Portrait of a Gentleman

One of the immediate solutions in the reaction against academic, neo-Renaissance and naturally conservative formulas was always expressive accentuation, dramatic emphasis. Martini had already reacted to late-19th-century naturalism with the expressionistic primitivism of the Prostitute. After 1935, and all the more so as the tragedy of the war raged, it was precisely on these two notions, primitivism and expressionism, that the search for a new language, better able to express the complex and contradictory situation of modern man, developed in both painting and sculpture. Maine, a shy and retiring artist, has always responded with great vigour, from his provincial corner, to the stimuli of a spiritualist culture aimed at recovering a new dignity for man above the fractures of an unprecedented barbarism. His mark tears and cleaves, hollows and twists the material, bending it, polemically, to intensely expressive values and meanings bordering on the symbol.