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Chapter 1

BANYULS-SUR-MER

Aristide Bonaventure Jean Maillol was born on 8 December 1861 in Banyuls-sur-Mer, a village at the southwest corner of France. This village, “Banyuls on the sea”, is located where the southeast end of the Pyrenees meets the Mediterranean Sea.  Its current population is five thousand.  A small village faces a small bay with a fishing port, and behind it extends a slope covered by vineyards and silver-gray olive trees, which are blown by winds from the Mediterranean Sea and burnt by the strong southern sun.  The French-Spanish border is just nearby, and Maillol grew up speaking Catalan as his mother tongue.

The word “maillol” means a young grapevine in Catalan.  The origin of the Maillol family must have been related to wine production.  Even now, Maillol’s relatives produce Maillol brand sweet wines. 

His father, Raphäel, was engaged in cultivation of a vineyard and trade in textiles. According to Maillol, he was “as good-looking as Jupiter sculpted by Pheidias.” (Cladel 1937, p.9)  Raphäel was a great reader but not with special interest in fine arts.  Maillol’s mother, Catherine, was a clerk at a shop and came to know Raphäel when he came to the shop to buy some clothes.  After marriage, they built a house near the port, but the husband was often away from home doing trade with Algeria, where his sister had a textile shop.

Maillol was born as the fourth of their five children.  At the birth of Maillol, the father was forty-one and the mother thirty.  

Catherine gave birth to Maillol not at their own house but at her father-in-law’s.  As the husband was often away from home and they already had three children, Catherine had difficulty in raising the fourth herself.  Maillol stayed at the house where he was born and was raised by his aunt Lucie and his grandfather Raphäel.

The house still remains in Banyuls.  One would find it on a narrow street in the old town after walking uphill a few minutes from the seashore.  It occupies a block and is one of the largest and the most magnificent houses in the neighborhood.  In the neighborhood where walls were all white, only the house had rose-colored wall, and it was called the “Maison rose”.  It looks three stories high seen from below the slope, and two stories high seen from above.  The top story commanded the view of the Mediterranean Sea.  The color of the wall has faded a bit, but one would see big fig trees in the garden just as at the time of Maillol.

When young, grandfather Raphäel made his living by coastal navigation and by tobacco smuggling between France and Spain.  He was at the age of seventy-six and already blind at the time of Maillol’s birth.  Infant Maillol led his grandfather every morning to a sunny bench on the seashore in winter and to the shades of plane trees in summer, and took him back every evening.

“I took my grandfather to this shore so that he could meet other sailors like him.  They sat there, having a kind of a reunion, you know, and killed their time.  I myself was so small that I sat leaning on my grandfather’s legs.  I used to listen to the talks.  I still remember my grandfather’s knees, which were so big.” (Frère 1956, p.46-47)

“He was a big man and I was so small but we often made long journeys together.  On the way, he told me stories caressing my head.” (Vierny 1994, p.111)

 Maillol learned of smugglers’ routes from his grandfather.  In Maillol’s last years, the routes, known as the “Maillol route”, served to let refugees from Nazi get out of the country. 

Aunt Lucie was forty-four when Maillol was born and was single.  She ran a small shop, whose proceeds helped her raise Maillol.  Maillol painted a large portrait of her when he was young, which is now exhibited in the Maillol Museum in Paris.  She sits up straight, and looks simple and neat.  Her large hands show her virtue of industry.  It is clear that the young painter respected her profoundly.  The portrait had remained to be the only ornament to the dining room of Maillol’s house in Banyuls till his last days.  Maillol named his only child Lucien, a name which must have been taken after Lucie.  For Maillol, Lucie played the role of a mother and had been one of the most important figures in his life.  Both the grandfather and the aunt, however, disciplined Maillol rigorously and were very strict to him.  Both of them were pious Catholics, and Maillol was also a religious child.  He was baptized and took his first Holy Communion at the church in his village.

Maillol was enrolled in a local primary school.  He had a good teacher.  “He taught me all what I know.” (Cladel 1937, p.11)  In the recollection of a classmate, however, “Maillol was always dreaming or drawing.” (Puig 1937, p.9)  He could not become intimate with other schoolboys and did not have many friends.  According to a classmate, “After school, he seldom joined us to play.” (ibid)

After school, he caught butterflies and other insects in vineyards and gathered shells and drifts on the seashore.  He seems to have been a child who liked playing by himself.  His whole life seems to have centered on silent plays by himself.  He was a child who crouches on seashore playing alone with shells, while his classmates played around in a group.

“I have never been so happy in my life as I was when fishing from rocks by the sea in my childhood.  When I could be all alone by the sea with a fishing line…, you know, I felt as if I were above everything.  My aunt strictly forbade me to go fishing, but I had a line concealed in a wall near the house, and stealing her eyes, I took it out and ran to the sea.  (…) I didn’t know why, but when I could be alone on rocks, passing time there, with the sea, I felt immense joy.  I felt the same joy when catching birds in the mountain.” (Frère 1956, p.321-322)   

At the age of twelve, Maillol was enrolled in a boarding school located in Perpignan, the capital of the prefecture, which is thirty kilometers away from Banyuls. 

“I learned nothing from the ignorant priests who taught at the school.” (Cladel 1937, p.11) 

“On these school days, I have no memories other than those miserable and boring.  The only exception is that I found how to raise a sparrow in my desk.” (op. cit., p.12)

His interest in fine arts started in this period.  According to a relative, “There were no shops in those days for artist’s materials in Banyuls.  Maillol took the scissors from his mother’s sewing basket, cut out the center piece of the tablecloth and painted his first work on the back.  It was of fishing boats.  He was 13.  There was quite a scene when it came time to set the table.” (Sciff 1997, p.105)  It is also said that a Polish teacher Alchimovitch taught him painting and that his first oil painting was a landscape of the Banyuls Bay.  He also painted a picture of a horse running over a volcano to decorate the shop of his aunt in Algeria.

