If, as the saying goes, every picture tells a story, there’s often a greater real-life narrative hidden beyond the frame. But over time, many of these have been forgotten, ignored or, perhaps worse, mythologised. Among the most romanticised accounts are those which frame the artist’s muse as a passive female victim, and perhaps none more than Elizabeth Siddall. Having posed for Millais’s famous painting Ophelia, she has since been fixed in the image of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine, floating lifelessly among the wilted flowers of her watery grave. Distorting fact into fiction, Siddall has been held up by many as a symbol of the mistreated, suffering muse.
But, if Siddall signifies all sacrificial muses, she thus also proves the need to emancipate them all from misleading legends and reductive narratives. Having awakened the real woman behind Millais’s painting, it’s apparent that Siddall was not passive, but an active protagonist of paintings for which she performed, bringing not just beauty but creativity to the role. At a time when women faced many barriers in the art world, it also gave her an opportunity, which she seized, to further her career as a painter and poet. Separating Siddall from Ophelia demonstrates that we must reverse conventionally accepted ideas of the muse.
Unsurprisingly, the concept of the muse has long been critiqued and condemned by feminist art historians, who have called out the word for its associations with patriarchal power dynamics between female muses and male artists, particularly in cases where muses, such as Siddall, are also artists. This loaded label has undeniably cast a shadow over such individuals, diminishing their own creative practice. Consequently, not only has the term been protested, but there have also been strong calls for it to be cancelled.
But the word ‘muse’ is not going anywhere and nor should it. Ever since the Ancient Greeks celebrated their divine muses, the term has been invoked by artists, written into history books, perpetuated by popular culture and cast onto our screens. Over time, our modern idea of the muse has gained unfair connotations of feminine passivity and romance, perpetuated by patriarchal narratives which have sought to celebrate the genius of the great male artist who possesses a muse, or several.
If we are to challenge such outdated stereotypes of the muse, we need the term. It enables nuanced discussions around the inspiring individuals who have made immense, but often overlooked, contributions to art history. As this book has shown, we must replace reductive narratives with a much wider picture of who and what the muse is, broadening our understanding of their true input and unique influence. By offering more accurate and complete accounts, from the perspective of the muse, we can, and must, banish reductive tropes and restore the original power of the term.
It’s time to reclaim the muse.
As early as the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi had already reclaimed the concept of the muse from her male counterparts. In a powerful act of control, she presented herself as Clio, the Muse of History, to take possession of her own body and paint herself into history. Meanwhile, the likes of Amrita Sher-Gil have played with notions of the sensual ‘exotic’ muse to critique such stereotypes from within. Frida Kahlo, who famously asserted that she was her ‘own muse’, went one step further in her paintings – not only exposing but cutting open her naked body to analyse, release and treat the pain within.
Like Kahlo, many artists have harnessed the power of self-portraiture to tell their own personal stories, using art as a powerful form of therapy, self-acceptance and even activism. In introspective photographs, Sunil Gupta interrogates and openly shares his identity as a gay Indian man living with AIDS to shatter the stigmas which exist around the disease, while Nilupa Yasmin weaves together family photographs as a means of exploring, reconnecting with, and preserving, her rich South Asian heritage.
Given the special bonds which exist between parent and child, family members frequently feature as deeply personal muses, while reflecting the culturally specific contexts within which they live. Most notably, Fukase Sukezo playfully posed for his son within the family’s photographic studio. The resulting images both parody and elevate the traditional Japanese portrait to ‘art photography’; Fukase Masahisa was paying a powerful tribute to the man who created, taught and inspired him. Meanwhile, Marlene Dumas has investigated the complex emotions, including fear, which a child can stir up; portraying her daughter Helena, she created a protective barrier between viewers and her young muse through layers of abstraction.
Romantic love, too, has been a great driving force for many artists and muses: the shadow of George Dyer haunts the most menacing paintings by Francis Bacon, who attempted to capture the destructive dynamic of their relationship on canvas. In contrast, Ada Katz, who gave up a successful career as a scientist for the role of muse, cuts a smart, sophisticated and fashionable figure in her husband’s paintings, which denote their shared American Dream throughout the decades. As his act of love, Salvador Dalí co-signed his surrealist paintings with the name of his wife, Gala Dalí, awarding recognition to the woman who brought business acumen, ambition and creativity to the position.
