Since then, artists as different as Rubens, Bonnard, Renoir, Charles Blackman and Brett Whiteley have painted their wives over and over again, but their wives were their subjects rather than their muses. Andrea del Sarto, an Italian painter born in 1486, was famously married to his muse, Lucrezia, whose features so closely approached his ideal that he made all his female figures in her likeness, at a time when most other painters were building their beautiful female images on the well-loved bodies of boys. Painters don't claim muses until painting begins to take itself as seriously as poetry. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind. The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. If Freud can be said to have had a muse, Bowery was it.Ī muse is anything but a paid model. He was allowed to pose standing erect, above Freud's eyeline, with his eyes open and focused, as no woman ever was. Bowery's big, glossy body was for Freud "perfectly beautiful". Freud tried again and again to reduce him to anonymity and failed. Bowery was the one subject Freud's ego could not subdue, partly because he wore his skin the way other people wear evening dress. At the same time, Freud was struggling to "work off" (his own expression) the sumptuous nakedness of Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery. Tilley posed for Freud a couple of days a week over a period of nine months in 1995, for the miserly sum of £20 a day. The thrilling news that Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping had fetched £17.2m at auction had the BBC and the Times so overexcited that they dubbed the model for the painting, Sue Tilley, Freud's muse - as if she didn't simply lie heaped on a sofa with her eyes shut while he painted her, but inspired him as well. Lucien Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |