Gentileschi often painted herself in various guises, including as a saint, the Old Testament figure Judith, even a Greek muse. When an artist looks to herself for inspiration, can she fairly be called a muse? Millington says yes and presents Italian Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi as a prime example. Still, Bacon continued to paint his deceased lover in what Millington characterizes as a struggle “to exorcise his sense of loss, as well as guilt, at the suicide of the great romantic muse whose shadow he could never quite escape.” Three years later, Dyer overdosed on alcohol and drugs. He went to the police and accused Bacon of secreting drugs in his studio. Things unraveled after Dyer discovered that Bacon was having an affair with another man. As one art critic observed, “A man beyond good and evil who would stop at nothing was also the kind of man whom Bacon, in his active sexual fantasies, most hoped to meet.” In the ensuing relationship, Bacon painted numerous portraits of his lover, and paid him for posing and doing handyman work. The artist, older and already established, was captivated by Dyer’s sexual energy. The connection began in 1963 when Dyer, an unreconstructed petty thief, approached Bacon in a pub. Like many before her, Maar was both muse and model.Īnother troubled relationship that inspired art was that between British painter Francis Bacon and George Dyer. In The Weeping Woman, pain is concentrated in an individual. Although that picture is often seen by critics to be an unflattering portrait of Maar - a reflection of her troubled relationship with Picasso - Millington interprets the image differently. The suffering shown in Guernica is spread among villagers who were bombed during the Spanish civil war. Immediately after finishing that painting, Picasso began The Weeping Woman, for which Maar posed. For example, that impact can be seen in Guernica, Picasso’s seminal 1937 work. Millington credits Maar with broadening Picasso’s outlook, encouraging him to make human suffering an explicit subject of his work. Far more consequential, though, were her left-wing political views and their influence on Picasso. Less well known is the fact that she was a photographer of some renown, and that they sometimes collaborated. Dora Maar, for instance, is well known as one of Pablo Picasso’s romantic partners and a subject of his paintings. “Could this characterization actually be somewhat lazy and untrue?” Millington writes, before introducing twenty-nine real life situations that offer a broader, more generous view of what a muse can be. Taking the premise of Chevalier’s novel as a rhetorical starting point, she questions whether the maid - powerless, submissive and female - accurately represents what it means to be a muse. In her new book, Ruth Millington aims to shake up how we think of artistic muses. In this telling, class distinctions, power differentials, and sexual tension inevitably come with the idea of the muse. On the cusp of the 21 st century, Tracy Chevalier created a fictional muse in her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, when a young woman enters the household of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer as a maid and eventually becomes his muse and model, the inspiration for the book eponymous painting. In the Italian Renaissance, that inspiration sometimes came accompanied by sexual innuendo, when painters depicted muses as nubile young women, their bodies only partially covered by dresses and drapes. As far back as ancient Greece, artists of all genres turned to these mythological creatures for inspiration. Pegasus, 320 pages, $27.95.Īrtistic muses have been with us a long time. Muse: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpiecesby Ruth Millington. Muse upends convention by examining twenty-nine real life situations that offer a broader, and more generous, view of what a muse can be.
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