Later, when he was asked what kind of circumstance was decisive for his development and what kind of a shock revealed his talent, Maillol told the following story:

“I never felt a shock.  The taste for art existed inside me.  If I am to say that there was a shock, then I should say that the shock was provoked by a green caiman, by a duck made of porcelain china, and by a dove made of glazed tinplate…  One of my classmates subscribed books, or rather pamphlets, each of which cost ten centimes.  The cover of one issue featured a picture of a green caiman.  The strange image and its color dazzled me.  I ran to the bookshop hoping to find the green caimans…  Well, it was for paintings.  I was conquered by the charm of the form for the first time when I found, after school, a duck made of china displayed by a peddler merchant.  The duck seemed to me a marvelous thing.  It evoked such a strong desire in me that I stole it and fled to my house to hide it in a drawer.  I was delighted by my loot and tortured by the fear of the police…  As to the dove made of glazed tinplate, it was on the cap of one of my classmates.  I was enchanted by the dove, so enchanted that, in spite of my extreme timidity, I dared to visit his house and ask his mother to sell it to me.  She exploded into laughter and said to her neighbors, “Look at this boy who fell in love with the tinplate dove of my son!” (Cladel 1937, p. 12-13)

Aunt Lucie visited the boarding school once a week but Maillol quitted it at the age of seventeen and recommenced to play by himself in Banyuls.

This was a period of calamity for the Maillol family.  Raphäel, Maillol’s father, passed away after being in bed for four or five years.  The vineyard was destroyed by insects and the family lost income from it.  As the second elder brother Adolphe was also dead young, the family had only two men, Maillol and his oldest brother Raphäel, but Maillol did not work to contribute to the household.  He spent time, for example, producing a magazine titled “The Fig”, later renamed “A Diary of a Bored”, that had only one copy issued and had only one reader.

Maillol told me that when he was really young, before going to Paris, he edited a small magazine “The Fig”, which he illustrated in the style of Cham, a cartoonist at that time. He produced about twenty issues but none of them remain now.  He found one issue in his cellar in Banyuls a few years ago but burned it. (Kessler 1961, p.649)

After spending two years in Banyuls, Maillol returned to Perpignan to take lessons on painting by Alchimovitch, an ex-teacher at the boarding school and then a curator at the city museum.  Maillol soon found he had nothing to learn from him and tried to study the works in the museum by himself, but Alchimovitch, not wanting to lose the tuition, did not let Maillol enter the museum.  Maillol brought the case to the city office but the office did nothing in response.  Maillol and aunt Lucie talked to Alchimovitch together but he did not change his attitude.  The effort to study art in his home region was frustrated.

Maillol happened to meet a student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris who was traveling in the region and had an opportunity to try sculpture with him.  Also, when drawing at a cafe in Banyuls, Maillol met another student in art, who gave an advice that if Maillol wanted to be a painter he should not stay in Banyuls but should go to Paris, start with the Decorative Art School, and then study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Maillol thus made his mind to go to Paris to be a painter.  Though his family opposed, he did not give in.  Aunt Lucie agreed to contribute twenty francs a month and, at the age of twenty, Maillol was set to Paris.

On the day of the departure from Banyuls, his aunt, mother, and sisters, lining on the steps of the Maison rose front gate, bade farewell to Maillol who were descending the slope.  The recollection of the scene brought Maillol into tears even in his old days.   

Chapter 2

ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS

           Maillol came to Paris in 1882.  As the re-design of Paris by Haussmann had already been completed in 1869, Paris must have been with the same magnificence as one finds today.  For this youth from a farthest periphery of France, the grandeur of the city must have been imposing. 

Maillol was miserable and without money in Paris.  He repeatedly failed in the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  The allowance from aunt Lucie and the scholarship from the East Pyrenees prefecture added up only to two francs a day.  Maillol rented a room in a dark slum district.  “I lived for many months with only ten sues par day: two sues for bread and eight sues for cheese.” (Puig 1965, p.11)  He suffered from chronicle malnutrition, and repeatedly experienced long hospitalisation due to rheumatism.  The life in the big city undermined the religious belief he fostered at home.  In addition, the twenty-year old youth had no solution for “la question femme”.  “I sometimes thought of bringing things to an end by throwing myself in the Seine.”  (Cladel 1937, p.24)

           He had one acquaintance in Paris: his teacher at the primary school in Banyuls was at his son-in-law’s in Paris.  Maillol rented a room nearby and had meals at the teacher’s.  The Gravillier Street, where the teacher lived, and the Vertus Street, where Maillol lived, both still remain in the third arrondissement, and, though they have been significantly renovated by a re-development project, do not look too shiny.  The Vertus Street is especially narrow and dark.  Maillol commuted to the school on foot everyday.  It took forty-five minutes from his room to the school.  He walked around the square shaped palace of the Louvre, crossed the Seine, entered the gate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and started drawing after classical sculptures as an auditor at Professor Gérôme’s class.

           Jean-Léon Gérôme was then at the age of fifty-eight.  Gérôme was a champion of the Neo-Classical school of painting and of the Realism sculpture and excelled especially in drawing.  He adored Ingres and despised the amateurism of the Impressionists.  The essence of the academicism lies in the belief that the art can be taught and learned and that even a revolutionary genius should meet  certain standards of sheer craftsmanship, and Gérôme was one of those who embodied the belief.  The youth from a periphery whose eyes for fine arts were opened by a green caiman, a porcelain duck, and a tinplate dove wanted to get concrete guidance from this highest authority. 

