The Musée d’Orsay is devoting a retrospective to Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) which will show him in all the diversity of his work, painting, decorative art and sculpture.The last major Maillol exhibition in Paris was for the centenary of the of his birth, followed in 1975 by an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which prompted the American art historian Jonathan Crary to state, «Now, with the experience of art in the 1960s that moved us away from the spatially constructed and developed work of the 1940s-1950s, the compactness and conceptual precisionof Maillol seems closer to our time.” In fact, as early as 1942, Mies van der Rohe combined Picasso’s Guernicain one of his photomontages for a modern art museum projectwith Maillol’s Action in Chains (L’Action enchaînée). As proof of the lasting influence of the work,the proponents of biomorphism as well as those of constructive art, including minimalism, claim a connection with Maillol.

Art historians, however, continue to call him a classicist or even a traditionalist by including him in what has been called the «return to style,» as opposed to Rodin’s expressionist approach. But they then fail to examine that which is also modern in his work. «It is beautiful, it means nothing, it is a silent work», declared André Gidein 1905 about the sculpture The Mediterranean. By examining the genesis of the sculptures, the continuity at work in his artistic production, analyzing the forty or so sketchbooks revealed to the public for the first time, and studying the bonds of friendship with his artist friends, we discover another Maillol. A Maillol that the 20th century welcomed all the more easily since he worked actively until his death in 1944. His formal search for simplification and balance was driven by a desire to break with the narrative and descriptive tradition of representation, leading him to the frontier of a geometric abstraction which had also been the preserve of many modern sculptors.