ARISTIDE MAILLOL (1861-1944) SANS TITRE, vers... Lot 11

ARISTIDE MAILLOL (1861-1944) SANS TITRE, vers 1895 Oil on canvas Signed lower right Oil on canvas; signed lower right 41 X 21,5 CM - 16 1/8 X 8 1/2 IN. PROVENANCE Mr. Olivier Lorquin has confirmed the authenticity of this work. Private collection, France. "His art is essentially an art of synthesis. Without having been led to it by any theory, by anything other than his own instinct, he took part in the neoclassical movement whose recent origin must be sought around Cézanne and Gauguin. The terracottas and wood carvings of the Master of Tahiti, as well as the tapestry cartoons of Emile Bernard, were not without influence on his training. It was the manifestations of the Synthetist group in revolt against the eclectic realism of the Academies that awakened in Maillol, a pupil of Cabanel, his true nature. But this simplicity, this great style that we were looking for among the paradoxes, and that we only found by dint of systems, Maillol discovered them almost without effort, within himself. He knew how to reject easily the petty preoccupations, the prejudices of the academic teaching, and he arrived early to realize in all matters works of really synthetic beauty. Every artist who thinks about it comes sooner or later to prefer this beauty to any other. The ideal of Art is to condense, to summarize in a small number of clear and concise forms the infinitely varied relationships that we perceive in Nature. It is to reduce to the essential our most particular sensations, it is to make simple with complicated." Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, l'Occident, n° 48, November 1905, p. 241.