The influence of Aristide Maillol on the German sculptors during the nazi period is a field of research that has certainly not been exhausted in the Netherlands. It is, moreover, a subject that until the nineteen-seventies was left as good as untouched in both Germany and France. National feelings probably played a part in this.
After the second World War, Maillol, due to his dubious behaviour during the occupation, was considered to be a collaborator, together with other French artists like Despiau, Vlaminck and Derain. In Germany people preferred not to be reminded of that black period in their history. During the last few decades of the twentieth century that situation had changed in Germany especially and to a lesser extent in France, partly due to publications by Silver, Curtis and Golan among others.
Popular in Germany
Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) was particulary popular in Germany from 1905 up to his death in 1944.
1. Up into the nineteen-thirties especially he was the most popular foreign sculptor. He was better known on the east bank of the Rhine than on the western side in his own country. In France, the fantastic Auguste Rodin (1840-
1917) overshadowed all of his colleague sculptors. The enthusiastic work of German art dealers like Harry Graf
Kessler (1868-1937) and Alfred Flechtheim ((1878-1937) introduced Maillol’s sculptures not only to the mantelpieces of the salons and gardens of the villas of the middle-class nouveau riche, but also to many
German Museums. His large solo expositions in Berlin (1928) and in Basle (1933) attracted the interest of a large host of art lovers, critics, dealers and artists. The reason for his popularity must be sought mainly in the publications of German art critics. Julius Meier-Graefe (1867-1935) was the first to pay attention to his work extensively, and saw in him a direct successor of Greek civilization.
2. In his much-read standard work, he described Maillol as an uncomplicated provincial from the Roussillon region, once a Greek colony, who designed the most harmonious sculptures from a natural genius (referring back to his “Greek” descent). In pre-
First World War Germany where society seemed to have run wild, these sculptures evoked a desire for the balanced and peaceful society of ancient Greece. It was a nostalgic concept that fitted well with the still active
Griechenkult in that country. After the First World War that longing took a more concrete and contemporary form. At the time Kessler and other publicists believed that the harmonious female figures of Maillol were capable of providing a positive contribution to regaining a heavily damaged social self-confidence and the development of a balanced society. Although Meier-Graefe and Kessler certainly did not intend it as such, this concept anticipated the artistic vision of National Socialism.
As an extension of the naturalistic vision of Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) of both critics mentioned above,
Alfred Kuhn (1885-1968) saw elements in Maillol’s work that, thanks to their outspoken classical/Latin slant, could have a liberating effect on the Calvinist/anguished German soul of both German observers and German artists.
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Followers of the neo-classical sculptor and theorist Adolf von Hildebrand (1847-1925) recognized in the French sculptor the ideal person who was able to mould rigid theory of the German master to his will into the form of contemporary, lively works of sculpture.
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Maillol’s sculptures thus, apparently self-evidently, occupied a major place in the endeavour for a retour a l’ordre, a European movement in the nineteen-twenties that wanted to return to the values in visual art such as balance, harmony and recognizability. With respect to sculpture, in Germany this meant that after a short period of modernism, there was a revaluation of classical land and realistic design. Was the topos of Maillol as a French Greek, who created his balanced sculptures from a classical spirit, the only pre-war German view of the popular French sculptor? No, along with remarks by journalist Bruno E. Werner (1896-1964) and art critic Paul Westheim (1886-1963), it was the German-speaking
Swiss publicist Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893-1973), who discovered elements in Maillol’s work that referred to the future.
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Due to their strength in composition and their tectonic shape, his sculptures were considered to form a bridge to modern sculpture. In her opinion, Maillol’s image language formed one of the sources of inspiration for the work of Arp, Lipchitz, Archipenko, Brancusi and Van Tongerloo. But the view aired by
Gidieon-Welcker in 1937 did not get a chance to become rooted in the Germany that had meanwhile become
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National Socialist. It was not until ten years after the Second World War that this vision received the attention it deserved. For the time being, the “classicist” view of Maillol set the tone in Germany.
