Aristide Maillol
French (1861-1944)
Born in Banyuls-sur-Mer in the French Pyrenees in 1861, painter, sculptor and printmaker Aristide Maillol studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. Encouraged by his contemporary Paul Gauguin, Maillol opened a tapestry workshop in Banyuls in 1893 and produced works that gained him wide acclaim. By 1895, he abandoned his tapestry work to concentrate on sculpture, woodcuts and printmaking. Maillol was a member of Les Nabis, a group of Post-Impressionist artists influenced by the decorative elements of Art Nouveau.
In 1902, art dealer Ambroise Vollard provided Maillol with his first exhibition and two years later his works were included in a publication by Julius Meier-Graefe and led to the acquaintance of his most important patron, the German art collector Harry Graf Kessler. Maillol exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, Salon des Beaux-Arts, Kunsthalle Basel and Petit Palais in Paris as well as at the Armory Show in New York and Alfred Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin, among others. He made numerous woodcut illustrations and prints for the work of poets such as Virgil and Ovid.
Maillol’s works are held in the collections of nearly every major museum worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Musée d’Orsay Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Gallery, London, National Galleries of Scotland, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.
