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PARTISAN REVIEW
One of the great pleasures of the spring was C
&
MArt's Maillol
exhibi tion, organized in association with Thomas Gibson Fine Art,
London, and the Musee Maillol, Paris, an impeccable selection of the
sculptor's celebrations of the female body, testimonials to the paradoxical
notion that full-throttle sensuality can be presented in the form of disci–
plined classicism. The exhibition's bronzes were all cast in Maillol's
lifetime-except for his last work, of necessity cast posthumously-and
their ravishing patinas offered a crash course in how nuances of color and
reflectiveness can enhance form.
Many of Maillol's most characteristic images from all periods were
present, from standing nymphs, the promise of their ripe flesh and offer–
ing gestures subdued by the erectness and near-symmetry of their poses, to
crouching earth mothers, their sturdy arms and legs folded uneasily under
their robust torsos; a group of intimate, boldly modelled drawings (and a
single, rather lumpen canvas) added images and poses not accounted for by
the bronzes. The range of the sculptures, from hand-sized statuettes to
near-life-sized standing goddesses, underlined Maillol's sensitivity to scale;
even when he repeated a pose in different dimensions, he always subtly
readjusted it. In a seven inch version at C
&
M Arts, the celebrated seated
nude,
La
Nuit
(1902), resting her head and folded arms on her bent knees,
was an emblem of withdrawal and, by extension, sleep, embodied by an
open cube of weighty limbs and torso, all equally hefty and smooth. A
monumental version of
La
Nuit
in the Nasher Collection shared those
qualities when seen from the front, as you moved up the ramp of the
Guggenheim, but the descending view was a startling confrontation with
a back as massive and implacable as the face of a cliff; Maillol thickened and
spread
La
Nuit's
harmonious body forms to emphasize the inwardness of
the sculpture rather than the anecdotal qualities of the pose.
Maillol's classicism is both archaic and implies the future-ironically,
not the continuity of a tradition, but its death. Maillol closes doors. His
figures are so idealized that the next step must be abstraction. Like Picasso's
heroic nudes from the period just before
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon-which
they anticipate by a good five years-Maillol's superwomen seem trapped
by geometry. They move with difficulty, rarely escaping the dominance of
vertical and horizontal axes; for all their vol uptuousness, their flesh is
unyielding, a series of linked convexities inseparable from the properties of
brittle, smooth bronze. The eye slides from a swelling hip across a full belly
to an up-thrust breast, a surface journey that reinforces both our awareness
of the hardness of metal and the "outwardness" of Maillol's sense of form
and mass. (This may be what Robert Pincus-Witten is getting at in a
catalogue essay that links Maillol's "massive integrity and molecular forth–
rightness" to the work of Serra and the Minimalists.) The show made clear