A philhellene
But did that German vision correspond with Maillol’s own vision? Was Maillol, who had enjoyed classical training at the Ėcole des Beaux-Arts, indeed a classicist? Although he did complete his training, later he spoke out critically several times about the old training, emphasizing in particular the rigid and outdated learning program in which imitation and following examples from Antiquity and the Renaissance were expected to result in artistry. He said himself that it was above all his admiration of early Greek art that had inspired him to seek the true foundations of sculpture. On the basis of models from his own region, whom he sketched, and not the sculptures from Antiquity that were displayed in the Louvre, he worked towards his own personal
Beauté in his sculptures, without further use of models. This was a beauty whose design was characterized by a simplification of shape, a solid structure of form, (sculpture c’est de l’architecture), a balanced, closed composition with a limited number of profiles, a subdued movement and a natural modelé. He was able to bring all these aspects together intrinsically in the pose, gesture and inner aura of the (usually) naked female body. This was entirely for the benefit of his sculptural idea. Ultimately, that lay at the heart of sculpture according to Maillol: Ce sont des idées que je cherche.
This is why Maillol was neither a classicist, nor a neo-classicist, nor an avant-gardist, nor a classicist turned
modernist. He was, as publicist Waldemar George (1893-1970) put it so saliently, a philhellene. This friend of the Greeks created unique personal sculptures from his inspiration aimed at the classical world, sculptures that cannot be categorized under one heading. We must therefore conclude that in pre-war Germany where he was ranked in the classical tradition, Maillol was interpreted incorrectly, or incompletely.
Maillol as teacher
Except for the period 1914-1920, many German sculptors, including a large number from the academies of
München en Düsseldorf, went to Paris to study there at one of the many “free academies”. They also went there to work and to live and to become familiar with all aspects of the vie mondaine de Montparnasse.
Basically there were two generations separated by the First World War. The first generation, including Barlach,
Lehmbruck, Hoetger, Klimsch, Marcks, Enseling and Stadler, originally came for Rodin, but after a while a number of them became more interested in Maillol. When they returned to their homeland, for a while they designed sculptures inspired by Maillol. At the various academies, where many of them held a professorship, they passed on their experiences of Paris (but also of Maillol) to rising young sculptors. This
Kriegsjugendgeneration, which counted Abel, Breker, Lehmann, Werner, Agricola and Zimmermann among its ranks, formed the second generation. For a number of them, Maillol filled the role of a teacher, directly or indirectly. He taught at the académie Ranson, he allowed a few German sculptors to work in his own studio, and as a mentor he received many young sculptors at his “Sunday visiting hours” in his house in Marly-le-Roy or in Banyuls-sur-Mer. Beside his enormous expert skills and his artistic-historical understanding, Maillol’s love for young people in these direct meetings was of great didactic importance. According to Kessler, Maillol was a teacher who could illuminate simply and clearly what he felt the essence of sculpting was, namely: start from nature and then develop your own sculptural idea, through simplification of form and logic in composition. He never offered his own sculptures for imitation or following. Besides the three spheres of influence just mentioned, we must not ignore the influence of publications about his work in Germany either. It is understandable that a number of his German pupils took his work as a direct example, because his image language, linked with his limited selection of motifs, seemed easy at first glance. Meier-Graefe, who cynically rejected the direct copying of Maillol’s work, referred to the Entwicklungsfähigkeiten der Form in the
Frenchman’s sculptures in connection with the learnability of his image language. They were starting points for developing an original and independent image language. For this point of view, we can distinguish four categories of Maillol followers in Germany. It is striking (and then again, not so striking) that the category of direct followers of Maillol’s sculptures at the time of National Socialism was most successful.
Four categories
German or German-speaking sculptors who went along with the ultimate conclusion of Maillol’s simplification of form included Arp, Wotruba and Mataré. For this first group, the work of the French sculptor was a source of inspiration for developing their own image language, size and composition, a language that would result in abstracting or abstract design. Fritz Wotruba is possibly the clearest example of this. Balance and unity, linked with an honest use of material, characteristic of Maillol’s sculptures, were central in his development towards his own image language.
