A shadowy chapter in art history

The recent article by Lara Marlowe on the tributes to Aristide Maillol in Paris, and the splendid legacy of his former model Dina Vierny, made absorbing reading. Vierny, a woman of Russian blood who first modelled for the great sculptor while still in her teens, has enriched France with a magnificent collection of his work, and for years also ran a much-respected art gallery in Paris. The poor lad from the South, who almost starved as an art student in Paris in the 1880s, lived to become a European figure in spite of the simplicity of his lifestyle and his apparent indifference to fame. One aspect, however, is scarcely ever discussed in any detail: the circumstances of Maillol's death in September 1944, immediately after the liberation of France by the Allies.

While Rodin represented the last chapter of Romantic sculpture - rhetorical, dramatic, and with a strong literary flavour - Maillol was the first of the new. Though he probably never heard of Roger Fry's doctrine of "essential form" and had no theories of his own, he had a major role in steering sculpture back to a kind of monumental, classical simplicity. He cut out movement and all "props", emphasising stillness and spatial gravity, and generally using static poses which give an effect of majestic repose and equilibrium.

Curiously enough, he came relatively late to sculpture and only made his mark with the bronze Mediterranean; shown at the Salon d'Automne in 1905, it achieved for him almost overnight recognition at the age of 44.

Public commissions began to come in and Maillol set up a studio and summer living space at Marly-le-Roi, not far from Paris.

It was here in 1914 that the incident occurred which first brought his patriotism under official suspicion. Count Kessler, who as a practising diplomat was close to official events in Berlin, sent him a friendly warning telegram: "Maillol - war is coming. Bury your sculptures!" In fact, war did come a few months later. Such a telegram, from an enemy alien who was also close to the Kaiser's court, was an invitation for trouble. The public prosecutor in the area issued a search warrant and for a time Maillol was in danger of being charged publicly with treason.

In the end, the investigating judge dismissed the charges, but shortly after he was attacked in the French right-wing press for his supposed leanings towards Germany - as is usual in wartime, cultural links were not distinguished from political ones. However, the fact that his only son Lucien served in the French army from 1915 to 1918 did something to discredit the rumours. And after the war, Maillol was given commissions for various memorials to the French war dead, including the one at Banyuls, his birthplace, which is among his most moving masterpieces. In many of these, the mourning figure is a woman.

By 1937, when a large mixed exhibition in Paris, held to coincide with the World Fair, included three rooms of his works at the Petit Palais, it seemed that France had taken him fully to its heart. In the same year, Count Kessler died in Marseilles, a refugee from the Nazis since 1933. Apart from sculpture commissions, Maillol had illustrated several books for Kessler's prestige publishing firm, the Cranach Press. The "Red Count's" superb diaries contain many descriptions of the great sculptor, both at work and at leisure, in Marly or in Banyuls, and of the trials he endured from his apparently stupid and possessive wife, Clotilde. Occasionally, Maillol had sought consolation with other women, including a female pupil, but his relationship with Dina Vierny can hardly have been a sexual one in the usual sense, since she was more than 50 years his junior.

He had been told about her by an architect friend, who thought that she closely resembled some of Maillol's sculptures. Hoping that she might be just the model he needed and had long sought for, he wrote saying: "Mademoiselle, I am told that you look like a Maillol or a Renoir. I'd settle for a Renoir." The female body had always been his great theme - there are few male nudes among his output - and Dina's advent into his life proved a catalyst which released a new burst of creativity.

War with Germany came again in 1939, so Maillol locked up his house and studio in Marly - leaving many works, mostly small or unfinished, stored in a shed there - and went south to Banyuls, where Dina Vierny joined him in 1940 after the French military collapse. Since it was in the Vichy zone Banyuls was not part of occupied France.

Dina Vierny became active in the Resistance, helping to smuggle refugees from the Nazis and/or the Vichy police across the Pyrenees into Spain, whence they could take ship to America or elsewhere. When Maillol learned of her activities, he gave her the use of his hillside studio at Puig del Mas as a kind of relay station and also showed her a safe path over the mountains which had been used by his smuggler ancestors. (This is officially testified by Varian Fry, the remarkable American diplomat who, from his base in Marseilles, organised the escape of many wanted people abroad.)

However, in 1942 Maillol made the greatest blunder of his career, which may well have proved fatal to him. Years before he had made the acquaintance of a promising young German sculptor, Arno Brekker, who visited France in peacetime and was known there in art circles. Brekker, a coolly ruthless careerist, had since hitched his wagon to the Nazis and was rewarded by Hitler, a warm admirer of his work, with a castle as his workshop - some accounts say, even the use of slave labour as assistants. To make use of his French contacts, an exhibition of his sculptures was organised at the Orangerie in Paris and Brekker was very anxious to have Maillol and Charles Despiau, the two most eminent living French sculptors, present at the official opening.

