The Met Store Aristide Maillol: L’Air Sculpture* Sculpture

An artful gift .

This sculpture references Aristide Maillol’s (French, 1861–1944) L’Air. The figure is featured in a monument commissioned by the French city of Toulouse in honor of the lost crew of the Croix du Sud, a hydroplane that was intended to follow a newly established mail route between France and South America, but disappeared after take-off. With reference to works by Auguste Renoir, for example, Maillol experimented with the nude in his paintings of bathers from around 1895. The pose for L’Air is said to have evolved out of a figure he created in a commissioned monument to the artist Paul Cézanne.

Produced in cooperation with the Getty Museum, Los Angeles