After attending his class for a few months, Maillol visited Gérôme’s studio to show his drawings.  The teacher at the primary school accompanied him till the gate of Gérôme’s mansion.  Gérôme’s studio was at the top floor.  Maillol, after ascending the stairs covered by red carpets, knocked the door, and heard his professor’s solemn voice, “Entrrrez!”  Maillol opened the door but Gérôme did not turn his eyes from the easel and asked what Maillol wanted.  Gérôme gave a glance at the drawings Maillol showed and immediately responded, “You know nothing.  Go to the Decorative Art School and try noses and ears.” (Cladel 1937, p.19)

           A student at the French academy, “began by learning to draw ‘from the flat’, i.e., from engravings of eyes, noses, ears, limbs, and finally entire figures taken from the works of approved masters.  He then worked from the cast, and again he would begin with isolated members, or in some cases from solid geometrical figures, and end with entire statues.  Colour was forbidden until the final stages of the course, when paintings might be copied.” (Osborne, 1970, p.74)  Gérôme’s advice was true to this tradition that lasted through the centuries. 

           Maillol followed the advice and was enrolled in the sculpture course of the Decorative Art School.  He also started to attend, as an auditor, to the classes of Cabanel and Yvon, in addition to that of Gérôme, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

           The course he took at the Decorative Art School was from nine to eleven o’clock at night.  The School’s documents record a professor’s comment that Maillol was diligent and excellent in the first semester.  Maillol, however, was often absent from the class in the second semester.  He got exhausted by the time of the night course, as he had to walk to and from the schools many times during the day, without eating well.

           Alexandre Cabanel, whose class Maillol attended at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was also at the helm of the academicism.  He graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, winning the Prix de Rome, the prize for the best students, studied in Rome for three years with the prize scholarship, and became a professor of his alma mater on his return from Rome.  “The birth of Venus”, a painting which he exhibited at the 1863 Salon, was the topic of Paris and was bought by the emperor Napoleon III.  He was at the age of sixty when Maillol first met him.

Cabanel was warmer and kinder than Gérôme.  Even after the abolishment of the auditor system, Cabanel allowed Maillol to attend his class for half a year till Maillol succeeded in the entrance examination.  When Maillol was arrested for misusing a railway ticket, Cabanel wrote to the authority, “I certify that Mr. Maillol is my best student.”  Gérôme only said “You are not there yet”, but Cabanel said “It’s bad, but, continue!”

Maillol once showed Cabanel a painting more or less influenced by the Pointillism, and Cabanel told Maillol, “Study drawing first.  Take up your small technique only afterwards.”

“I was disappointed, but I understood what he meant, and Cabanel was helpful…  He corrected me well rigorously, and he sometimes gave me good advice.  Unfortunately, he did not add how I can put his advice into practice.”  (Cladel 1937, p.26)

           Practical technique for beginners was given by Achille Laugé, a student from the same region and at the same age as Maillol.  “It was Laugé who put me right on track.” (ibid)  A few months after getting the advice of Laugé, Maillol heard Professor Yvon say, “It’s so good!  Well, very good!”  Maillol asked Cabanel to let him move from the class for drawing to that for painting and was accepted.  Maillol, who had been “ignorant, blind, idiot”, and like a “lost dog”, according to his later words, got finally on the right track of the academicism.

For three years as an auditor, he studied drawing after classical Greek and Roman sculptures under Gérôme, drawing of nudes under Yvon, and sculpture at the Decorative Art School.  As his chief accomplishment in later years was nude sculptures which reminds us of Greek classics, one can conclude that his efforts in these years was not useless.

On 17 March 1885, at the age of twenty-three, Maillol was accepted by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  Among the 223 candidates, eighty was accepted, and Maillol was sixty-forth.  He stayed at the school for eight years till 1893, i.e., till the age of thirty-one.  He attended the class of Cabanel for four years, and after his death, studied under Jean-Paul Laurens.  He copied after such masters as Chardin, Fragonard, and Rembrandt at Louvre and other museums.  He tried works influenced by Courbet and Puvis de Chavannes.

At the year when he was accepted by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Maillol moved to the Sèvres Street.   Georges-Daniel de Monfreid recalls Maillol’s room as follows.

He rented a cheap attic which was well lighted by its two scuttles and called it “his atelier”.  The room was without ceiling and was directly on the zinc roof.  It was freezing in winter and the heat in summer was intolerable.  To get there, one had to climb up the stairs in the dark, hitting  lead sewers opened on the wall to let the tenants dispose dirty water and others.  The place was filled with bad smells of ammonia but due to the darkness one could not see things.  One followed a sticky handrail as if it had been the string of Ariadne, and I have to admit that certain courage was needed to go higher up on this stairs.  Fortunately there were only three stories, and in the end it got a little bit better lighted by a scuttle obscured by spider’s webs.  There were many doors.  On one of them, one small paper was tacked by a pin: “Aristide Maillol, Artist-Painter, knock hard.”  (Le Normand-Romains 1994, p.22-23)       

          Maillol lived with Achille Laugé mentioned above for three years till Laugé quitted Paris to go  home.  They shared scare resources and ate bread, sausages, or potatoes.  Sometimes one of them got foods sent from home, Laugé prepared fire and pealed vegetables, and Maillol cooked well according to recipes he learned from aunt Lucie.  Not being able to hire models, they painted only after apples.

“I had not seen Cézanne but painted more apples than Cézanne.  It was ‘the period of apples.’  It was the period we wasted our time.” (Cladel 1937, p.28)

“It was at the Ambassadeurs that I made my first decoration after my arrival in Paris.  Yes, I decorated the Ambassadeurs!”  Maillol was at that time without a penny and his friends took him there to do interior painting together and to earn some small money.  He was, however, the only one to be paid among them in the end, as the director found him completely incompetent and fired him settling the outstanding pay, while the others, who continued to work, did not get paid as the employer went bankrupt after then.  Maillol laughed with a broad smile on his face telling this story.  Maillol continued that he had also made a big decoration for the Moulin Rouge.  He painted two clowns freely after a painting by Willette, which had been burnt in a fire a few years before.  The completion of the decoration was celebrated really festively.  Maillol was disguised as a charcoal crayon, wearing a green tights and black sleeves and gloves.  The dancers of the Moulin Rouge carried him in a triumphant march and then ripped from his body all the clothes, even the green tights.  (Kessler 1961, p.511)

Having spent a childhood collecting shells on the seashore and a youth at a corner of Paris, Maillol grew to be a person who does not exaggerate oneself.  

