Ovid's "The Art of Love" ("L'art d'aimer" d'Ovide) 1935

Here is a drawing by Aristide Maillol, likely done with red chalk, illustrating Ovid’s “The Art Of Love.” The figure is rendered with soft, rounded forms, and you can see a lot of attention paid to the nuances of light and shadow on the model's skin. The lines are gentle, suggesting the artist coaxed the figure into being. I can imagine him thinking about classical sculpture, about the weight and volume of the human body, and how to capture that with just a few strokes of the chalk. It’s a beautiful, sensual image, but there’s a melancholy about it too, the way the figure is looking down, lost in thought. It reminds me a little bit of some of Picasso’s drawings, the way he could capture so much emotion with such simple means. Artists learn from each other, riff off each other's ideas, and keep the conversation going across time. And here we are, still talking about it today.