FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For press inquiries please contact: Janis Gardner Cecil (jcecil@marlboroughgallery.com)
at Marlborough Gallery, tel: 212.541.4900; fax: 212.541.4948.

ARISTIDE MAILLOL
Maillol and America
October 27-November 27, 2004 

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that an important exhibition of work by the French sculptor Aristide Maillol will open on October 27, 2004, and continue for four weeks. This extensive exhibition has been selected and will be installed by Dina Vierny, the founder of the Musée Maillol in Paris. Madame Vierny is also President of the Maillol Foundation. She was herself the sculptor’s last model, muse and subsequently executrix. It provides a unique opportunity to see the full range of his sculptural oeuvre – from the monumental works in bronze or lead to the exquisite, small bronze statues, covering almost 50 years of creativity – alongside working drawings never shown before.

Primarily an art of simplicity and synthesis, Maillol’s sculptures of the female form are celebrated for their honesty, grace and balance of proportion. He has been called “the priest of beauty” and another critic hailed “the beauty and strength of the design, of the skill in the use of particular medium, of texture, tone and patina, of the sense of absolute flesh and bone reality.”
Maillol’s sculpture was first seen in America at the famous 1913 Armory Exhibition, where one of his large terracotta reliefs was installed at the center of the main hall, next to works by Brancusi and Lehmbruck. After an interval brought about by the World War, but even before his first major exhibition in the United States, Vanity Fair had published illustrations of his sculptures and drawings, celebrating him as “the greatest French sculptor who seems likely to take the place of Rodin,” and acknowledging that “he has…come to be recognized by the most authoritative critics as one of the greatest French sculptors.”

Thanks to the adventurous and forward-looking programming of the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the support of its patron and sometime President A. Conger Goodyear, in 1925-27 the first United States exhibition of Maillol’s sculpture and drawings was toured to ten museums and to the leading gallery for sculpture in New York, that of Joseph Brummer. After the showings in Buffalo and New York, the exhibition – underwritten by Conger Goodyear himself – was seen in Boston, Chicago, Toronto, Denver, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, Worcester, MA, and Rochester, NY.

In 1929 the Metropolitan Museum purchased its first work by Maillol, the torso of his first monumental sculpture Action in Chains, 1905, and when the Museum of Modern Art opened in the same year, with Conger Goodyear as its President for the first ten years, Maillol’s life-size bronze, Île de France (torso), 1910, was the first work to enter the permanent collection. In the following year Maillol, jointly with Lehmbruck, was the first sculptor to be given an exhibition at MoMA. Over the next decade, his work was frequently seen in New York galleries – at Brummer’s, Pierre Matisse’s and at Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery – in museums in Boston and Chicago, as well as in several theme exhibitions at MoMA. But it was Buffalo that again organized the most comprehensive exhibition in his memory in 1945, including a survey of all the known works by the sculptor in public and private collections in the United States, in close collaboration with Curt Valentin, who brought a reduced version of the exhibition to New York in the same year.

Born in 1861, and coming to sculpture after a career of no little note as a painter in the French Nabi group (with Bonnard, Roussel and Vuillard) at the age of 35, it was Rodin himself who hailed him as “le genie de la sculpture” after seeing and purchasing his work at Maillol’s first solo exhibition at Vollard’s gallery, Paris, in 1902. Thereafter on more than one occasion, Rodin ceded Maillol’s large sculptures, La Méditerranée, and later, La Nuit (in our forthcoming exhibition), the place of honor at the Salons d’Automne, Paris.

The French State commissioned the first of many public monuments from the artist in 1923 and today one can see numerous examples of his sculpture in the gardens of the Musée du Louvre and the Carrousel, Paris. In addition to the aforementioned and the Musée Maillol, Paris, many of the most important museums in the world count Maillol’s work among the highlights of their collections, including the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany and the Tate Gallery, London, England.

A fully illustrated catalogue, with annotated biography, will be available at the time of the exhibition.

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