It was also in this period that Maillol got acquainted with Bourdelle.   Laugé and Bourdelle were in the same class at the Art School in Toulouse and Laugé introduced Bourdelle to Maillol.  The three were at the same age.  Bourdelle came to Paris two years later than Maillol and was already married.  Maillol used to eat, work, and stay in Bourdelle’s.  “I was sticking around in Bourdelle’s studio all the time in those days.” (op.cit., p.453)  Once Maillol made a statute of Christ for someone, and, according to Maillol, Bourdelle loved it very much.    

           Later, Maillol talked of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as follows:

“I did not learn drawing.  Even less painting.  Educated badly or not educated at all, we understood nothing about the art.” (Cladel 1937, p.31)

“The story of someone who comes to Paris to follow an artistic career is not funny.  The unfortunate guy would fell in the school just as one fell in a pitfall.  He would not find the truth there, as the truth exists only outside the school.  (op.cit., p.34)

           The extremely long period of basic training, lasting more than ten years, in which he could not find his potential, must have been frustrating and cruelly painful for Maillol.  He was penniless, far detached from his home, and single, and could not produce many works.

“The talent, it is a seed sown in the brain, it’s like a germinal disc of an egg.  When it is cold, the egg would not hatch out.  It hatches only if it is warmed.” (op.cit.,p.32)

“Most of my friends were sunk into the school unfortunately.  When I left the school, I did so all alone.  There were almost nobody other than Bourdelle and I who could get out of this quagmire.  To escape from the school is a miracle.” (op.cit., p.34)

Maillol, however, also recalls, “Cabanel never gave me bad advice,” (Berger 1996c, p.29) or “The Master (Cabanel) was so good to me and I never forget him.” (Puig 1965, p.12)  Though the works of Rodin and Bourdelle are eloquently talkative, Maillol’s works are characterized by the silent serenity of Greek classics.  One should say, in spite of his words, that he acquired all what he could get from the academicism during his ten years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

The two decades between the birth of Maillol and his arrival in Paris was the period in which the Impressionist movement was started, bore rich fruits, and evolved into the Post-Impressionism.  Only a few years after Maillol was born, on the occasion of the salon of 1863, “The birth of venus” by Cabanel, which was acquired by Napoleon III, and “Lunch on the grass” by Manet, which was rejected by the salon, formed a good contrast between the old and the new.  During the twenty years till Maillol’s arrival in Paris, major achievements of the Impressionism were all accomplished.  Van Gogh, who came to Paris almost at the same time as Maillol, utterly changed his tableau after his encounter with the Impressionism.  Maillol, however, studied under Cabanel, the archenemy of the Impressionists, and, as described later, escaped from the academicism via his interaction with the Post-Impressionism.  Maillol passed the Impressionism without stopping.

Maillol has seen many Manet exhibitions.  At first he loved Manet, but later hated.  (…)  Maillol said, “It’s just a painting.  To acquire a Gauguin’s Tahiti painting, I will make any sacrifice.  I will be happy to sell my last underwear.  To get a Manet, I would not sell even my old shoes.”  (Kessler 1961, p.728)

“On Manet, Renoir once said, ‘He is a great painter, but he never knew how to do a woman.’  And this is true.  His tableaux are very good, but his women are failures.  He succeeded in some faces drawn very quickly in pastel, but, in his paintings, the women are horrible.  On the Olympia, people say it is a masterpiece. Myself, I don’t appreciate it at all.  It is a horrible nude, isn’t it?  I never find it good.” (Frère 1956, p.178)

   Olympia, a prostitute representing Manet’s women, did not please Maillol.  Cabanel’s Venus, idealized and smoothened to look most sexy in the eyes of men, could not satisfy Maillol, either.  The task to form a female figure that embodies a living self was still left entirely to Maillol.

Chapter 3

EARLY PAINTINGS

           There is a room in the Maillol Museum in Paris where the tableaux Maillol painted around 1890 are gathered.  Maillol was in his late twenties when he painted these tableaux.  Walking into the room, one would feel as if the room were filled with the light and the breeze of the first day of the summer.  Girls and young women are looking into their inner self.  The world is silent.  The time is stopped.  We are facing the eternal now. 

           Creative activities of Maillol recorded a sudden surge in 1889: “A crown of flowers” (1889, previously at the Josefowitz collection), “Portrait of Jeanne Faraill” (1889-1890, private collection), “Miss Faraill wearing a hat” (1890, Maillol Museum), “A crowned child” (same), “Head of a woman” (same), “Two young girls” (same), “Young girl wearing a black hat” (same), “Profile of a woman” (1890, Hyachinthe Rigaud Museum), “Bust of a country girl” (1891, Reims Museum).

           This explosion was ignited by the encounter with works of Gauguin at the “Impressionist synthetist painters’ exhibition” at the Café Volpini in May 1889. 

 

“Gauguin’s painting was a revelation to me.  L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, instead of leading me to the light, had led me away from it.  When I looked at Gauguin’s pictures of Pont-Aven, I felt inspired by the same spirit which had prompted his work.” (Rewald 1939, p.10)

“It was Gauguin and Maurice Denis who, after I left the school, opened my eyes.  Thanks to them, I succeeded to clear the first hurdle.” (Cladel 1937, p.33)

“My advice to the beginners has always been, ‘Start by copying masters.’  In the period when I was at a loss, one day I said to myself, ‘I shall do a Gauguin.’  And I worked in Gauguin’s way.  This gave me an idea, you know.  This made me get out of mumbling.  It is necessary to have an aim.  Then, one would forget it and start doing something else on one’s own.  But an idea on what is the art remained with me.”  (Frère 1956, p.221)

The year before, 1888, was the year Gauguin saw Van Gogh cutting an ear, the year the denial of Impressionism suddenly emerged in Gauguin’s tableaux.  Gauguin had just met Gauguin himself.  In his later letter, he recalled, “At that time, I was trying to try everything and liberate a new generation.” (Gauguin 1946, p.294-295)  Gauguin intended to liberate a new generation, and Maillol did felt he was liberated by Gauguin.

