13 captivating women and men who have become muses for great artists and photographers

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

History is full of captivating muses: from mythical idealized beauties to ordinary women, as well as men who have inspired artists, sculptors, poets, composers, filmmakers, screenwriters, photographers and musicians, regardless of the era in the yard. Each of them was unique and interesting in its own way, so much so that creative personalities, literally losing their heads, devoted to them not only their works of art, but sometimes their whole lives.

1. Amelie Gotro

Parisian socialite, the beauty Amelie Gautreau (better known as "Madame X"), was the main cause of the scandal that erupted around the painting by John Singer Sargent in 1884. The painting caused a scandal in Paris when it was presented at an exhibition at the Salon of that year: the image, including Gautreau's clothes, was recognized as "blatantly vulgar", as a result, she and Sargent were humiliated by public criticism. Indeed, this sensation ended Sargent's career as a portrait painter in France, prompting him to move to London.

Before the scandal, Amelie was a "professional beauty", whose appearance, according to eyewitnesses, literally knocked everyone out. She was unnaturally pale, so much so that it was rumored that she had swallowed a small amount of arsenic in order to achieve her "otherworldly" pallor. But later it was proved that the light-skinned Parisian woman used rice powder with a light lavender scent.

In Madame X, Amelie's open ear is pink, although some sources suggest she dyed her ears to keep her skin tone natural.

In her dramatic short story, Strapless, Davis reveals that the once-famous Gautro never fully recovered from the scandal that gripped her after the portrait was unveiled. She became a recluse, removing all the mirrors from her home, and died in relative obscurity.

2. Quiz Louise Meuran

The artist Quiz Louise Meuran is best known for being the muse of Edouard Manet himself, who portrayed her in his landmark 1863 work Olympia. She is also depicted in Breakfast on the Grass, Woman with a Parrot, Railroad and a number of other paintings.

Louise was born in Paris to a family of artisans - her mother was a milliner and her father patinated bronze sculptures. She began modeling at the age of sixteen and first worked with Manet in 1862 on his painting "The Street Singer", although it is still not known how they met. She also worked as a model for artists Edgar Degas and Alfred Stevens.

Unlike many other muses, especially at the time, Quiz was not Manet's mistress, although it was assumed she was romantically involved with Stevens.

3. Audrey Manson

Known as Miss Manhattan and Panama Pacific Girl, Audrey Manson was the most popular model of her time. According to the 1915 Oxford article, she "posed for most of all the sculptures of the Panama-Pacific Exhibition" (which featured over 1,500 sculptures).

When she was fifteen, she first posed for the sculptor Isidore Conti and became the preferred model of Alexander Stirling Calder. In 1915, Audrey sparked a scandal among the censors of the American film industry when she played the artist's muse, becoming the first woman to appear completely nude in a (non-pornographic) motion picture.

In her memoirs, she wrote:

Her life began to go downhill in 1919 when she was living at a New York boarding house. Apparently, Audrey's infatuated landlord, Dr. Walter Wilkins, killed his wife. The tabloids immediately dubbed the murder a "crime of passion," inspired (albeit unwittingly) by America's most famous model. Sentenced to death, he hanged himself in prison, and Manson's reputation was irreparably damaged.

Three years later, unable to find a job and settling with her mother in a small town in New York State, she attempted suicide. In 1931 she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she remained until her death, dying in 1996 at the age of one hundred and four years.

4. Alice Pren

Alice Ernestine Pren, aka Kiki de Montparnasse, began posing nude for artists when she was fourteen years old. She became one of the most famous model artists in Paris, as well as a nightclub singer, painter and actress. She has posed for dozens of artists, including Jean Cocteau, Moses Kisling and Alexander Calder, and has also starred in short films.

Kiki was the muse of the photographer Man Ray, with whom she had a relationship throughout the 1920s. It was Man Ray who photographed Kiki as Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres Violin), in which she is depicted from behind, with two violin f-holes painted on her back.

By the late 1920s, she became known as the "Queen of Montparnasse". The girl performed in a cabaret, and in the 30s she opened her own cabaret "Chez Kiki".

Her appearance was legendary: a sharply trimmed black bob with straight thick bangs, pale white skin, dark red lips, and heavily painted eyebrows. This iconic helmet-like hairstyle can be seen in art including paintings, photographs, and a 1928 bronze Kiki de Montparnasse by Pablo Gargallo.

Kiki was known for her optimism and enthusiasm, as well as for her provocative nature: she considered underwear bourgeois, although this may have been understandable given her first job in a printing house at the age of twelve, associated with binding copies of the Kama Sutra. She became a symbol of the burgeoning bohemian environment on the left bank of Paris in the 1920s and 30s, along with such famous figures as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce.

In 1927, Kiki enjoyed a sold-out exhibition of her own paintings at the Galerie Au Sacre du Printemps. Her memoir, published in 1929, contained an introduction to Hemingway. The book was banned in the United States until the 70s on grounds of obscenity.

