This is a brilliant monograph devoted to the early modern sculptor whose bronze figures are collected in major museums as important precursor to modern sculpture movements. Maillol's massive female figures were characterized by massive volume and simplicity of form, a radical departure from 19th century Academic style, that abolished movement and recovered the simplicity of line and volume. This account opens with the artist's promising beginnings as a painter in the late 1890s, and follows Maillol's development as a sculptor through his masterpieces. Here are his first small but refined wooden bas-reliefs and the first small-scale bronzes of the years 1900-1905 that lead up to the large-scale monuments which gave him success and notoriety among both his contemporaries and modern descendants.