The tableaux of Maillol at this period have some common elements with those of Gauguin:  luminous colours, flat and decorative composition, etc.  However, while tableaux of Gauguin look embedded with a complex philosophy, those by Maillol look utterly lyrical.  What one would sense behind Gauguin’s tableau is a man of middle age with a difficult and troublesome ego, while stood behind Maillol’s tableau is a child playing by himself on seashore.  Later, Gauguin said to Maillol, “You have a heart of gold.” (Rewald 1939, p.11)  Octave Mirbeau said of Maillol “He has a clear soul, clear as the soul of a person who has never been troubled by bad desires.” (Mirbeau 1921, p.24)   Maillol’s tableaux show us what these words meant.

“At that period I painted several female heads.  They were good but most of them were lost.  I do not know where they are now.  Among them, a painting of a young woman with a flower crown on her head was, if I am not mistaken, good.” (Kessler 1961, p.562)

Maillol’s interest moved to tapestries around 1892 (around the age of 30), and in his paintings he started to focus mainly on designs for tapestries.  Nevertheless, he painted two tableaux with earlier lyric style after this change: “A seated woman with a parasol” (Maillol Museum) in 1895 (at the age of 33) and “A woman with a parasol” (Orsay Museum) in 1900 (at the age of 38).  Standing in front of them, one would feel the solitude of a young woman staying amid the silence in the afternoon of a clear sunny day.  These works, which mark the end of the period of his early paintings, already contain something common to the solitude of La Méditerranée. 

Gauguin left France in April 1891 for his first stay in Tahiti.  Thanks to the introduction by a painter Daniel de Monfreid, Maillol could meet him before the departure.  Gauguin was at the age of forty-five, and Maillol thirty-one.  Maillol was a dedicated follower of Gauguin, believing “What I was doing would be satisfactory if Gauguin were to approve of it.”(Rewald 1939, p.10)  Gauguin, however, seems to have kept certain distance to Maillol.

When Maillol was hospitalised, Gauguin urged all of their common friends to visit Maillol, but he himself did not go.  Nevertheless, Maillol chose Gauguin as the first person to visit after he had left the hospital.  Gauguin in his second stay in Tahiti often wrote to Daniel de Monfreid referring to Maillol: “You have not written on Maillol recently.  Is he still producing masterpieces of tapestries?” (May 1899)  “It is deplorable that poor Maillol is suffering from his extreme poverty.  He is an artist, a man of gold heart.” (August 1899)  “I am deeply pleased with the success of the first one man show of Maillol, who is an excellent artist.” (October 1902)  Gauguin often concluded his letters by saying “Please give my best regard to Maillol.”  However, it does not seem that Gauguin wrote to Maillol himself.

Maillol once said on Gauguin, “He was as gentle as a lamb, speaking very little.” (Rewald 1975, p.10)　　

This remark is in sharp contrast with what van Gogh told in his letter to his brother.  “The arguments between us two are like terrible electricity.  Sometimes we get out of our arguments with exhausted minds, as exhausted as batteries which discharged all their electricity.”

           Why did Gauguin maintain certain distance to Maillol?  It might have been because the two were different in age and personality.  It might have been because Gauguin left for Tahiti soon after they had come to know each other.  One might also speculate that Gauguin had some hesitation due to his bitter experience in the past.

“Some of my friends, who were very intimate with me and often had discussion with me, somehow happened to go insane.  It was the case with Gogh brothers. People, with or without malign intention, blamed me for this.  What childish blame.  True, some may exert certain influence on others.  Driving someone insane, however, is another matter.”

           Just a while before Gauguin met Maillol, Vincent van Gogh had committed suicide and his brother Theo van Gogh had died in a mental hospital.  Strindberg was also in an abnormal mental condition.  In one of his plays, Strindberg narrated a story of a professor driving a painter mad by intensive discussions, but what Strindberg was afraid of might have been the case of a professor driven mad by a painter. 　　         

Chapter 4

Maillol in his Thirties

           In his thirties, Maillol’s focus was shifted from painting.  He produced his works in tapestry and ceramics mostly in his thirties.  He also started sculpture and woodprints.

                      1) Why shifted from painting

           His zeal on painting seems to have waned around 1900, when he was thirty-eight.  Maillol never ceased to paint, but full-blown activities was resumed only in his last years, around 1938, at the age of seventy-six.  Why was his attention shifted from painting?

“I was quite alone.  I knew nobody.  If this had not been the case, probably I would have continued painting.  I had not come to do what I wanted to do in painting, and I had nobody who gives advice to me.” (Kessler 1961, p.562)   

In fact, however, Maillol did meet many painters, those of Nabis (a group of painters formed in 1892 by the followers of Gauguin) and others:

l       1882 or 1883 (Maillol at the age of 20 or 21) Maillol met Daniel de Monfreid.

l       1890 (28)     met Josef Rippl-Rónai

l       1891 (29)     introduced to Gauguin

l       1892 (30)     met Maurice Denis

l       1894 (32)     met Edouard Vuillard

l       1895 (33)     met Pierre Bonnard

l       1899 (37)     visited by Picasso

l       1900 (38)     met Matisse

l       1907 (45)     sculpted a bust of Renoir

His friendship with Denis, Vuillard, Bonnard and Matisse lasted through the life.

Gauguin liberated Maillol from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  Gauguin’s spirit even demanded liberation from imitating Gauguin.

