Ref: 091004-165057
For prints please contact chris.smith@twentytrees.co.uk
L'Harmonie, Premier État
Aristide Maillol's L'Harmonie, Premier État, his last sculpture, taking four years, completed in 1944, the year Maillol died.
The Sotheby's Selling Catalogue states:
"What Bertrand Lorquin has described as the 'summing up of forty years of sculpting', L'Harmonie Premier État is arguably Aristide Maillol's most significant, most passionately realised composition, and was the very last sculpture he was to produce (B. Lorquin, Maillol, Geneva, 1994, p. 148). The modelling and obsessive re-working of this life-size figure occupied Maillol for four years from 1940 until his death in 1944. So concerned was he to ensure the ideal embodiment of beauty in this seminal work that Maillol embraced a fundamental change in his sculpting practise; 'I want this work', he stated, 'to be more realist and alive than anything I have done up until now. That is why I am for once working directly from a model, and not just from drawings, as I usually do' (the artist in: B. Lorquin, Op. Cit., p. 148).
This model was the 21 year old Dina Vierny, Maillol's most celebrated muse; her figure, robust and graceful, offered the sculptor a guide for the archetypal rendition of beauty through the use of form and volume alone. As Maillol declared, confident of his objective if not of its fulfilment, 'for Plato, idea and form were identical, and that is how I too understand it. It is a form and a preconceived idea that guides the artist. Followed by gracefulness, power, and all the other qualities which accrue in the course of the work, and as a result the work is not just the realisation of an idea, of an intellectual conception, but is also a work of art' (the artist in: B. Lorquin, Op. Cit., p. 148). Maillol, then, held no pretensions towards naturalism. Rather, his modelling of L'Harmonie Premier État tempered perception with intuition to produce a sculpture of great tenderness and gravity. His want for the work to be his most 'realist' betrays a desire for palpable volume, for a figure that is altogether more corporeal than monumental."
The majority of the photographs in the Scultpture Gallery are of sculptures exhibited at Sotheby's annual selling exhibition at Chatsworth: Beyond Limits. Now in its fifth year it always includes an eclectic mix of old and new.
Some of these photographs are personal favourites of mine. A number are framed and hang at home. Where possible I've included information about the sculpture. For further information please contact me: chris.smith@twentytrees.co.uk.