The Master of Banyuls

In the galleries of Paris' National Museum of Modern Art, fleshy women of bronze, wood and marble stood, sat, crouched or knelt--and each was as young and enticing as the one before. One or two seemed to be weeping, but most simply gazed serenely into space as if caught in the middle of some gentle reverie. Their creator, the late Aristide Maillol, had found one great theme for his art, the female nude, and he spent more than 40 years portraying its inexhaustible harmonies. Last week most of his women, each a study in curving grace (see color), were assembled in Paris from Europe, Canada and the U.S. to pay him tribute on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

In the language of Catalan, spoken in the sunny region on the border of Spain the word "maillol" means "young vine beside the sea." Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol was born in the village of Banyuls-sur-Mer, where his grandfather had operated as a smuggler. At 19 he set out for Paris to become a painter, and though he quickly became disgusted with his classes at the School of Fine Arts ("I painted more apples than Cezanne. This was the time of the apple, a period in which we wasted our time"), he found impressive support on the outside. Gauguin encouraged him; Vuillard, Bonnard and Matisse became his lifelong friends.

Absolutely Pure. Kind words were no substitute for sales, and Maillol returned to Banyuls, where he hired a few local girls as weavers (he later married one of them), opened a small tapestry factory. But once again, sales were few. One day when he was nearly 40, he carved a small nude, Bather. At first Banyuls' prudery precluded his asking anyone to pose ("The best I succeeded in doing was to persuade my sister-in-law to raise her skirt a little above the knee"), but the small sculpture pleased him. He decided to stick to sculpture from then on. In 1900 he turned out his delicate Leda, which was included in his first Paris show two years later. "In all modern sculpture," said Rodin of Leda, "I don't know of a piece that is as absolutely beautiful, as absolutely pure, as absolutely a masterpiece . . . What an artist!"

The rest of France was not so enthusiastic. He was rejected as a candidate to do a monument to Novelist Emile Zola. Aix-en-Provence commissioned a monument to his beloved Cezanne, then refused to accept the finished statue, a reclining nude. Even when Maillol found a sympathetic patron, Count Harry Kessler, art adviser to the German Kaiser, it turned out badly. World War I broke out, and the French angrily concluded that Maillol was pro-German, dismissed his beautiful nudes as so many plump Fraeulein.

An Equilibrium of Masses. Maillol would have been at home in ancient Greece. On his first visit to Piraeus, he declared that he had "come home to Banyuls, the same houses, same windmills, same trees and flowers." When a student later said to him, "The Acropolis must have struck you in the face," Maillol quietly replied, "On the contrary, it gave me a kiss." Like early Greek statues, Maillol's nudes wear an expressionless gaze; his statues are neither anecdotal nor are they portraits. "I look for beauty, not character," he said. "I look for architecture and volume. Sculpture is architecture, the equilibrium of masses, a composition with taste."

At his Banyuls farm, he worked away at his nudes until the day he was killed in an automobile accident at the age of 82. His majestic beard turned white; his wiry body became stooped. Younger, placid and broad-hipped models came to pose and serve as inspiration. "I am inconsolable," he once said, "not to have seen the figures of all the women of my native province." It was his last favorite model, plump Dina Vierny, who tracked down every work the master did and was largely responsible for assembling the current show. Now in her 40s, she still refers to Maillol as "le patron," vows "he will some day have a museum of his own, even if I have to build it with my own hands."

"To the end," adds Dina, "even when success came to him at last, he changed nothing of his habits and never lost his great sense of humility. He was the most complete human being of our century, but he never really knew who he was. Perhaps that was his force. Several days before he died, he said to me, 'Ask Bonnard when you see him if he thinks I've made progress. Last time he was here, he didn't say a word.' "

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