It was, of course, at heart a collaborationist and propaganda showpiece, but a number of leading French artists and writers were conned into believing that the event was essentially a demonstration of international solidarity among artists. In return, it was hoped to dupe a French cultural party into visiting wartime Germany - which actually happened.

Maillol duly received his invitation, but travel between Vichy France and the Occupied Zone was not easy. In the end, a personable young German officer named Heller arrived by car and drove him to Paris. Almost certainly, Maillol's chief motive was to inspect his old studio-home in Marly and to make sure his works there were intact; but presumably he also hoped to renew contact with old friends and colleagues. So he naively attended the gala opening, along with Despiau and the painters AndrΘ Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and Dunoyer de Segonzac, among others. Reputedly, the writer Jean Cocteau was also present and is even said to have made a laudatory speech.

None of them ever lived it down, though Cocteau proved more adroit than the rest in escaping peacetime condemnation. When Despiau died in 1946 he was under a dark cloud, while the painters (all of whom had fought for France in 1914-18) were semi-ostracised by the postwar art establishment, which in any case was largely Leftist.

To make matters worse, Maillol had received at his studio in Banyuls a number of German officers who admired his work, This was in no way exceptional - Picasso had also been visited by Germans at his studio in Paris, and the commanding officer in the capital, General Stulpnagel, was a cultured non-Nazi who in 1944 was shot for his links with the Bomb Plot against Hitler. Some leading French actresses during the occupation years went about publicly with German officers, or even lived with them. In fact, the attitude of a great many French people towards Hitler was highly ambivalent, at least for a time. Since the early 1930s France had been virtually a divided nation, polarised between Left and Right, and Leon Blum's Popular Front had come near to provoking civil war, as the republican government finally did in Spain.

Maillol was certainly no Fascist sympathiser, or even to the Right in politics; he was essentially apolitical, with pacifist and vaguely humanitarian leanings. However, the Resistance, made up largely of proscribed and hunted Communists for whom Stalin was a demigod, is unlikely to have appreciated his Olympian detachment during the years of national humiliation. Then in 1944 came the Normandy Landings, soon followed by another Allied landing in the South. After German resistance in north-western France had been broken by Montgomery and Patton in vicious, prolonged fighting, Paris was liberated and General de Gaulle made a triumphant return, walking down the Champs ╔lysΘes while hostile snipers still fired from rooftops.

During these months of liberation many Frenchmen died at the hands of their compatriots for alleged collaboration with the Nazis, while women who had consorted with German soldiers had their heads shaved and were spat upon in public. The Communists, who had suffered worst during the war, were prominent in these reprisal killings, many of which were simple acts of revenge or private feuds. At least 20, 000 people died, though the figure has been put as high as four times that. RenΘ Char, the great poet who had been a Resistance hero in the South under the nom-de-guerre "Capitaine Alexandre", strongly disapproved of these random killings, but could do little to stop them.

On September 15th Maillol was on his way by car to visit his painter-friend Raoul Dufy, when according to the official version he suffered a fatal accident and died later at his home. The most recent biography-study of him, by Bertrand Lorquin, says merely that he was "grievously wounded in a car accident." His son Lucien accepted this account and Dina Vierny, who presumably must have known the facts, apparently endorsed it. Nothing I have read about Maillol contradicts it. And yet the rumours are strong, and refuse to die out, that he was in fact attacked with a hammer by a frenzied Resistance member and did not regain consciousness. He was 83 years old and hardly likely to recover from such a beating.

In Germany and Austria - though never in France - I have heard this latter version repeated several times as accepted fact. The respected Austrian painter Georg Eisler, who sadly died a few years ago, confirmed it to me in conversation - and since Eisler was a Jew and a strong Leftist, who in 1944 was in exile in England, he was not at all likely to be duped by German propaganda. The sculptor Imogen Stuart has also told me that her teacher, the Bavarian artist Otto Hitzberger, spoke of it as something generally known and accepted. Hitzberger, too, was not a man to swallow propaganda rumours easily, since he had been persecuted under the Hitlerian regime, forbidden to show his work, and deprived of his teaching post in Berlin.

In September 1944, France was studded with burnt-out or bombed-out villages and towns, few important bridges were left standing, telephone wires had been cut, the debris of war still lay about in the track of the German retreat eastwards. In some areas, it took the newly liberated state several weeks to restore order and stability.

Given these conditions, the death of an aged sculptor, however eminent, was unlikely to make much stir and Maillol's corpse was only one among many. The probability, then, is that the affair was hushed up quickly and that the death-by-accident formula was adopted to save everybody's face and avoid the danger of an escalating scandal.

It seems unlikely that the full truth will ever emerge at this stage, but it is equally unlikely that the rumours of a violent death will wholly die away. The Maillol case, though never discussed in public, is one of the more shadowy chapters in 20th-century art history.