Maillol's Women

Greatest living sculptor, by common consent of the artistic world, is grey-bearded Aristide Maillol, who next week celebrates his 80th birthday in the little fishing village of Banyuls, in southern France. In spite of war, little Banyuls will give this spry oldster his usual birthday party. In Manhattan, his birthday is being celebrated by an exhibition of his sculpture at the Buchholz Gallery.

Sculptor Maillol has devoted his entire life to a single subject: the full-blown bodies of naked women. Only three or four times has he sculpted a man; never an animal. When he did Leda and the Swan, he left the swan out and concentrated on Leda. His sculptures seldom tell a story, never illustrate any high-flown saw or slogan. But his placid, broad-hipped, female torsos, mountainously solid, yet so graceful that they seem about to move, have been the envy and despair of fellow sculptors all over the world.

Sculptor Maillol started sculpture seriously at the age of 40, when six months of blindness due to eyestrain forced him to give up his previous work as a tapestry designer and weaver. By the time World War I broke out, Aristide Maillol was already one of the best-known sculptors in France. His famed Action in Chains, a buxom female nude commemorating the French revolutionary Socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui, stood in Puget Theniers, near Grenoble. At his summer studio at Marly, near Paris, he was working on a memorial (another female figure) to France's great painter Paul Cezanne.

Today he lives and works quietly in the pink stucco Banyuls house where he was born, taking his models from among the neighboring peasant women, ringing a thousand changes in plaster, stone and terracotta on the one theme that interests him in life: the curving grace of women's bodies. At home, spry Bohemian Oldster Maillol has his troubles. His sister-in-law, who has a tremor in her hands, is continually dropping his best casts on the floor and breaking them. His wife, a monumental peasant woman whom he married 46 years ago when she was a perfect model, now glowers jealously over every younger model that 80-year-old Sculptor Maillol brings home.

But in his basement studio, surrounded by his buxom torsos and his latest model, a Paris university graduate named Dina (see cut), white-bearded Maillol accepts his domestic difficulties with an octogenarian's philosophy. His crusty motto: "The harder the stone, the pleasanter the work, because you can strike with all your might."

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