Aristide Maillol

John Rewald, Maillol, Paris, 1939, illustration of the plaster p. 61
Jean Charbonneaux, Maillol, Paris, 1947, illustrations of another cast pls. 2 & 8
Claude Roy, Maillol vivant, Geneva, 1947, illustration of another cast pl. 52
Waldemar George, Aristide Maillol, Greenwich, 1965, illustration of another cast pl. 206
Maillol au Palais des Rois de Majorque, Perpignan, 1979, no. 85, illustration of another cast
Bertrand Lorquin, Aristide Maillol, London, 1995, colour illustration of another cast p. 117

Pomone aux bras tombants was conceived in 1937 during a period when Maillol was working on several private commissions for monumental sculptures. This life-size figure allowed him once again to explore a theme that had interested him during his early career. The sculpture was based on an earlier version of Pomone, which Maillol created in 1910. In that sculpture, the figure extends her arms in a rigid gesture of offering to the beholder. In the present work, however, the artist renders Pomone with a much more relaxed posture, allowing her arms to rest at her sides. The resulting sculpture appears more naturalistic than the earlier version, and possesses a lifelike softness that the original Pomone lacked. When Maillol exhibited this revised version at the Petit Palais in 1937, it was considered the crowning achievement of his career.

John Rewald commented about Maillol’s sculpture: ‘To celebrate the human body, particularly the feminine body, seems to have been Maillol’s only aim. He did this in a style from which all grandiloquence is absent, a style almost earthbound and grave… The absence of movement, however, is compensated by a tenderness and charm distinctively his own’ (J. Rewald, in Aristide Maillol (exhibition catalogue), Rosenberg Gallery, New York, 1958, pp. 6-7).