Maillol's search for nothing

It is beau­ti­ful; it means noth­ing.” Nobel prizewin­ning au­thor André Gide needed no grand words to praise Aris­tides Mail­lol's (Banyuls-sur-Mer, 1861-1944) The Mediter­ranean, in 1947. It was a work that in­au­gu­rated a new era in sculp­ture that would even­tu­ally lead to the ab­strac­tion of Henry Moore. The artist from French Cat­alo­nia fin­ished the work in 1905, not long after aban­don­ing paint­ing in favour of sculp­ture. A cen­tury later, The Mediter­ranean adorns the patio of the Museu Marès in Barcelona, with a huge photo of its cre­ator star­ing out at the sea that gives his sin­gu­lar piece its name as a back­drop.

The Mediter­ranean is the cor­ner­stone of the ex­hi­bi­tion, Mail­lol i Grècia, which brings to­gether a small col­lec­tion of the artist's works and dis­sects a cru­cial mo­ment in the ca­reer of a sculp­tor who had such a strong in­flu­ence on the nou­cen­tista move­ment: his trip to Greece in 1908: “It is in the Hel­lenic sculp­tural tra­di­tion that Mail­lol reaf­firms him­self. He dis­cov­ered noth­ing new in Greece, but had every­thing con­firmed,” says Àlex Su­sanna, the ex­hi­bi­tion's cu­ra­tor. The Mediter­ranean, and the small sculp­ture Leda, also on dis­play, were fin­ished be­fore the sculp­tor went to Greece, but show his in­ter­est in the sleek, com­pact forms of an­tiq­uity.

Mail­lol went to Greece look­ing for what Pi­casso sought in Africa and what Gau­guin sought in Ocea­nia: the pu­rity of art. Yet, as Su­sanna says, Mail­lol al­ready had what he was look­ing for in his head: “I do not go to Greece to learn any­thing, I go to see stat­ues be­fore the sea” he wrote in his diary at the time, a doc­u­ment that has been an in­valu­able source of in­spi­ra­tion for the ex­hi­bi­tion.

Ac­com­pa­nied by the Ger­man pa­tron of the arts, Harry Kessler, and the Aus­trian writer, Hugo von Hof­mannsthal, Mail­lol spent five weeks in Greece, avidly vis­it­ing every­thing but in­ter­pret­ing what he saw in his own unique way. The world fa­mous Char­i­o­teer of Del­phi, for ex­am­ple, dis­ap­pointed him and in his diary he de­clared the an­cient statue to be “dead”.

Most of the 23 pieces on dis­play in the Museu Marès ex­hi­bi­tion, which runs until Jan­u­ary 31, have been lent by the Musée Mail­lol in Paris, which is cur­rently being ren­o­vated.