Monument to Cézanne at the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris by Scan The World

Description

In 1912 Maillol received a commission from Frantz Jourdain, the founder of the Salon d'Automne, and a group of friends of Paul Cézanne, for a monument to the master of Aix-en-Provence, who had died six years earlier. The committee was unable to solicit sufficient funds for the project, however, or agree on the details, and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 put an end to their plans. Maillol, who regarded Cézanne as "the genius of modern painting" (quoted in J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 19), kept the idea alive, and returned to it following the end of the war in 1918.Maillol had already made several preparatory studies, in which he tried out and rejected several reclining poses, including those seen in many of the smaller bronzes that have since been cast, in which one leg is raised significantly higher than the other. By 1920 the sculptor had arrived at the definitive state for his Monument à Paul Cézanne: the legs of the recumbent girl are only slightly bent, and she presents in her raised hand an offering of olive branches (not included in this lead version). Maillol intended her to be seen as a bather, one of Cézanne's important subjects; she reclines on a flowing drapery, as if she were resting in the current of a river, a symbol of passing time. Her forms are classical, having been rendered in simple, unadorned volumes, in keeping with Cézanne's conception of form as Maillol understood it. The antique stylization of the girl's hair carried connotations of the…