L'Air

In December 1936 the aviator Jean Mermoz vanished over the South Atlantic, one more loss among the airmail crews who flew the Aéropostale line from Toulouse to South America. In 1938 the city of Toulouse asked Maillol for a monument to those pilots. He began from something he already had, a plaster of a reclining woman made years earlier for a memorial to the painter Cézanne. He cut it apart and put it back together, tilting the torso forward, lifting one leg, freeing an arm from the body. Maillol called this marcottage, the gardener's word for growing a new plant from a branch still attached to the old one.

The stone version was finished in 1939 but reached a Toulouse garden only in 1948, four years after his death. This figure comes from a later reworking of the plaster, with the drapery and hidden supports taken away, so she touches her base at a single point, the right hip. It was cast in a lead alloy in 1962, one of an edition of six. It first came to the garden on loan, and the director Bram Hammacher bought it and gave it a concrete pedestal on a small rise.