Van Gogh •
Artist Biographies
•
Aristide Maillol
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Aristide Maillol |
| Birth Year : |
1861 |
| Death Year : |
1944 |
| Country : |
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.
US
"The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism."
