Weightless & Monumental

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The New York Sun

The sculpted nudes of Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) are heavy and rotund, reticent and sensual, weightless and monumental. They bridge the Old World sculpture of


Rodin and the pared-down forms of Arp, Moore, Nadelman, and Brancusi. Rodin – who collected Maillol’s work, and who, on more than one occasion, ceded the place of honor at a group exhibition to Maillol – was not the only one who saw the younger French master as European sculpture’s heir apparent.


But figuration, specifically Maillol’s subject and muse, the classical nude, fell out of favor with the advent of the abstraction on which


Maillol’s smooth, curved volumes had the greatest influence. After Maillol’s death, sculpture – which Rodin had resurrected in the 19th century – again took a secondary position to that of painting. In great part this was due to the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism, which led to a rejection not only of the sculpted nude but of anything that smelled of Classicism.


Maillol’s large, reclining figure “The River” (1943) has for decades been the centerpiece of MoMA’s sculpture garden. Yet he is not the household name in New York, let alone America, that he deserves to be. The breathtaking exhibition at Marlborough’s uptown space, “Maillol and America,” – an airily spaced grouping of 10 drawings and 40 sculptures, in bronze and lead, from handheld to monumental – re-establishes Maillol’s singular brilliance.


Maillol believed everything in art could be expressed through the metaphor of woman. His understated forms – as innocent and pure as they are erotic – convey an inwardness, an eternal silence, that goes all the way back to Egyptian tomb sculpture. Their classical clarity recalls both Hellenistic Greece and the simplification of form that is at the heart of Modernism. Yet his sculptures do not feel bound to any particular time.


They express woman as eternal. Woman as Nature and Desire. Woman as the essence of growth, change, and creation; as architecture and landscape; goddess and fertility figure – the root of all art. Maillol’s women are best seen out of doors, where the tension between their modesty and their sexuality is not hindered by the intimacy of a room. It is also outside where their metaphors of landscape and architecture are fully felt.


There, his nudes flow naturally into the landscape. They heave and swell like rolling hills. Their limbs, often melancholic, pour like waterfalls. Their bodies ripen like fruit, and they are most themselves. Their dazzling patinas of brown-and-green shimmer with that of the trees, and their bodies take on the blues and grays of overcast skies.


Free and fully exposed, they feel as natural as animals. At times, as in “Woman holding her Foot pierced by a Thorn” (1920-21), “Woman holding her Foot” (1923), and “Woman With a Crab” (1930), their feet look like lion’s paws. Shy, sly, and pensive, they turn their heads away from us or down. Often they look surprised or as if they had just been awakened from deep dreams. At times, as in the crouching “Thought” (1930), they appear to be wiping sleep from their closed eyes.


Maillol’s nudes are elongated sighs. When curled up or crouching, they appear to be unfolding, giving birth to themselves or to the notion of beauty. Their distant faces sink away, as if, though humble, they were in awe not of themselves and their gorgeous, rolling volumes but of the greater power of sex and of nature. In “Bust of Venus With Fringe” (1920), Venus’s chest is cut diagonally into a rocky cliff. Her breasts, mere suggestions, appear to rise like sunlight over the horizon. In “Harmony” (1940) and “Standing Bather Arranging Her Hair” and “Nymph Without Arms” (both 1930) they stand, hips swelling and swaying, round breasts and pudendums forward and exposed.


These women are as proud as figureheads, yet childlike and demure. Their legs roll inward and together, but their toes are splayed and their thighs, calves, and ankles expand to the point where arousal meets distortion. They are erotic, but they make us aware of eroticism as a greater function of nature rather than as a fixation of man.


There are many works of heroic achievement in this exhibition – among them “Debussey” (1930), “Pomona Clothed” (1921), and the unbelievable “Young Girl walking in Water (Torso of Ile de France)” (1921), in which the headless, armless, nearly legless girl plows forward, seemingly pulling the floor and the surrounding space along with her. Yet the hallmarks of the show are the early “Night” (1902), a seated woman with her head buried in her arms, who sinks infinitely into the base; and the two large, recumbent lead nudes “Air (1st state)” (1938) and “Monument to Cezanne” (1912-25), both more than seven feet long.


Maillol can make his figures lithe, lyrical, or enchanted; rock-solid or levitating. “Air” is long and bulky, as if she were made of giant oaks, but she flies through space swiftly and with ease. She reminds us that tornados can hurl straw like bullets. In “Monument to Cezanne,” Maillol transforms the nude into pure geometric forms that never abandon their primary character as woman. She is alert; beautiful; regal as a goddess and solid as a temple. Her upraised hand is abnormally large. She rides through space, commanding it, shaping it, with the precision of God tweaking the world on the last day of Creation.


A distillation of Classicism and of Cezanne, who worked from the landscape, the still life, and the figure, the work merges all three in a metaphoric realm that is as much a monument to art as it is to the father of Modernism.


The New York Sun

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