Exhibition view "Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) : La quête de l’harmonie" with "La Montagne", 1937, stone, 176 x 185 x 78 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon © Alain Leprince

Maillol creates masses and constructs his compositions, guided by the infinite possibilities of nature, with a keen sense of synthesis and environment. He abandons the subject, the accident, in favor of the essence. Aiming for a timelessness rooted in a kind of archaic universality, his work is foreign to the history of the avant-garde, but fully relevant to the history of modernity. This retrospective underscore Maillol's role in the panorama of sculpture in the first half of the 20th century: in the face of Rodin's expressionism, he embodies the values of clarity and balance of form that make him the culmination of the great classical tradition.