The 73-year old Maillol wrote a letter to Dina, telling her (humbly): ‘I am told that you resemble a Maillol and a Renoir. I would be satisfied with a Renoir’. She would be his muse for the last ten years of his life, inspiring the old sculptor to unexpected masterpieces. Their relation was strictly professional and would always stay platonic. When she began to study chemistry and physics, Maillol invented postures in which she could keep on reading her books. Dina Vierny would grow into a key figure in the French art world, befriending important artists like Matisse, Bonnard and artists from the Surrealistic movement.
During WWII, Vierny risked her life by guiding refugees over the Pyrenees from occupied France to Spain. As soon as he discovered these activities, Maillol – who was a native resident of Banyuls, a small fishing village near the Spanish border – decided to help her by showing all the goat paths and smuggler routes needed to cross the mountains unnoticed. Soon his workshop in the hills of Banyuls became the starting point of the route. Dina Vierny got arrested twice, by the French police and by the Gestapo. Maillol saved her both times, the second time through the intercession of his friend Arno Breker, who – ironically - was a Nazi and known as ‘Hitler's favorite sculptor.’
After the war, Dina Vierny carried out two important projects in Paris with the intent to immortalize Maillol’s name: she gave twenty masterpieces of Maillol to the French state for exhibition in the Tuileries; later, she founded a Maillol museum in Paris. She died there in 1999, above the exposition rooms, aged 89.
(text: Maarten Levendig)
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