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Lot Essay
Olivier Lorquin has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Having early understood that l’éternel féminin would constitute the thematic foundation of his art, Aristide Maillol included among his earliest mature works in sculpture a personal and original representation of Eve, the biblical first woman and mother of all humankind. Overwork on his Nabi-inspired, decorative tapestry projects had led in 1898 to an eye inflammation that nearly cost him his sight. While recovering, Maillol—then in his late thirties—turned to the small, terra-cotta figurines he had occasionally produced since 1895 and decided to commit himself to sculpture as his primary means of expression. From a relief of the mythical Three Graces adorning a ceramic water fountain he had recently completed, Maillol in 1899 transformed the central figure into his freestanding Eve. The sculptor imparted to her lithe and graceful lines the radical purity and simplicity of his classical, Mediterranean aesthetic.
The iconography traditionally accorded Eve, stemming from the Book of Genesis and subsequent Western literature, is also in Maillol’s conception given a fresh and affirming makeover; the artist dispenses with all of it, save the fruit alone, no longer—he seems to proclaim—expressly forbidden or tainted with those fateful implications and consequences so long ascribed to it. Turning to one side, Eve innocently offers in her hand a small apple to her companion. She is a pristine Eve for the new century, a simple, local peasant girl, but with ancestral roots reaching back to a golden age in pagan lore, amicably sharing nature’s bounty with another—and us, her most distant progeny.
The work of Paul Gauguin was a major influence on Maillol during the 1890s. Both men admired the serene and static art of the Egyptians, and were drawn as well to the Khmer sculpture they had seen in the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris. The table-top scale and informal postures that characterise Maillol’s early sculptures stem from his appreciation of the late fourth century BCE figurines that were discovered during grave excavations in the Boeotian town of Tanagra during the late 1860s. The Musée du Louvre acquired one hundred of the so-called Tanagras in 1872, which quickly became popular among viewers.
Maillol’s style of balance, harmony, and quiet restraint was novel, even controversial. His sculptures proposed an original, fundamental alternative to the dramatic, expressive gestures of which Auguste Rodin was master nonpareil. ‘To celebrate the human body, particularly the feminine body, seems to have been Maillol’s only aim,’ John Rewald averred. ‘He did this in a style from which all grandiloquence is absent, a style almost earthbound and grave. The absence of movement, however, is compensated by a tenderness and charm distinctly his own… He has achieved a peculiar balance between a firmness of forms which appear eternal and a sensitivity of expression—even sensuousness—which seems forever quivering and alive’ (J. Rewald, Maillol, exh. cat., Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York, 1958, pp. 6-7).
Having early understood that l’éternel féminin would constitute the thematic foundation of his art, Aristide Maillol included among his earliest mature works in sculpture a personal and original representation of Eve, the biblical first woman and mother of all humankind. Overwork on his Nabi-inspired, decorative tapestry projects had led in 1898 to an eye inflammation that nearly cost him his sight. While recovering, Maillol—then in his late thirties—turned to the small, terra-cotta figurines he had occasionally produced since 1895 and decided to commit himself to sculpture as his primary means of expression. From a relief of the mythical Three Graces adorning a ceramic water fountain he had recently completed, Maillol in 1899 transformed the central figure into his freestanding Eve. The sculptor imparted to her lithe and graceful lines the radical purity and simplicity of his classical, Mediterranean aesthetic.
The iconography traditionally accorded Eve, stemming from the Book of Genesis and subsequent Western literature, is also in Maillol’s conception given a fresh and affirming makeover; the artist dispenses with all of it, save the fruit alone, no longer—he seems to proclaim—expressly forbidden or tainted with those fateful implications and consequences so long ascribed to it. Turning to one side, Eve innocently offers in her hand a small apple to her companion. She is a pristine Eve for the new century, a simple, local peasant girl, but with ancestral roots reaching back to a golden age in pagan lore, amicably sharing nature’s bounty with another—and us, her most distant progeny.
The work of Paul Gauguin was a major influence on Maillol during the 1890s. Both men admired the serene and static art of the Egyptians, and were drawn as well to the Khmer sculpture they had seen in the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris. The table-top scale and informal postures that characterise Maillol’s early sculptures stem from his appreciation of the late fourth century BCE figurines that were discovered during grave excavations in the Boeotian town of Tanagra during the late 1860s. The Musée du Louvre acquired one hundred of the so-called Tanagras in 1872, which quickly became popular among viewers.
Maillol’s style of balance, harmony, and quiet restraint was novel, even controversial. His sculptures proposed an original, fundamental alternative to the dramatic, expressive gestures of which Auguste Rodin was master nonpareil. ‘To celebrate the human body, particularly the feminine body, seems to have been Maillol’s only aim,’ John Rewald averred. ‘He did this in a style from which all grandiloquence is absent, a style almost earthbound and grave. The absence of movement, however, is compensated by a tenderness and charm distinctly his own… He has achieved a peculiar balance between a firmness of forms which appear eternal and a sensitivity of expression—even sensuousness—which seems forever quivering and alive’ (J. Rewald, Maillol, exh. cat., Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York, 1958, pp. 6-7).