woodcut illustrations for exclusive book editions of Roman authors.

Although Maillol worked from models, he had a non-naturalistic approach. He drew from antique sculpture and claimed that he used simple geometric shapes as the building blocks for the poses of his statues.  ‘I always set out from a geometric figure, a square, diamond or triangle, because these figures stand up to the space best.’ A good example of this is Night (1905), where the square of crossed arms and shoulders rests upon the triangle of the upraised legs.

There are different versions of the same piece in complete form and cut-down versions. Chained Action (1905) depicts a walking woman, head turned, arms tied behind her back. In the cut-down cast we see the torso alone, shorn of limbs and head. The latter is vastly superior, having even greater robust dynamism than the full figure, expressed through its jutting convex forms. The energy in the full figure is dissipated through having limbs dilute the pose’s latent energy and having the pose ‘explained’ through the ligature. The torso contains more power because it is reduced to the absolute essence. It is remarkable that in every single case where a full figure is juxtaposed with a cut-down version, the reduced version invariably works better.

From the frequency of Maillol’s reductions (which are always pared-down versions of complete figures and are never preparatory studies) it is clear that the sculptor understood this fact too. Torso of Ile-de-France (1921) perfectly expresses a gentle forward wave of motion through the arching back, free of the arms that balance the full-figure version.

Seeing the Rotterdam exhibition in person reminds one (in a way illustrations never do) of the beautiful textures, the tactile qualities of Maillol’s art. The surfaces of the lead casts have delicious graphite slipperiness. Getting close, one can see rasp marks that were on the plaster originals. The bilingual catalogue (French-Dutch) records most of the exhibits and acts as a reasonable introduction to Maillol.