Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [156]
The Musée Delacroix faithfully evokes these personalities but possesses none of the artist’s great canvases. A half hour’s wandering through its rooms serves as an aide-mémoire, inspiring one to track Delacroix’s paintings across Paris, the museum’s map in hand: from La Barque de Dante, which made his name at the 1822 Salon, to the flamboyant ceiling in the Galerie d’Apollon, both at the Louvre, to the canvases at the Musée d’Orsay; from the Musée Carnavalet to the Petit Palais. Of course, one should see the lyrical yet austere wall paintings at Saint-Sulpice. Their power is apparent, in spite of bad lighting and damage from damp. Take the time to seek out the splendid if troubling Pietà at Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais and to venture an hour’s tour of the Assemblée Nationale to admire the magnificent décors of the Salon du Roi (located off the left side of the debating chamber and therefore, ironically, the principal writing room for French Socialist deputies) and the Bibliothèque.
The art critic Robert Pincus-Witten writes, “Aristide Maillol’s place among the great sculptors has been secure for nearly a century.” Others who are less aesthetically attuned dismiss this nineteenth-century artist’s work with “Seen one, seen ’em all.” Whatever your predispositions, you should plan a visit to the Fondation Dina Vierny–Musée Maillol. You can’t help but walk away convinced of the genius of this man whose oeuvre focused almost exclusively on the female form but who found in it the means of expressing endless near-abstract reflections.
The museum nestles discreetly beside a ninety-foot-wide fountain created by one of the eighteenth century’s leading sculptors, Edme Bouchardon. Little matter that the rue de Grenelle is only sixteen feet wide. The pure theatricality of the grand Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons endears it to Parisians.
First-time visitors to the Musée Maillol determined to gain insight into the artist’s work should head directly upstairs, and seek out the early paintings. For, to the surprise of many, Aristide Maillol came to sculpture via painting and tapestry design.
Born in 1861, this son of a cloth salesman had passed a lonely childhood in Banyuls-sur-Mer—a coastal town not far from the Spanish border in what is called French Catalonia—first distinguishing himself in art at secondary school. At twenty he prevailed on his impoverished family to assure him a twenty-franc monthly stipend and took off for Paris. Initial rejection by the Académie des Beaux-Arts discouraged but did not defeat him. He eventually gained admittance, but the courses proved disappointing, providing little more than technical grounding.
Maillol was more shaped by the friends he made, among them members of the Nabis, a group whose name means “Prophets” in Hebrew. These Neoplatonic artists, who included Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard, sought to express “Ideas” through their creations, lending substance to their interior visions. Georges Seurat’s color theories also appealed to Maillol, but the artist’s greatest single inspiration seems to have been Paul Gauguin. The museum’s early Maillol canvases, L’Enfant couronné and Le Portrait de Tante Lucie, which date from 1890, glow with backgrounds of Gauguin’s much-favored cadmium yellow.
A chance visit to the Musée de Cluny sparked Maillol’s interest in tapestry. Two years’ feverish tapestry design—the handsome products of which are arrayed at the museum—wrought mayhem with the artist’s eyesight, so he turned to wood carving and then to monumental sculpture.
At the time, Rodin still dominated the latter field. Unlike most of his contemporaries, the Catalan consciously avoided the master’s studio, convinced, in the words of Constantin Brancusi, that “nothing grows