Aristide Maillol: Quotes about art

Aristide Maillol was sculptor from France. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Aristide Maillol: 36 quotes0 likes

“The immobility that the artist creates is not at all that of the photograph. A worth of art contains latent life, possibility of movement; a grimace made eternal does not represent life. One always talks of w:Donatello, but never of della Quercia. Yet della Qercia invented w:Michelangelo’s style before Michelangelo.”

Aristide Maillol

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 408

“We should try to return to our youth, to work naively; this is what I see, and it is why I have such success, because our century has tried to return to the primitive. I work as if no art had ever been made, before me, as if I had never learned anything. I am the first man to do sculpture.”

Aristide Maillol

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), pp. 406-407

“I have a weakness for Egyptian sculpture: its figures are sculptured gods, sculptured ideas. Very different in expression, Hindu sculpture is based on very similar assumptions... The oriental people are much more artistic than we. When nations grow old, their art grows complicated and soft.”

Aristide Maillol

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 406

“w:Donatello's art does not come out of nature, it belongs to the studio. He exaggerates to make it lifelike. His weeping children grimace frightfully... When movement is excessive it is frozen: it no longer represents life.”

Aristide Maillol

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 408

“Art is complex, I said to Rodin, who smiled because he felt that I was struggling with nature.... the beauty of Rodin’s art is.... in the thoughts he embodied. As for me, I just take a walk on the beach. A young girl appears. From that girl walking there emanates a soul. That is That is at I want to give my statue, that thing alive, yet immaterial. In composing the figure of one young girl I must give the impression that there are all young girls. From the spirit, my feeling passes into my fingers”

Aristide Maillol

Quote in 'Aristide Maillol', ed. Andrew C. Ritchie, Albright Art Gallery N. Y. 1945, p. 31 + 45; as cited by Angelo Carnafa, in 'A sculpture of interior Solitude', Associated University Presse, 1999, p. 167

“Negro art contains more ideas than Greek art. Its strange inventiveness of form is astonishing, and its imagination and extraordinary sense of decoration are difficult to explain. We dare not take such liberties; but the Negroes have succeeded. We are too much the subjects of our own past..”

Aristide Maillol

Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 407