Night is the result of Aristide Maillol’s interpretation of the somber and heavy eighteenth-century sculptures he encountered in the gardens of Versailles outside of Paris. It is composed of a series of lines that both represent a figure and evoke the shape of a cube. The model for this work was the artist’s wife. Her pose is simultaneously brooding and powerful. In 1909, upon viewing an earlier cast of Night in an exhibition, sculptor Auguste Rodin remarked, “One forgets too easily that the human body is an architecture, a living architecture.”
Label from Picasso: The Artist and His Models, November 5, 2016–February 19, 2017
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