Ninth Eclogue: Two Nymphs of the Woodlands (Deux nymphes) Possibly 1926

Aristide Maillol made this print of two nymphs, and it looks like he used a reddish-brown ink. What I'm seeing here is the bare minimum of gesture, just enough to get the idea across, and sometimes that’s the most an artist can do. I'm thinking about how the artist might have been feeling that day, what was the weather like? Did the artist have a clear idea of the image or did the image evolve through the process of drawing and redrawing? I wonder if he was imagining a classical scene, nymphs relaxing in the woods, but giving it a modern twist, something raw and immediate, and the economy of line is really beautiful here. It’s as if Maillol is saying, ‘look, this is all you need’. Artists are always responding to what came before, maybe Maillol was inspired by the linear style of someone like Ingres, but wanted to make it more casual, more about the feeling than the details. It makes you think about the conversations artists have across time, borrowing and riffing off each other's ideas.