Biography

Gide, Mirbeau, Denis and Barbusse praise him. These friends manage to get him the commission for the monument to Auguste Blanqui, Action in Chains. Maillol sells a stone statue that is larger than real life, called Nymph or Serenity, to a German collector with the help of Count Kessler. He makes a portrait of Renoir in Essoyes.

Maillol is interested and takes part in the cultural and artistic life in the districts of Gerona. He participates in the activities of the Athenea Association and becomes part of the circle that includes Prudenci Bertrana, Carles Rahola, Xavier Montsalvatge, Miquel de Palol and Dídac Ruiz.
He firstly hires a young sculptor from Camprodon, Joaquim Claret (1906-1910) and subsequently the promising Ricard Guinó (1910-1913) on the recommendation of Bertrana, a result of being close to the cultural activities of the area.
His admiration for ancient history takes him on trips to Empúries, where the Barcelona Museum Board with the Institut d’Estudis Catalans is starting the first excavation campaigns.

He sets off to Greece from Marseille with Count Kessler on 25 April 1908; Hugo von Hofmannsthal meets them in Athens. He finishes Desire and The Cyclist when he returns. He works on a large piece, The Night.
The Monument to Blanqui in Puget-Théniers is created, but it is not inaugurated.
Maillol donates a bronze version of Mediterranean to Perpignan in August 1909, which is placed in the patio of the City Hall three years later.
He makes his first woodcuts for the Virgil's Eclogues as commissioned by Count Kessler. He exhibits a plaster statue in the Salon d’Automne in 1910, Pomona, which becomes very successful in international art press and he receives his first favourable criticism from Paris, which had been quiet until then.
A Russian collector, Morozov, purchases Pomona and commissions three more sculptures from Maillol: Summer, Spring and Flora. These works occupy Maillol from 1910 to 1912. Maillol imagines a girl walking on water: a torso without arms or a head. He makes three variations of this topic from 1912 to 1921. Île de France was made from this torso in 1925.

1911-1914
He exhibits tapestries in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. He makes all the woodcuts for Eclogues, which do not appear until after the war in 1926. Thank to his friends, he receives the commission for the Monument to Cézanne to be placed in Aix-en-Provence. The city of Aix-en-Provence would reject the monument.
From 1910 to 1914 he visits his artist friends Enric Casanovas, Manolo Hugué, Pablo Picasso, Deodat de Severac and Joaquim Sunyer who have moved to Céret. Maillol carries out research to create a kind of paper in 1906, which he ends up showing to Count Kessler.
This research takes the two men to Girona in March 1912 to visit a paper factory. They make the most of the trip to visit Bertrana and Rahola. On their return to Paris, the Count decides to finance a small company to manufacture the paper according to the process conceived by Maillol. Located in the village Montval, near Marly-le-Roi, it does not take long for the company to become big and it is passed on to his nephew, Gaspar Maillol, who sells it in 1925. The first watermark on the Montval paper has the initials of Maillol and Kessler and is crowned with an image of Mediterranean.