In the wilderness where the flood wiped out all the solid structures of academicism, Maillol had to search for what he wanted to do for himself.  Maillol in his thirties tried various forms of expression simultaneously: drawing, painting, woodprint, zincography, tapestry, ceramics, woodcarving, terracotta, plaster, bronze, etc.  During the decade when he repeated enormous trials and errors, he did not meet with what he wanted to do in painting.  Maillol says, “I was quite alone.  I knew nobody,” but in order to meet what one wants to do, maybe one need to walk through all by oneself.   

In his thirties, Maillol tried the motif of a woman seated by the shore in drawing, painting, woodprint, tapestry, and plaster relief.  Though each has its own charm, the beauty of the drawing was best reincarnated in the plaster relief.  When the relief stood up into the three dimensions, La Meditérranée was born.

The motif of a washerwoman was also tried in zincography, painting, and bronze.  The beauty of the lines in the zincography is fully alive in the bronze, which attains even better harmony and rhythm.  One cannot find in the painting, however, the simplicity and clarity of the zincography.

Even after the germination, a long period of trials and errors, patience and perseverance was needed before what Maillol had in him started to bloom. 

2) Tapestry

Maillol started to study tapestry in 1892, when he was thirty.  Maillol was attracted by “Lady with an unicorn” tapestry at the Cluny museum.  He once found a Spanish tapestry from the Renaissance period in an exhibition and felt that it was greater and more beautiful than a Velasquez.  Tapestry was what Gauguin had experimented as well.

In 1893, at the age of thirty-one, Maillol opened a tapestry workshop in his aunt’s house in Banyuls, and started to employ five or six girls of the village.  Though chemical colourings were already common, Maillol coloured the tapestries only by plants gathered in the region.  In 1894, at the age of thirty-two, he exhibited his works at a salon in Brussels and appraised by Gauguin, who commented, “One cannot over-praise the tapestries Maillol exhibited.”  The next year he exhibited at the Salon de la National and

“As I went out, I met Gauguin in the street, and he told me that he had looked for me everywhere and that my work was finest in the whole exhibition; he also invited me to have a drink.” (Rewald 1939, p.11)     

           In 1897, when he was thirty-five, a Romanian aristocrat in Paris, Princess Hélène Bibesco (the mother of Antoine Bibesco, who was the model for Saint-Loup in Proust’s “In search of the time lost”) commissioned a tapestry to Maillol.  He exhibited the commissioned work at a salon and attracted  public attention.  It is said that this was the first occasion for Maillol to attract public attention in his life.

           Intensive detailed work, however, damaged Maillol’s eyes and he had been almost blind for six months around 1900, when he was thirty-eight.  He had to abandon tapestry.

           Many of the tapestries by Maillol depict court-life of ladies.  Their compositions are rather complicated, though his works in other genres are characterized by simplicity.  Among the various forms of expressions he experimented, only tapestry in his thirties and paintings in his last years lack the serenity typical to Maillol.  Some tapestry works provided motifs for later sculptures, but it may indicate that in tapestry Maillol did not find the definitive expression for the motifs.

           Maillol declares, however, that tapestry was an important step for him:

           “I did not find my expression in painting.  I found it in tapestry.” (Cladel 1937, p.50)

           “It was by tapestry that I started to do composition.” (ibid)

Indeed, compared to paintings done before the period of tapestry, Maillol’s sculptures and woodprints, which came after the period, seem to be with much more solid composition.

3) Ceramics

In the Maillol museum in Paris, one sees several ceramics Maillol created in this period.  They are all really charming.  A combination of a vase with a tap and a basin has an attractive form, and  patterns and a female figure painted blue on the white base is also charming.  One would also see a big panel depicting virgin and child visited by a pair of angels.  These works are characterised by a happy marriage of the excellence in three-dimensional moulding, which in later years unfold fully in his sculptures, and the decorative charm, which in later years manifest itself in his woodprints.  Maillol’s ceramics are more streamlined than his tapestries, but are with stronger primitive power.  Just a look of it would make one sense the joy of craftworks.

His ceramics are with strong Spanish fragrance.

“Already a hundred years ago, Spanish potters achieved marvellous effects by simple methods.  Fayel has a big collection of such Spanish pottery.  Richness of their ideas and effects is unbelievable.” (Kessler 1961, p.453)

One would feel Maillol’s Catalonian origin in his ceramics.

4) Marriage

Tapestry worked as a matchmaker.  Angérique and Clotilde, daughters of Narcisse family, a baker, worked for Maillol at his tapestry workshop in Banyuls.  Maillol and Clotilde fell in love.  Maillol was at the age of thirty-two and Clotilde twenty-one. 

Clotilde accompanied Maillol wandering Banyuls mountains in search of plants for dyeing. 

“I lived my most beautiful hours; the whole mountain saw my wife in nude.  She was beautiful.” (Vierny 1996c, p.84)

“The period of tapestry was the happiest in my life.” (Cladel 1937, p.56)

The next year, Maillol went back to Paris with Clotilde and tried to make their living by teaching drawing.  Economic difficulties were even greater than when he was single.

“She posed for me in the cold.  In the period of great poverty, she endured hunger with me without complaining.  This is unforgettable.” (Vierny 1996c, p.84)   

Maillol and Clotilde, who could not feed themselves, visited their friend and a painter Daniel de Monfreid almost everyday and dined at his house.

The diary of de Monfreid (cited in Puig 1965, p.18) relates as follows:

“5 May 1897.  I came home to find Maillol trying to fire several pieces of pottery in my stove but they had already been cracked.  His wife arrived around half past eleven to have lunch with us, as they are without money.  The Maillols arrived again at half past seven for dinner.  Remaining in our cash box: zero franc and zero centime.”

“8 May.  I visited Maillol.  I invited him and his wife for lunch, as they are without penny.”

“11 May.  In the morning Maillol came to fire ceramics.  I went for Mrs. Maillol at their house on the Saint-Jacques Street.”

