Saturday, August 8, 2009

Love me that is all. Aristide Maillol

If I were asked about the ideal woman and an artist who could create such ideal in art I would call Aristide Maillol as one of those artists who did create the divine one. Woman of Aristide Maillol is a queen, idol, dream or whatever you want, this is the woman you will never confuse with a man, the woman which charms you with all her femininity that make you to lose not only your mind and your feeling of reality but yourself at all. One of the most famouse and my most loved sculpure by Aristide Maillol, I comsider as a hymn of love, is "The River"



Love me like a river does
Cross the sea
Love me like a river does
Endlessly
Love me like a river does
Baby don’t rush you’re no waterfall
Love me that is all
Love me like a roaring sea
Swirls about
Love me like a roaring sea
Wash me out
Love me like a roaring sea
Baby don’t rush you’re no waterfall
Love me that is all
Love me like the earth itself
Spins around
Love me like the earth itself
Sky above below the ground
Love me like the earth itself
Baby don’t rush you’re no waterfall
Love me that is all




Of all the greats in modern sculpture, e.g., Rodin, Giacometti, Picasso, Brancusi, Moore, Manship, there is one figure whose subtle and heroic work left a profound mark on perhaps all sculptors of the early 20th Century. Aristide Maillol is not a household name by any means, yet his work can be viewed in practically every great art museum in the world. In the US, one can view the Frenchman’s art on the sculpture terraces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and at almost every important art destination in between.



Deep within the corners of my mind
I keep a memory of your faces
And I only pull it out when I long for your embrace

Deep within the corners of my mind
I'm haunted by your smile
As it promises me joys like a journey to a tropic isle
It's not hard to see what you do to me
It's like a page right out of fist time wave
Though I try to fight it all the word you write
Leave me standing in the starry robe in some tradjec lovers place

But deep within the corners of my mind
I'm praying secretly that eventually in time
There'll be a place for you and me

That eventually in time
There'll be a place for you and me

There'll be a place for you and me

Deep within the corners of my mind


Beginning his art career at the end of the 19th Century, Maillol determined to join the ranks of the avant garde, first as a decorative artist studying under Alexandre Cabanel (whose voluptuous Birth of Venus hangs famously in the Met in New York), then as a sculptor in the circle of artists who were to contribute to a new chapter in Art History. He was a member of the Nabis (the Hebrew word for “prophet”) artists, who were followers of Gauguin and whose names included Bonnard, Denis, and Vuillard. Maillol participated in the Nabis aesthetic, which strove for pure form and moved away from symbolism and verism. Maillol’s greatest contribution during this period was his single-handed revival of the lost art of tapestry. As an exclusively decorative art, tapestry showed him the way to form for form’s sake, which would become the anthem of early 20th Century art.


Maillol’s first public commission was the Monument to Cézanne (1912-25). This supreme, flying couch of a woman left its mark on 20th Century giants like Picasso (in his classical period which featured giant-limbed, small-headed goddesses no less) and Moore (whose signature style features a bench-like, classically reposed, abstract woman). Monument would be a mother to Maillol’s late period masterpieces like The Mountain (1937), Air (1938), and The River (1938-43). Although undocumented, the clear influence of the great American Deco sculptor Paul Manship is evident in these late works, which each bear characteristics of Manship’s most public of masterpieces: Prometheus in Rockefeller Plaza. Of these, The River is an enigma that will forever leave the book open on Maillol. A reclined, yet animated goddess of a woman is frozen in a kind of mysterious half-exstacy half-torment. At once a Medusa and a languid beauty, this work was based on the idea of a fallen stabbing victim to symbolize the abolition of war. In the end, these polar initiatives become a sublime commingling in art the likes of which the world had not seen since the ancient Laocoon Group of Greece.


all lyrics by Melody Gardot