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A second, more expressionistically oriented group of sculptors, including Lehmbruck, Steger, Markcs, Kasper,
Seitz and Blumenthal, also took Maillol’s simplification of form as a starting point for certain sculptures. They were not as intent on abstraction as the sculptors in the first group. In their design, Lehmbruck and colleagues concentrated more on expressionistic stylization or deformation, for the purpose of an intensified expression of emotions. This is apparent from the way Seitz used Maillol’s Femme à l’épine from 1923 as an example for
Die Wäscherin (1928) and how this motivated him to develop a personal style as in Hockende from 1936. In general, the work of the first group as well as the second group was branded by the nazi leaders as entartet.
Both the design and the content did not tally with Hitler’s aspiration for artists who were capable of dem Staat des deutschen Volkes den Kulturellen Stempel der Germanischen Rasse als einem zeitlos Gültigen aufzuprägen vermögen.
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A third group, including Hoetger, Albiker, Scheibe and Gerstel, concentrated more on Maillol’s idea of taking nature, in this case the human body, as a starting point. These Bewahrer des Menschenbildes were generally of a conservative nature, whereby the realistic human body was the pre-eminent means for transferring feelings.
The policy makers of the nazi’s were initially able to accept a number of sculptures from this group in their vision, but around 1940 politics hardened and their sculptures turned out to be insufficiently “heroic” and therefore not suitable enough for propaganda. The work of academy professor Richard Scheibe – first sacked and later reinstated – could stand up to the nazi criticism. His designs included powerful female figures, inspired by Maillol. Thus the composition of Maillol’s Pomone vêtue from 1921 seems to have shown him the way to making the liberation monument Die befreite Saar. The big difference between the inner force of
Maillol’s sculpture and the external expression of power of Scheibe’s work is quite striking. Although Scheibe could continue to work as normal during the war, he was quite quickly overshadowed by real propaganda sculptors such as Breker and Thorak.
The fourth group, with sculptors as Klimsch, Grauel, Breker, Bronisch and Agricola, not infrequently copied
Maillol’s compositions and motifs quite directly, sometimes with only a single change. Many of them, urged on by nazi leaders or nazi sympathies, did not achieve much more than cliché, propaganda sculptures for the purpose of the prestigious building program of Hitler and Speer. We must remark at this point that many of the construction plans never got further than a design on paper, while the sculptures were often already completed. Some sculptures were given a temporary location in government buildings, but most of them were used in propaganda exhibitions. The sculptures that Maillol’s friend and Hitler’s favourite sculptor Arno Breker made in the nineteen-forties demonstrate the influence of the French sculptor in many of his ideal Aryan female figures. Thus in his Schreitende he took the motif and the composition of Maillol’s île de France as an example.
The doctoral dissertation, summarized above, aims to show that the view of Maillol’s work common until now, that is, Maillol as a pivotal figure towards modernism in sculpture and as a continuer of a classical tradition, needs some modification. Maillol was also, unintentionally, an artist who influenced the propagandist sculpture during the Third Reich in Germany. Undoubtedly he knew that his motifs and compositions were used by
German propagandist sculptors. Except for some informal remarks, he never officially renounced. Probably opportunistic motives were stronger than ideological ones.
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See among others, Arie Hartog, “Zwischen Ausdruckspalstik und Klassik”, Maillol, München 1996 and Brassaï, Artistes de ma Vie, Paris
1980
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Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, München 1904. 1913, 1919, 1924
Hyppolyte Taine was a French philosopher and art critic who convinced that works of art could be explained intrinsically on the basis of the origins of the artist. This origin consisted of race (the cultural baggage of a particular population group), milieu (the personal living conditions) and moment (the spirit of the times in which the artist leved). His theory leaned heavely on naturalism in literature and his ideas greatly influenced French and (especially) German art critics.
Alfred Kuhn, Die neuere Plastik von Achtzehnhundert bis zur Gegenwart, München 1921
Carola Giedion-Welcker, Moderne Plastik, Elementen der Wirklichkeit – Masse und Auflockerung, Zürich 1937
Reden Hitlers am Parteitag der Freiheit, München 1935
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