The legendary muse died of substance abuse at the age of fifty-one and was widely mourned.

5. Louise Flöge

Gustav Klimt's life partner, Emilia Louise Flöge, is featured in his 1908 masterpiece The Kiss, which depicts the couple as lovers covered in shimmering gold. Klimt also portrayed the Austrian fashion designer in a 1902 painting called Emily Flöge.

Although they were never officially married, they were together until the artist's death in 1918.

Klimt researcher Paul Simpson writes in his book Flöge and the Klimt Family Affair that there are over six hundred love letters between the couple throughout their ten-year romance. However, it is also rumored that Gustav slept with many of the high society models and beauties he painted, and is even said to have fathered at least fourteen children.

6. Edie Sedgwick

Socialite and Poor Little Rich Girl Edie Sedgwick had an undeniably codependent relationship with pop icon Andy Warhol.

Edie has been an integral part of the iconic Warhol Factory, as well as a star in two screen tests and several films, including Chao! Manhattan.

Warhol also drew her several times. Edie's image and iconic sense of style, which included a short haircut, dangling earrings, fur coats, and sometimes no pants, captivated the rather shy pop artist. It is also said that Sedgwick was the inspiration for Bob Dylan's songs such as "Rolling Stone", "Just Like a Woman" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat".

7. Ilona Staller

Ilona Staller, also known as Cicciolina, married Jeff Koons in 1991. He was inspired by a porn star and an Italian politician in one bottle to create a candid series "Made in Heaven", which featured both photographs and sculptures of a couple making love at different stages.

After their marriage fell apart in 1994, the couple entered a fierce battle over custody of their then two-year-old son Ludwig. Despite the fact that Koons won custody, Ilona kept her son next to her in Italy and allegedly refused to allow the artist to see him. This situation soon became the inspiration for Koons, which gave birth to a series of works "Celebration", which features large, shiny balloons in the form of animals.

8. Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel was an important artist in her own right, but her work was often overshadowed by her relationship with her mentor, Auguste Rodin. She began her career working in his studio, and, despite the twenty-five year age difference and Rodin's affection for long-term partner Rosa Bere, they soon began an affair that would last more than ten years.

Rodin created several sculptures depicting Camille, including a portrait of Camille wearing a hat. Unfortunately, Claudel destroyed most of her own work and spent the last three decades of her life in an insane asylum. Her tragic life story has inspired books, films and plays that explore her life as an artist and muse.

9. Ada del Moro

Ada del Moro is the wife of artist Alex Katz, who portrayed her as a classic dark-haired beauty in over forty imaginative works, including Black Dress, Ada in a Bathing Cap and Red Scarf.

In 2006, the Jewish Museum hosted the exhibition "Alex Katz Painting Hell", which presented her portraits made with love.

The couple met in 1957 at one of Katz's exhibitions at the Tanager Gallery in New York. In an article about the couple in T magazine, Katz says she was already a legend in the art world when they met, while she claims she was actually embarrassed to go to galleries.

Portraits of Katz's wife tend to show her stylishly dressed and radiating positivity.

- said Katz.

10. Dora Maar

The dark-haired beauty Dora Maar was Pablo Picasso's muse in the 1930s and 40s. She inspired the artist to paint some of his most famous paintings, including Guernica and The Weeping Woman.

Dora met Picasso in 1936 and became the only person who was allowed to capture the successive stages of Guernica as Picasso painted her.

11. Gala Dyakonova

Born in Russia as Elena Ivanovna Dyakonova, Gala Dyakonova became a muse for not one, but three men. She started out as the wife of the surrealist poet Paul Eluard and was also the mistress of the painter Max Ernst - the trio spent three years at the ménage à trois. But she is best remembered for her relationship with Salvador Dali. She met Dali, then an aspiring artist, in 1929, and, despite the fact that she was ten years older than him, they fell in love.

And from that very day she became not only his lover and wife, but the main inspiration to whom he devoted most of his works.

12. George Dyer

George Dyer, a petty con artist, met the artist Francis Bacon in 1963. Their romance was turbulent and ultimately tragic: just two days before the opening of the 1971 Bacon retrospective at the Grand Palais, Dyer committed suicide.

In Michael Pippiat's book Francis Bacon: Anatomy of a Mystery, Bacon recalls the circumstances of their meeting:

Bacon painted several portraits of his lover and muse both before and after his death. A later work, a triptych May - June 1973, is directly dedicated to the moment of Dyer's death.

13. Sandra Bush

Not all muses are lovers. For Mikalaine Thomas, her biggest source of inspiration was her mother, Sandra Bush. Mikalaine portrayed her mother, a former model, in several of her characteristically exuberant collage paintings as the quintessential 1970s, complemented by a chunky afro and rhinestone-encrusted outfit.

In the 2012 film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, Thomas shows a different side of his mother: an aging woman with kidney disease who tells her own incredible life story through questions asked by Mikalaine, who is left behind the scenes.

Read also how eleven women posing as men achieved universal recognition, becoming one of the most successful in their field.