In the Mediterranean light of Banyuls-sur-Mer, between sea and cypress trees, opens an exhibition as intimate as it is moving. Harmony. The Ultimate Masterpiece looks back on the four years (1940–1944) that Aristide Maillol devoted to his final major sculpture, left unfinished at the time of his death. Despite its incomplete fate, Harmony joins its sister sculptures in the pantheon of Maillol’s masterpieces, now held in museums across the world—in the United States, Israel, Japan, and, of course, at the town hall of Banyuls-sur-Mer. The story behind this famous bronze even inspired the Franco-Spanish film The Artist and the Model, starring Jean Rochefort and Claudia Cardinale in 2012.

Conceived in the isolation of the Roume Valley, at the heart of the Second World War, this statue forever seals the bond between the eighty-year-old sculptor and his young, politically committed muse, Dina Vierny.

More than just a tribute, the exhibition at the Musée Maillol in Banyuls is a visual, historical, and emotional investigation. Visitors discover the various stages of the sculpture, the drawings, formal studies, but also letters, archives, absences and silences. For behind Harmony’s gentle stillness lies a story of war, waiting, and threatened beauty.

A Studio in Wartime

The first part of the exhibition immerses visitors in the world of the studio, in Maillol’s constant experimentation and evolving vision. It features the initial torso, numerous drawn sketches with endless variations, and never-before-seen archives. This is an introduction to the creative context of the sculpture: the mountain farmhouse.

In 1939, Maillol left Paris and withdrew to Banyuls. There, he began what he called an exceptional project: a life-size sculpture, modeled directly from the living body of Dina Vierny. For the first time, he sought to “be more realistic, more alive than in anything [he had] done before.” Dina became a daily presence at the “pink house” or at the remote farmhouse in the hills, posing for countless drawings, paintings, torso studies, heads, and feet.

Yet behind this apparent calm, the world was collapsing. Far from being a passive muse, Dina was already involved in resistance networks. She crossed cities, helped refugees flee the Occupation, sang in a cabaret in Marseille, and was eventually arrested in Paris in 1943. Maillol, worried, wrote to his contacts: “The survival of my statue depends on getting her back.” He even appealed to Arno Breker, the official sculptor of the Nazi regime, to secure her release. Dina’s return in November 1943 finally allowed Maillol to resume work—but time was running out. He died in a car accident in September 1944. Dina, back in Paris, took part in the Liberation.

A Sculpture Without Arms, A Work Without End

The second part of the exhibition focuses on the outcome of those four years of labor, presenting the sculpture as it stood at Maillol’s death—through its various stages, as many iterations that the artist was unable to complete during the war years.

Four sculptural versions of Harmony are shown in the exhibition, all without arms. This is not a stylistic choice: Maillol had planned for the right hand to support the left breast in an intimate, symbolic gesture. “She will be something like the symbol of a rose,” he told historian John Rewald, who witnessed the modeling sessions. It was Rewald who suggested the final title: Harmony.

Far from diminishing the work, the missing arms imbue it with a unique tension. They symbolize incompletion, the fragility of the project, and the unending quest for balance. The body, gently undulating, seems caught in suspended motion. The tilted head and subtle smile recall the Southeast Asian figures that Maillol admired at World Fairs. The sculpture bears the influence of both Eastern aesthetics and Cézanne’s legacy: pure forms, synthesized volumes, and rigorous balance.

Maillol wrote: “This is the tightest sculpture I’ve ever made, the closest to nature.” There is nothing anecdotal or decorative here. Just a standing body, human and vulnerable, carrying a promise of peace amid chaos.

“For this work, I want to be more realistic, more alive than in anything I’ve done before.”

– Aristide Maillol

A Quest for Harmony in the Midst of Chaos

The Musée Maillol’s exhibition reveals that Harmony is not a serene farewell, but a work of inner struggle—a form of aesthetic resistance. The contrast between the sculpture’s silence and the turmoil of its creation is striking. The exhibition brings this tension into focus: between the softness of the modeling and the violence of the context; between Maillol’s introspection and Dina’s fiery determination; between the pursuit of formal order and the impossibility of completeness.

Maillol’s final notebook, displayed here for the first time, contains a few words addressed to Dina. He believed she had been arrested again. Even on the eve of his death, the sculptor still seemed to think she needed to be freed so that he could continue the statue. The bond between them—woven from mutual admiration, confrontation, and deep friendship—runs throughout the exhibition.

Through a compact yet rich exhibition, visitors are brought back to the essential: a sculpture, a place, a human connection. The exceptional loan of the version of Harmony held in the gardens of the town hall allows the public to rediscover it in its birthplace. The understated, meditative scenography evokes the warmth of a studio hidden in the scrubland, drawings pinned to the walls, the stubborn research of the aging master. The voices of Maillol and Dina seem almost audible.

“It’s my portrait, and it’s his testament,” said Dina Vierny. This armless, unfinished nude may well be the most perfect expression of Maillol’s art. It embodies an idea of beauty that not even war could destroy. Harmony has no arms, and yet it embraces—history, pain, desire, and the unshakable quest for a world in balance.