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Lot Essay
Olivier Lorquin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In 1930, Aristide Maillol—then at the peak of his fame—received a commission from the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the birthplace of Claude Debussy, for a monument to honor the great modern composer, who died in 1918. Although Maillol’s own musical tastes ran the gamut from Bach and Mozart to contemporary jazz and the traditional sardanas of his native region, he had never heard any of Debussy’s work. Nevertheless, he welcomed the opportunity, for the first and only time in his career, to treat the subject of music, which paralleled his own search for artistic harmony. He chose to commemorate Debussy with the figure of a crouching woman, her head bowed in quiet contemplation, her arms swinging languidly as though to the rhythm of a gentle melody. One leg is folded under the thigh while the other is raised in a kneeling position as though the figure were preparing to stand, imbuing the serenely self-contained triangular pose with a sense of incipient dynamism.
“The monument to Debussy combines harmonious forms with an almost mathematically rigorous composition,” Bertrand Lorquin has written. “Like virtually all of his sculpture, it is built on a counterpoint of silence and breath, space and solid volumes; its rhythms might be those of a Bach composition, and like all music it attempts to give form to thought” (quoted in op. cit., London, 1995, p. 96).
The commission from Saint-Germain-en-Laye called for Maillol to produce a figure in white marble, which was completed by July 1933 and dedicated in the garden of the municipal library. The base of this sculpture was carved to resemble a book of sheet music, on which were inscribed the first few measures of Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune, an overtly didactic touch unusual in Maillol’s work. In the course of finishing the commission, Maillol decided to model a second version of the sculpture that eliminates this specific reference to Debussy, focusing entirely on the architecture of the female body. This figure was cast in a bronze edition of six, including the present example, plus two artist’s proofs; the unnumbered casts were both purchased in 1932 by major American collectors, Stephen C. Clark and A. Conger Goodyear, and are now in the collections of the Toledo Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York.
Expressing the beauty of the female form in highly distilled, almost abstract terms, Hommage à Debussy reflects Maillol’s ongoing effort to fuse the iconographic traditions of antiquity with the radical formal purity of the modernist project. The figure’s pose at first calls to mind Hellenistic Greek statues of the Crouching Aphrodite, which depict the nude goddess surprised at her bath. Maillol, however, eschewed the scrupulous naturalism and complex, twisting posture of that prototype, and instead harked back to the stylizations and simplifications of the earlier Severe Style. Two kneeling charioteers from the east pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, which Maillol visited during his transformative trip to Greece in 1908, may have provided the inspiration for the pose of the present figure, as well as for the pared-down, purified rhythms of the body.
“I prefer the primitive art of Olympus to that of the Parthenon,” Maillol confirmed. “It is an art of synthesis, a higher art than ours today, which seeks to represent human flesh. If I had lived in the sixth century [sic], I should have found happiness in working with those men” (quoted in J. Rewald, Maillol, London, 1939, p. 17).
In 1930, Aristide Maillol—then at the peak of his fame—received a commission from the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the birthplace of Claude Debussy, for a monument to honor the great modern composer, who died in 1918. Although Maillol’s own musical tastes ran the gamut from Bach and Mozart to contemporary jazz and the traditional sardanas of his native region, he had never heard any of Debussy’s work. Nevertheless, he welcomed the opportunity, for the first and only time in his career, to treat the subject of music, which paralleled his own search for artistic harmony. He chose to commemorate Debussy with the figure of a crouching woman, her head bowed in quiet contemplation, her arms swinging languidly as though to the rhythm of a gentle melody. One leg is folded under the thigh while the other is raised in a kneeling position as though the figure were preparing to stand, imbuing the serenely self-contained triangular pose with a sense of incipient dynamism.
“The monument to Debussy combines harmonious forms with an almost mathematically rigorous composition,” Bertrand Lorquin has written. “Like virtually all of his sculpture, it is built on a counterpoint of silence and breath, space and solid volumes; its rhythms might be those of a Bach composition, and like all music it attempts to give form to thought” (quoted in op. cit., London, 1995, p. 96).
The commission from Saint-Germain-en-Laye called for Maillol to produce a figure in white marble, which was completed by July 1933 and dedicated in the garden of the municipal library. The base of this sculpture was carved to resemble a book of sheet music, on which were inscribed the first few measures of Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune, an overtly didactic touch unusual in Maillol’s work. In the course of finishing the commission, Maillol decided to model a second version of the sculpture that eliminates this specific reference to Debussy, focusing entirely on the architecture of the female body. This figure was cast in a bronze edition of six, including the present example, plus two artist’s proofs; the unnumbered casts were both purchased in 1932 by major American collectors, Stephen C. Clark and A. Conger Goodyear, and are now in the collections of the Toledo Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York.
Expressing the beauty of the female form in highly distilled, almost abstract terms, Hommage à Debussy reflects Maillol’s ongoing effort to fuse the iconographic traditions of antiquity with the radical formal purity of the modernist project. The figure’s pose at first calls to mind Hellenistic Greek statues of the Crouching Aphrodite, which depict the nude goddess surprised at her bath. Maillol, however, eschewed the scrupulous naturalism and complex, twisting posture of that prototype, and instead harked back to the stylizations and simplifications of the earlier Severe Style. Two kneeling charioteers from the east pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, which Maillol visited during his transformative trip to Greece in 1908, may have provided the inspiration for the pose of the present figure, as well as for the pared-down, purified rhythms of the body.
“I prefer the primitive art of Olympus to that of the Parthenon,” Maillol confirmed. “It is an art of synthesis, a higher art than ours today, which seeks to represent human flesh. If I had lived in the sixth century [sic], I should have found happiness in working with those men” (quoted in J. Rewald, Maillol, London, 1939, p. 17).