MAILLOL, ARISTIDE ), French sculptor, was born at Banyuls sur Mer, Rousillon. After studying at Perpignan he entered the studio of Cabanel in Paris, at the age of 2 1 , as a student of painting. He belonged to a group of young artists who, inspired by Gauguin, abandoned impressionism for a more dec orative form of art. In order to realize his aspirations, he worked on tapestry design ; he built majolica vases and experimented with glazes; he modelled wall fountains with figures in relief, and finally tried his hand very successfully at small figures in clay.
He then began his great statues in stone and bronze, which estab lished his reputation as the greatest contemporary French sculptor.
He found in the early 5th century art of Greece the confirmation of his artistic aspirations. The sense of proportion and feeling for unity, the harmony of the masses which Greek art displays, be came the guiding principles on which he modelled his figures. In 1909 he visited Greece in company of Count Kessler, his enthusias tic admirer and friend, for whose Cranach Press he executed a series of wood engravings to illustrate the Eclogues of Virgil.
Maillol is a member of the Salon d'Automne and a regular ex hibitor at the Salon des Independants. He works in close contact with nature in his native fishing village on the shores of the Medi terranean; and spends some months of the year at Marly, near Paris.
Among his monumental works are the standing figures of Flora (1911) and Pomona (1912) in the Morrozoff collection at Winter thur; the two "Crouching Women" of Osthaus, in Hagen, and of Count Kessler's collection, Berlin; the war monuments at Elne, Ceret and Port Vendres, the reclining goddess of "Fame" for the monument to Cezanne, on which he worked during ten years, and which he completed in 1925. His little terra-cotta statuettes are among his most attractive work.
See Octave Mirbeau, Aristide Maillol (1922) ; Marc Lafargue, Aristide Maillol (1925) .