Aristide Maillol
French, 1861-1944
Bather Putting Up Her Hair, 1930
bronze - signed, inscribed, and numbered (1877/XXVII)
61 x 26 1/2 x 22 in.
SBMA, Bequest of Wright S. Ludington
1993.1.39
Undated photo of Maillol
RESEARCH PAPER
How amazing it is that a mere form in bronze can have so much impact on its viewer. One stands before this larger than life-sized figure of a standing nude with her arms raised above her head while putting up her hair before her bath and tries to grasp the source of the energy that pulls you nearer. At first this bather seems just a quiet, inward looking, reflective young woman. One can see that Maillol created her with the powerful legs and arms and the well endowed torso he usually presented. Yet on deeper study, one feels there is something about the fullness and suppleness of her figure that suggests a restrained inner energy and a force below the surface. There is certainly a sense of great power in her body coupled with great gentleness. This sensuous figure is another representation of the nude female form that he had drawn from both his vivid imagination as well as some male primordial sense of the ultimate female goddess. We sense more than a simple combination of sensuous feminine mass fused with quiet simplicity.
For most of his first 73 years of life, Maillol invariably derived his concept for a sculpture from a figure or a pose he had visualized in his mind. That is not to say that he didn’t make voluminous sketches of a variety of models, including his wife Clotilde, yet he rarely sculpted replications from the direct observation of a model. There were times he would recall a model to review a pose. Usually, however he made notes and drew sketches of her from a variety of angles from which to work. However, during the molding of the sculpture, it was his imagination that came to determine the outcome. What he was searching for was a simplification of contours and a refinement of slopes and planes. He was not interested in details, but rather in the central idea, stripping away any extraneous parts. While Maillol had a predilection for rounded surfaces and curves by which he gave compactness to the volume of the sculpture, his figure became more like a purified concept of volumes.
It could be said that without feminine thighs and breasts, Maillol might not have become a successful artist. For the most part, he chose to depict an almost pubescent female anatomy in natural poses as his usual subject. Most of his females were standing in a contraposto position, were full figured, had straight sturdy legs, projected a strong neck and shoulders, and had high, small breasts. The BATHER PUTTING UP HER HAIR shares these characteristics. In addition, her head is slightly inclined forward, and her eyes appear half closed. This is what gives her the appearance of serenity, introspection, and sensuousness. Since positioning the arms was a special challenge to Maillol, in this figure he raised them above her head rather then let them hide any part of the body or interfere with the view of the contours of the torso. Maillol’s positioning the arms curved upward, draws the viewer’s eyes upward to bent arms, then to the top of the head, the face shaded by the inclined head, and ultimately leads us down to the breasts, stomach, legs and feet. So the viewing of a static figure impels us to see the motion inherent in our eye movement across these body parts.
As the two contemporary artists, Rodin and Maillol, both sought to abstract the forms of their sculptures, each took a different direction to achieve this goal. Rodin’s works were energized by movement, tension, extension, and emotion. The deep modeling and uneven surfaces caught the light and animated his subjects. Yet, Maillol brought abstraction to sculpture via smoothness, motionlessness and inwardness. With this approach, he had broken with his work in the decorative arts at the turn of the 20th century and created timeless works that were modern before modernity and ancient long after Antiquity. Although he admired Greek sculptors, he did not follow a formula for proportion in his figures like they did, nor did he give them a frozen expression.
Maillol reached ideal balance through his accuracy of proportions as well as the harmoniousness of composition. His work sought to capture the beauty of the human body through simplification. It seems that his perception of beauty was a representation that encompassed his view of the world--simple, natural beauty. But his modernity went beyond this. During his long formative years, working with tapestry, painting, ceramics, sculpting, and engravings for books, Maillol searched for what he envisioned was the perfect female body. Then in 1934 Dina Vierny entered his life. It was by an unusual confluence of circumstances that she was introduced to him by mutual friends. Dina was a fifteen year old girl whom artist friends of his thought would be an excellent model for a relief he was working on. He convinced her parents to let her vacation at his home as a guest of his family and to be the model for the head of that relief. For him she was the incarnation of his vision because she personified his mental image of a woman. By the time she was sixteen, she had no reluctance to model nude for this very refined, reserved, and shy old man. Now, the man who rarely sculpted directly from a model was sculpting only from his observation of this model. With passing of time, Dina developed into the ideal, classic model, becoming the human form that Maillol could transfer into the bronze aesthetic form.
Dina returned to live in Paris for most of each of the next four years as she continued her university education in chemistry and physics. But whenever she had holiday time, she returned to Maillol’s studio in Banyul-sur-Mer, his birthplace at the foot of the Pyrenese Mountains, and continued to pose for him. By February of 1940, war broke out, and she decided to remain with his family. Maillol described her as an intelligent young woman, with a plump body, high breasts, and a willingness to adapt her body to a variety of intelligent poses. However, it was she who said, “There is nothing better than being a model.”(Pg. 8,Marlborough) Although she denied it, it was she who became his muse, as it was no longer his wife. It was she who even encouraged him to once again resume painting. And, it was she who inspired him to create monumental sized sculptures in his final years. She continued to inspire his work until he suddenly died as a result of serious injuries he sustained in an auto accident on his way to visit Raoul Dufy.
