Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> A Maillol exhibition in New York is so special an occasion that it allows us to step back and evaluate not merely the importance of his work in the history of sculpture but the influence he has exerted over successive generations of American sculptors. At another and simpler level it is also an opportunity to admire one of the most individual manifestations of beauty in all sculpture in a body of work whose meaning undergoes incessant change precisely as the relations of contemporary and modern art evolve. Maillol’s work like that of most twentieth-century European masters was first seen in the United States at the Armory Exhibition one of the founding events in the history of American modern art. Held in 1913 that celebrated exhibition proved a watershed for the outlook of young artists and the general public alike. It was a vast exhibition which included the work of more than 300 artists many among the avant-garde and it made a correspondingly large impact. Never before had Americans been brought face to face with modernity in art on such a scale. The Armory Exhibition was greeted with uproar. Maillol’s contribution had been sent in part by his dealer of the time. Ambroise Vollard but mainly by the Druet Gallery Paris. His nudes could have caused some offence. As late as 1934 a court in the United States was to condemn a nude sculpture as obscene because it lacked any attributes justifying its state of undress. It is therefore easy to imagine how in 1913 Maillol’s Bather could have seemed shocking to the Puritan mindset this overt expression of the beauty of the body was largely unfamiliar. The collision between the European artworks and the prevailing spirit in America nevertheless had a catalytic effect. The new forms of expression Maillol’s nudes Brancusi’s sculptures and Matisse’s paintings embodied a complete break with the nineteenth century and necessarily raised the hackles of a society that had barely emerged from the previous century (LL)