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.