Lot Essay
Dina Vierny has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Aristide Maillol turned to sculpture in the 1890s, only when his failing eyesight forced him to give up his tapestry work. He experimented first with wood carvings and then began modeling statuettes in clay. Around the turn of the century, Ambroise Vollard bought a number of these terracotta statuettes and had them cast in bronze. After earning critical acclaim for La Méditerranée, which Maillol exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1905, he began to receive commissions to create monuments. One such commission came from the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the birthplace of the composer Claude Debussy, which awarded Maillol a commission to honor the composer in 1930. The original Monument à Debussy was executed in stone and had a musical staves carved around the bottom of the base.
Fundamental to Maillol's sculpture was the primacy of form and subject, and in the arrangement of his models he often focused on a gesture, attitude or movement that interested him. Debussy avec un écharpe sur le dos is characteristic of Maillol's sculpture; its simple, smooth contours suggest a form of idealized beauty. In the present sculpture the female model is casually posed, her arm is half raised and her head slightly turned, imbuing her with a sense of freshness and immediacy. There is no unneccessary detail, no complicated gestures. Even the musical notes surrounding the base of the original stone version were omitted from the later bronze casts. As John Rewald has commented:
To celebrate the human body, particularly the feminine body, seems to have been Maillol's only aim. He did this in a style from which all grandiloquence is absent, a style almost earthbound and grave. The absence of movement, however, is compensated by a tenderness and charm distinctively his own; and while all agitation is foreign to his art, there is in his work, especially in his small statuettes, such quiet grace and such warm feeling that they never appear inanimate. He has achieved a peculiar balance between a firmness of forms which appear eternal and a sensitivity of expression--even sensuousness--which seems forever quivering and alive (in Maillol, New York, 1958, pp. 6-7).
Aristide Maillol turned to sculpture in the 1890s, only when his failing eyesight forced him to give up his tapestry work. He experimented first with wood carvings and then began modeling statuettes in clay. Around the turn of the century, Ambroise Vollard bought a number of these terracotta statuettes and had them cast in bronze. After earning critical acclaim for La Méditerranée, which Maillol exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1905, he began to receive commissions to create monuments. One such commission came from the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the birthplace of the composer Claude Debussy, which awarded Maillol a commission to honor the composer in 1930. The original Monument à Debussy was executed in stone and had a musical staves carved around the bottom of the base.
Fundamental to Maillol's sculpture was the primacy of form and subject, and in the arrangement of his models he often focused on a gesture, attitude or movement that interested him. Debussy avec un écharpe sur le dos is characteristic of Maillol's sculpture; its simple, smooth contours suggest a form of idealized beauty. In the present sculpture the female model is casually posed, her arm is half raised and her head slightly turned, imbuing her with a sense of freshness and immediacy. There is no unneccessary detail, no complicated gestures. Even the musical notes surrounding the base of the original stone version were omitted from the later bronze casts. As John Rewald has commented:
To celebrate the human body, particularly the feminine body, seems to have been Maillol's only aim. He did this in a style from which all grandiloquence is absent, a style almost earthbound and grave. The absence of movement, however, is compensated by a tenderness and charm distinctively his own; and while all agitation is foreign to his art, there is in his work, especially in his small statuettes, such quiet grace and such warm feeling that they never appear inanimate. He has achieved a peculiar balance between a firmness of forms which appear eternal and a sensitivity of expression--even sensuousness--which seems forever quivering and alive (in Maillol, New York, 1958, pp. 6-7).