Did you know that Aristide Maillol's final muse was a teenage girl of Russian-Romanian Jewish descent? In 1934, Dina Vierny was introduced to the seventy-three-year-old sculptor by the architect Jean-Claude Dondel, who told her: "You look like a Maillol." He was right. For the next decade, until his death in 1944, she became his primary model - the body through which he channeled every late exploration of classical form. This chalk study, "Dina from the front, study for 'Harmony'," shows her standing in frontal stillness, head gently inclined, a cloth draped over one arm. Black and white chalk on joined sheets of paper, the soft modeling of her torso working the way a sculptor's thumb works clay - light pooling on the sternum, sliding across the belly in tones of graphite and cream. During the German occupation, Dina used Maillol's connections as cover to smuggle refugees across the Pyrenees into Spain. She was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and nearly didn't survive. Maillol intervened to secure her release. The dedication on this sheet reads "pour monsieur et madame Marcel" - a quiet personal gift. In 1995, Vierny opened the Musée Maillol in Paris. The model built a museum for the man who built monuments around her body. Nothing about what followed this drawing was quiet. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com
