Elle est belle, elle ne signifie rien.
ANDRÉ GIDE
Where do the sculptures of Aristides Maillol which appear in Mies van der Rohe's collages in his Museum project for a small town come from? In this project, commissioned by the Architectural Forum for its special issue "New Buildings for 194X" in May 1943, four Maillol sculptures share space with Picasso's Guernica and with another cubist painting by Braque: 'Torse de jeune fille' from 1930, 'Étude pour le monument à Paul Cézanne' from 1912, 'L'Action enchaînée' from 1906 and 'La Nuit' from 1905.
The origin of Guernica in this imaginary museum is clear. Picasso's painting arrives in America in 1939 and, until 1942, it is exhibited in several north american cities. Among them Chicago. From December 4th to 28th, 1940, The Arts Club of Chicago organizes a retrospective exhibition of Maillol's work. In addition, a year before this exhibition, a monograph is published by Berlin-based art historian John Rewald.
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| Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'Concert Hall' (1942) |
In 1942 Mies choses another sculpture by Maillol to illustrate his Concert Hall project. In this case, he creates a photomontage, with an image of the assembly hangar of the aircraft factory Glenn L. Martin Company, by the architect Albert Kahn, as a backdrop, where Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' appears, in the foreground, as a ready-made. His presence, however, reinforces the idea that, in this context, nothing is what it seems. It is not until a few years later that the sculptor Mary Callery, a personal friend of Mies, will remove Maillol's work to place the figure of a scribe from Ancient Egypt. Although in the catalog of his retrospective exhibition, between September 16th, 1947, and January 25th, 1948, at the MoMA, Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' will still be there.
That photomontage has its origins in an architectural design course that Mies teaches in January 1941 at the IIT. In this course he proposes as a theme a concert hall and three different ways of approaching his architectural solution. One of his students, Paul Camagna, opts for the solution of a single large open space with strictly acoustic partitions. And this is how the interior photography of a large industrial space is chosen, such as the assembly hangar for the PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat. Years later, Campagna himself will admit that the concert hall project is more of Mies than his.
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| Peter Behrens 'Ausstellungsraum in der Kunsthalle, Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung, Mannheim' (1907) |
A year before Mies entered his studio, Peter Behrens asks Karl Ernst Osthaus, an art collector and patron, for a female nude by Aristides Maillol like the one it was exhibited, between April and September 1906, at the eleventh Kunstausstellung (art show) of the Berlin Secession. Osthaus brings him a plaster reproduction of 'Le Méditerranée'. This is how Maillol's sculpture, perhaps under the influence of german Hellenism, will become the main character of the room created by Behrens at the Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung in Mannheim.
But Maillol is not the first sculptor to whom Mies turns to in his works. In fact, in his collages for the courtyard houses of 1938 he incorporates sculptures by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a personal friend of his brother Ewald who was also a sculptor. Another photograph of the interior of Villa Tugendhat from 1930 already shows a sculpture by Lehmbruck himself. It is none other than 'Torso' from 1914. And in the Glasraum (glass room), designed by Mies and Lilly Reich, for the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, we find his 'Maedchen, sich umwendend' of 1913.
In one of the first versions of the German Pavilion in Barcelona, Mies plans to incorporate up to three sculptures. One where we can find now ‘Der Morgen’ (the morning) by Georg Kolbe. A second, also on open air, at the edge of the main pond. And the third in the central space of the Pavilion. On the other hand, in a collage of 1928 a figure seated in the inner pond is glimpsed. There is also a drawing by the architect Sergius Ruegenberg, then Mies's assistant and later Hans Scharoun's collaborator in his Berlin Kollektivplan, where a figure sitting in the same place can also be seen.
If Kolbe’s statue, at that stage of the design, isn’t even drawn it may be because it isn’t expected to be there. If we also consider that Lehmbruck and Kolbe did not make this type of sculpture, it can also be that the sculpture Mies has in mind, from the beginning, is none other than Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée'. On the other hand, the Pavilion is nothing but a Mies collage. In this case, a badly re-constructed collage. Because, despite not being a work by Mies, both Puig i Cadafalch's exterior colonnade and Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' are integral parts of the Pavilion. Because form, by itself, does not exist.
Nowadays, you can see Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' in the courtyard of Perpignan's City Council. A woman isolated and elevated in a pedestal leaning her, left, arm on her, also left, bent leg. It could be said that his skin is crushed by the sun of this Catalan Arcadia. Go see her, stand in front of her, accompany her for a while. She is all we have left of what could have happened in Mies Pavilion.