“12 May.  Maillol came at half past eight to cast a small statuette and to fire clay.  Mrs. Maillol came around half past six to join her husband, who came back to finish his casting, and they had dinner.”

“15 May.  The Maillols came to lunch.  As they have nothing to eat, we feed them.”

“17 May.  The Maillols had lunch.”

“18 May.  The Maillols came to have lunch and told us that they would be able to leave for their country thanks to a statuette they had sold.”

Maillol had to fire his ceramics at Monfreid’s as he could not do so in his own house.  Marc Lafargue recalls as follows:

“Maillol heated his oven.  The glaze he wanted to have on his ceramic fountain needed even more heat, but then his neighbors started to shout, “The fire in the attic!”  Maillol heated the oven even more, climbed up to the attic with buckets to stop the fire, descended to heat the oven again, and then turned to the fire.” (Camo 1950, p.34) 

Maillol and Clotilde married in July 1896, when Maillol was at the age of thirty-four and Clotilde twenty two.  In October, Lucian, who was to be Maillol’s only child, was born.  Pictures of the Maillol family taken by Monfreid in this period show young, handsome and sturdy Clotilde.

Works titled explicitly as “Portrait of Madame Maillol” are only one painting and one terracotta bust.  The encounter with Clotilde, however, is clearly marked in Maillol’s works: before, Maillol depicted only clothed women with pre-adolescence bodies; after, naked women with fully mature, rich bodies. 

“Do you remember, when he came to the house in Marly with you, d’Annunzio (an Italian poet) said that my sculpture is very good, but that legs of my women were too short.  This remark demonstrated that d’Annunzio understood nothing about sculpture.  Whether long legs or short legs, one can make, but one should start from there, one should find harmony.  I married a short woman, I always had short legs in front of my eyes; that’s why I try to find harmony for short legs.” (Kessler 1961, p.421)

“Models, Models, but why should I need a model?  If I need to know something, I will go to the kitchen and get my wife.  I lift her shirt and find marble.” (The diary of Andre Gide, 25 December 1905)

         The decade long quest starting from the 1896 drawing of a naked woman sitting on the beach, via painting, woodprint, tapestry, and plaster relief of the same motif, and through various stages of the plaster sculpture of a seated woman, to the final version of La Mediterranee in 1905, is said to have its origin in the memory of a day on the Banyuls beach when Maillol was struck by the figure of Clotilde.

“You see, this path, which traverses the ravine, leads to a small beach surrounded by rocks.  I took my wife there when we were young.  As she never got ready to go there, in steasd of taking the route early in the morning, we had to walk under the heat of the sun.  She complained all during the way: Oh, my legs!  Oh, I scratched myself!  Oh, how hot!  Oh, my feet ache!  But once we arrived there, she was very satisfied.  Me, I cooked, and she stripped herself off and bathed in the sea.  The buttocks, yellow like ivory, in the blue water, under the sun, it was magnificent.” (Frère 1956, p.70)  

Maillol’s marriage did not please Gauguin, who just had started his second and last stay in Tahiti in November 1895.  Gauguin was in poverty.  His skin was covered by eczema.  He had pain in his foot which had been broken being kicked by a sailor’s clogs before and used morphine to forget the pain.  Daniel de Monfreid informed him about the marriage by a letter, and Gauguin responded as follows:

“How much trouble one makes for oneself through marriage, this stupid institution.  And I see that Maillol is about to do so; I wish him good luck but I am afraid for him, it would be a pity as he is a good soul and an artist.” (Rewald 1939, p.11)   

           Gauguin picked up from his portfolio a watercolor titled “Human Misery” which he painted seven years before and sent it to Maillol as a gift to celebrate the marriage.  Gauguin drew horns, which are said to bud on the head of a cuckold, on the paper wrapping the watercolor.

           Naturally the gift did not please Maillol then.  But in his later years, Maillol defended Gauguin strongly.

“If you cannot abandon your job and all the other things, you do not become an artist.  Your parents?  It’s nothing to do with your parents.  What they did is just putting you in this world.  You owe nothing to them.  What you should lead is your own life, not theirs.  If you would like to be an artist, never be stopped by anything.  If necessary, kill your father and your mother.  If you do not have colors, steal them.  Gauguin abandoned his wife and children, and he did it all right.  Without doing so, he would not have become Gauguin!  Mrs. Gauguin, would that matter?  Who would worry about Mrs. Gauguin now?  As to Gauguin, it is the glory of France.”  (Frere 1956, p.241)

On the other hand, some of his words indicate his distaste for the worship of fine arts.

“Do you ask me if my work goes well?  I just amuse myself.  Nothing is eternal.  How crazy are those who believe in heroes.  All what I do, whether it is tapestry, ceramics, or woodcuts, I do as it pleases me. For me, the art is not that serious or terribly important as it is for the members of the Academy.  Even if one fails in a work, one does not need to kill oneself.  One just makes another.  (Being asked about Rodin,)  Me?  Did I sacrifice all my life?  Sacrifice?  And for whom?  For what?  Then you are supposing that I wanted to do something other than sculpture?  No.”  (Cladel 1937, p.134)     

           Maybe the above two statements do not contradict with each other.  Maillol did only what he wanted to do.  Doing only what one wants to do is not compatible with the institution called marriage.  Maillol had his wife pause in the cold, and was absorbed in his work lefting his wife in hunger.  Later, he needed women other than his wife as his models.  Even if much trouble were to be made out of the marriage as predicted by Gauguin, one should say that such was the outcome of Maillol’s own choice.

