Early Maillol Bronzes from an Important Collection at Lempertz this Autumn

For Aristide Maillol, the first decade of the 20th century was the decisive phase of his artistic development. On 4 and 5 December 2025, Lempertz will auction an outstanding collection of 13 early casts from this period.

Maillol's collaboration with art dealer Ambroise Vollard proved to be a breakthrough: Their contracts of 1902 and 1907 enabled Maillol to have his works cast by the famous foundryman Florentin Godard, who played a key role in the development of bronze sculpture during that period. Under these conditions, Aristide Maillol developed the intimate and sensual style for which he is famous today, as evidenced by 22 works from this period. Among his most famous admirers at the time were such luminaries as Auguste Rodin and Harry Graf Kessler. In our time, art history deals extensively with this phase, as Ursel Berger recently did in the 2021 catalogue of Maillol's sculptures from his collaboration with Vollard.

The works from this period can now be found in major collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée Rodin in Paris and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Nine of these works are part of a collection that will be auctioned at Lempertz in Cologne on 4 and 5 December 2025. These include Femme à genoux and Baigneuse debout. The Baigneuse Renoir owes its name to the fact that it appears in several paintings by Renoir, an admirer of Aristide Maillol's art. The project to design a clock resulted in Les Deux Soeurs – dite la Pendule, of which only two other examples are known to exist. 

This collection is complemented by further early works by Maillol, such as La Lavandiere articulée from 1896. Jeune fille assise se voilant les yeux, created in 1900 - another cast of which is housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art - from the Weyhe Gallery in New York, and Tête du Printemps, which is derived from the life-size figure created in 1911 for the Russian collector Ivan Morosov, testify to Maillol's international reputation. Apart from the relief Femme assise, this is the only piece in the collection that was not cast by Florentin Godard. 

Another special feature is a rare movable door knocker from the Nabis period (John Hay Whitney Collection).

Jan Bykowski
Press and Public Relations
info@lempertz.com
Tel. 0221 925729 -57