Sculptors

Frenchman Aristide Maillol (pronounced Mayoll) made a long false start. For ten years he tried to paint; for another six he designed tapestries. When he was nearly 40 he took a tree trunk, carved from it a nude figure that he liked very much. Thereupon Aristide Maillol became a sculptor. At 78 he is dean of them all. Last week a show of his work opened in Manhattan's Buchholz Gallery, demonstrated Oldster Maillol's extraordinary talent for imbuing sculpture with both vitality and repose.

A lover of classic art who calls Greece his second home, Maillol almost got into trouble on the Acropolis for trying to embrace a statue whose beauty intoxicated him. Like the Greeks, he is more interested in modeling the body than the face. His strapping, good-natured wife, who was formerly one of his tapestry weavers, posed for many of his statues. Now he uses younger, slenderer models.

To Maillol, size means little. So poised and serene are his figures that even his statuettes seem monumental. No large statue in the show surpasses the 11-inch Leda, of which Rodin said: "In all modern sculpture I do not know of a piece which is as absolutely beautiful, as absolutely pure, as absolutely a masterpiece."

Short, spare, blue-eyed, with a flowing white beard which he tucks into his vest at mealtimes, Sculptor Maillol comes of a line of smugglers, fishermen and vine-growers who lived in Banyuls, a Mediterranean village near the Spanish border.

There he still lives in the pink house where he was born, filling endless notebooks with his sharp, detailed sketches, turning out his statues in a vast, litter-strewn studio. "I invent nothing," says tireless Sculptor Maillol, "no more than the apple tree can pretend to have invented its apples."

No dean but a debutante is Sculptor Dorothy Simmons, who last week had her first U. S. showing at a group exhibit in Manhattan's Bonestell Gallery. She is a tall, blonde, serious young Englishwoman who wants sculpture in every home, fears that most of it is fit only for museums and memorials. Lately, to fill the gap, she has done small, lively pieces in wood, each part carved separately and then fitted together. These she hopes to have copied in multiple, sold cheaply.

Sculptor Simmons' sculpture looks like surrealism, but she is no dilly-Dali-er. Her pieces tell stories with such imagination that each tells something different to every onlooker. Immunity (see cut) shows a placid feminine face resting on a hand, amid the broken sections of a wheel. In Waiting an old woman looks down two flights of stairs, while a clock's hand nears 12 and a high-heeled slipper crosses from one flight to the next.

When Sculptor Simmons arrived in the U. S. last summer, she brought her work in its unassembled parts. Puzzled, the customs inspectors slapped a duty of $60 on it; for days could not be convinced that it was art, hence duty-free.

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