Maillol’s oeuvre has played an enormous role in modern art. His constantly reworked concept of form has left a deep imprint on successive sculptors who admired his smooth, polished, and compact forms. Arp, Brancussi, Lourens, and even Henry Moore are among those who continued to reflect his influence. In a way, Maillol chased a vision of an image and finally found it in a remarkable, young and nubile woman. He shunned fame and honor, yet both found him and preserved his place in modern art. Despite all the pressures from a variety of art movements, he chose to have his work reflect the smooth, quiet, classical Greek form as opposed to the rough, animated surfaces reflected in Rodin’s work. We can view Maillol’s work as ‘massive sensuousness’ in style and ‘symbolic concentration in his restricting his sculpting to the nude female form, concentrating on the balanced positions of the head and breasts, the lower torso that includes the abdomen and buttocks, and the powerful limbs. His reclining nudes assume natural poses in which we find an expressed kind of nakedness, a truth without cover, a carefully displayed woman, totally honest and thoughtful, yet set apart from the interactions and concerns of the social or temporal context. Maillol’s figures are so openly demanding of the viewer’s concentration directed toward the simple yet intelligent poses that are asking to be examined for how its surfaces reveal, while they hide, in the pose itself what is suggested by the wordless figural softness while being symbolically loud in it mass, and all of it so equally proportioned according to classical dimension. Here is what Rodin, and other sculptors afterwards, assimilated from Maillol’s sculptures: his powerfully understated, yet carefully proportioned figures contribute to the value of artistic truth, drawing a point of perception from the viewer, across each shoulder, each breast, each buttock, each leg and arm yet all in such a natural state. This carefully crafted BATHER PUTTING UP HER HAIR, with the inclined angle of head and semi-closed eyes, is greater than the sum of human body parts. This nude femme carries that eternal message all artists seek to convey and is precisely what embedded itself in the next generations of sculptors and what we see reflected today in their works. In this way, this female nude ties classical art and focus to the contemporary period’s concern with artistic expression
Prepared for SBMA Docent Council by Eunice Drell, August 2003
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lorquin, Bertrand, MAILLOL, Thames & Hudson publishers, NY,NY, 1995
Vierny, Dina, MAILLOL AND DINA, Marlborough Fine Arts, London, Eng. , Feb. 2001.
GUIDE BY CELL
Guide by Cell Script
Sara Bangser
I think it’s fair to say that, right now, in today’s uncertain world, a little serenity and calm are most welcome. Perhaps this is what has drawn you to this 1930 bronze sculpture, Bather Putting Up Her Hair, by the French artist Aristide Maillol.
Please take a few moments to walk around this piece. Notice how the highly polished, smooth surfaces draw you into the inner thoughts of a young woman preparing for her daily ritual.
Maillol began his career as a painter and tapestry weaver. However, the intricate work of weaving taxed his eyesight, and at age 40, fearing he might lose his vision, he turned to sculpting. Maillol did not sculpt using live models. Rather, he took photographs, made notes and sketches of his sitters. When he returned to his studio, he sculpted from memory and his imagination.
Maillol is known for his larger-than-life female nudes, presented in the Classical Greek simplified style. These are highly polished compact forms and are a gorgeous combination of Classical Greek art with a modern 20th century artistic expression. Notice that she is presented in a Contrapposto stance – her bent right leg is positioned in front of the straight back leg that provides bodily balance.
There is a quiet simplicity about our bather. Maillol subtracts details, thus revealing the soft, smooth, gentle nature of this woman. We do not see any definition of muscles or extraneous details. Maillol typically positioned the arms upward to avoid covering up other portions in the figure. Your eye is drawn to the simple act of readying her hair for a bath. Next, her gently bent head and half-closed eyes offer a facial expression of calmness and serenity. This continues as you scan the length of the entire torso.
Aristide Maillol’s female nudes are distinctive sculptures seen worldwide in museum collections such as the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena or poised over a pond in the sculpture garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Wright S. Ludington (1900-1992), one of the founders of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and donor of this work, had a clear fascination with the representation of the human body. He would have displayed this work alongside his celebrated collection of Greco-Roman monumental sculpture, delighting in the modernist twist that Maillol put on such venerated classicism. Maillol, a contemporary of Edgar Degas and Pierre Bonnard, as well as lifelong friend of Henri Matisse (whose Pont Saint-Michel on view nearby was also gifted to the Museum by Ludington) was one of the most prolific and successful producers of public sculpture of his generation. During the last decade of his career, he was inspired by his favorite model, Dina Vierny, whose idealized form he repeated in countless allegorical personifications as communicated through the classical staple of the female nude.
- Ridley-Tree Gallery, 2016