Aristide Maillol

Acquired in the 1980s

The beauty of the female body fascinated Maillol throughout his career, and the present sculpture is one of his most idealized representations.   The sculpture is a medley of formal quotations that call to mind some of the greatest sculpture of the classical age. But Maillol's idealized first rendering of this figure at the beginning of the 20th century is emphatically avant-garde, characterized by a sleek linearity that would define the Modernist aesthetic.  Bertrand Lorquin describes the true artistry at the heart of Maillol's work:  "Maillol's sculpture achieves an ideal balance through the accuracy of its proportions as well as the harmoniousness of its compositions.  Paul Valéry once said that sculpture is an art full of surprises, and at each moment the sculptor chooses his viewpoint among an infinite array of possibilities.  A Maillol statue is a perpetual revelation of the type of beauty which the sculptor invented" (B. Lorquin, Aristide Maillol, op. cit., pp. 102-03).

Another cast of this sculpture belongs to the collection of Musée d'Orsay in Paris.