           Two years after the letter, Gauguin painted “Where we are from, what we are, where we will go”, and then swallowed arsenicals up in a mountain to kill himself, without success.  Four years later, Gauguin asked Daniel de Montfreid about Maillol, learned from de Monfreid of Maillol’s poverty, and lamented about that in his response.  Seven years later, Gauguin expressed in a letter to de Monfreid  his pleasure to learn that Maillol’s first one-man-show had been a success.  Half a year later, one day in May, Gauguin had a heart attack, when he took large amount of morphine in spite of his already frail health.  “The god of desire of night”, who is in charge of death in Tahiti, visited Gauguin’s plain bed in his hut roofed by palm leaves.  It was two years before Gide and others applauded Maillol’s La Mediterranee.   

           5) Early sculptures  

      

“There are artists who start very late.  I was more than forty years old when I took up sculpture.” (Cladel 1937, p.59)

How did you come to take up sculpture?

“I don’t know.  I tried my hand at it one day and enjoyed it.  I continued because I still enjoyed it.  And when the day came on which I had to give up my tapestry work, I continued with sculpture because I had time to spare and I could not sit with idle hands.” (Rewald 1939, p. 12)  

Your early wooden statuettes reminded me of statues of Buddha Japanese people sculpted.

“When I made my first wooden statuette, I took a tree-trunk and began to carve it in an attempt to express my impression of feminine grace.  I lost sight of that statuette; and thirty years later, when I came across a photograph of it, I took it to be a piece of Chinese sculpture, for it seemed to belong to another period.  I had had no idea beyond the wish to carve a pretty shape out of the wood.  That gave me the clue to the methods used by the ancients.”  (Cladel 1937, p. 128 as translated in Rewald 1939, p. 12)    

So you were not directly influenced by the orient?

“I studied ancient Indian sculpture in depth.  On the occasion of the universal exposition in 1900, a whole Indian temple was reproduced in plaster.  When the temple was broken up after the exposition, I purchased some relief pieces and put them in my studio.  Those oriental sculptures, however, do not suit for direct imitation, though Gauguin did such imitation.  One can learn only the totality from them.”  (Kessler 1961, p.454)

Gauguin also made many wooden sculptures.

“Gauguin impressed me strongly, but only in painting, not in sculpture.  Some people maintain that my sculpture is under the influence of Gauguin, but it’s false.”  (Cladel 1937, p.39)  

Jules Romains says that you tried to be primitive intentionally in order to be distinct from the sculpture of Rodin.

“In my early years, I did not care about Rodin at all.  As to what is called the primitiveness of my sculpture, I am not trying to make my work primitive.  I just try to make my work as perfect as I can.”  (Kessler 1961, p.651)
              You came to sculpt like ancient people did just because you had no idea beyond the wish to carve a pretty shape out of the wood.  Your primitiveness is not the result of the effort to imitate existing primitive arts; it is more direct and original primitiveness.

“I work as if nothing had existed, as if I had learned nothing.  I am the first man who make sculpture.”  (Cladel 1937, p.130)

Maillol entered the sculpture division of the Decorative Art School in his second year in Paris.  He had a period when he almost always stayed at the studio of Bourdelle.  Early in his thirties, Maillol produced several wooden relieves such as “Woman with Mandolin” (Maillol Museum), “Seated Girl Meditating”, (Maillol Museum), and “Dancer” (Orsay Museum).  A statuette in bronze “Washerwoman” in 1896 coordinates complex lines and forms to create a pleasant rhythm.  Decorativeness is the foremost characteristics of the works in this period; some even suppose the influence of the Art Nouveau.  

It was in 1898, at the age of 36, that purity and simplicity like old Buddhist statues suddenly emerged.  Maillol’s recollection cited above indicates that this happened unexpectedly even to the artist himself.  Maillol also relates as follows:

“Carving is a source of joy to the artist, but it is also one of difficulty and disappointment.  The sculptor takes a block and obtains from it at first a head or a figure, based on a rough sketch which suffices as a guide.  This is the way I started when carving wooden statuettes.  To attack the raw material, gradually to extract a shape out of it following one’s own desire, or, sometimes, the inspiration of the material itself:  this gives the sculptor great joy.  In carving, material and thought are linked by the hand alone; thus the raw material is imbued with a warmth of feeling directly drawn from the artist’s nature.” (Rewald 1939, p.12)

Maillol, who encountered with his own nature in a small block of wood, started to try many female nudes with the sizes of 60 cm when standing and 20 cm when seated.  Between 1898 and 1900, several versions of “Standing Bather” were created, in wood, bronze, and terra cotta, and all of them have their own archaic charm, distinct from the great life size works in later years.  Statuettes in bronze made in 1900, such as “Seated girl”, “Woman covering her Breast”, and “Leda” are richer and more expressive; one would feel that all of the characteristics which would blossom afterwards were already there.  

In June 1902, Maillol had his first one-man-show at the gallery of Vollard.  Thirty-three pieces of work, including sculpture, ceramics, tapestries and furniture, were exhibited.  Octave Mirbeau, a renowned writer who was at the age of 56, found Maillol at the exhibition and purchased “Leda”.  Mirbeau showed it to Rodin, and wrote about Rodin’s reaction in his letter to Maillol:

“He picked up your Leda, just as I had done, and looked at it intently, examining it from every angle, turning it round in every direction.  ‘It is most beautiful’; he said, ‘what an artist!’  He looked at it again, and went on: ‘Do you know why it is so beautiful and why one can spend hours looking at it?  It is because it makes no attempt to arouse curiosity’.  And there was a look of melancholy in his eyes.  ‘I do not know, I swear I do not know of any modern piece of sculpture that is of such an absolute beauty, and absolute purity, so evidently a masterpiece.’” (Rewald 1939, p.13)

Mirbeau cites Rodin’s words in another place as follows:

“What is admirable in Maillol, or, I would say, eternal, it is the purity, clarity, transparency of his skills and thoughts; that is, none of his works, so far as I have seen, attracts viewers’ curiosity.  Nothing, never.”  (Mirbeau 1921, p.29-30)

Rodin seems to have noticed immediately that things had remained intact in Maillol from those days he spent alone on the seashore of Banyuls forty years ago.