Throughout modern art, in particular, we have seen the phenomenon of mutual muses, particularly in pairings of artists who have sparked reciprocal creativity in one another: Guernica wouldn’t exist without the photography and politics of Dora Maar, nor would Gustav Klimt have acquired his signature style without the trail-blazing fashion designs of Emilie Flöge. Such partnerships prove that muses are not always models, although these women featured in two of the world’s best-loved paintings. Meanwhile, many of Marina Abramović’s most heart-stopping performances would not have been possible without her trusted Ulay. Acting as allied collaborators in a shared endeavour, these muses have defied expectations and conventions, to break new artistic ground together.
While some muses have fallen into the role unintentionally, others have sought the status in an act of subversion, manoeuvring it, strategically, to inspire entire movements and ensure their own legacy. The Bloomsbury Group was formed around the formidable Lady Ottoline Morrell, who befriended, supported and hosted artists and writers, who in turn depicted her in the theatrical images she fashioned. Similarly, Sunday Reed mentored, funded, championed and modelled for many of Australia’s most notable modern artists, including Sidney Nolan, whom she housed at Heide. In Venice, Luisa Casati transformed herself into a living work of art, enthralling and advocating for artists such as Italy’s Futurists, who claimed her as one of their own.
Numerous muses have also collaborated with artists to broadcast both personal and political messages. By posing nude for the pioneering, gender-swapped paintings of Sylvia Sleigh, curator and critic Lawrence Alloway was both actively complicit in, and a powerful ally for, his wife’s feminist interventions in art history. Contemporary artist Pixy Liao has continued such conversations with photographs of her boyfriend, Moro, in which he lies naked, transformed into a life-size sushi roll. Through these subversive images, the pair poke fun at, and protest, the expected gender roles in heterosexual, romantic partnerships. Moro points to the fact he is just ‘an ordinary Japanese guy’, which allows him to stand for the everyman. But this muse also brings wit, willingness and humility to the role, without which Liao’s staged photographs would not be possible.
This same sense of performance has defined numerous collaborations, particularly where the muse is an actor or entertainer. Most notably, power-art couple of the 1980s, Grace Jones and Keith Haring, brought the street artist’s doodles to the stage, where Jones revelled in her image as a graffiti goddess. Deep in the Mexican jungle, meanwhile, Tilda Swinton awoke Tim Walker’s enchanted dream-world to enact expressions of androgyny with demanding presence. Despite the long hours and exhausting work of modelling, carer-turned-model Lila Nunes has taken great pleasure in performing as an entire cast of magical characters inside the studio of Paula Rego; connected by their shared Portuguese heritage and gender, artist and muse have united to tell gripping stories of women taking revenge.
Similarly, Sue Tilley has not just enjoyed, but benefited from, the hours she spent asleep in Lucian Freud’s studio, using her association with the British painter to launch her own creative career. From job centre supervisor to Freud’s most famous sitter, Tilley exploded all conventional ideas of who could be a muse in the 1990s. But she was far from the first; Diego Velázquez elevated his enslaved assistant to the status of free man with the dignifying portrait Juan de Pareja, before freeing him in real life. Such paintings demonstrate the diversity of muses, who exist far beyond limiting stereotypes.
While de Pareja stands centre stage, many other muses have historically remained in the shadows, anonymous, and awaiting discovery. No muse has been more overlooked than the Black maid in Édouard Manet’s masterpiece, Olympia (1863). For decades, scholars fixated on the central white female muse, Victorine Meurent, who posed as a nude Parisian sex worker, gazing directly at the viewer, from her bed. However, during the 1990s, post-colonial and feminist accounts began to focus on the figure of the maid, who brings her mistress a bouquet of flowers, likely from a client.
For many critics, Manet’s canvas is characterised by oppression and racial stereotypes: ‘Olympia’s maid, like all other “peripheral Negroes”, is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery’, writes Lorraine O’ Grady. Although Laure does undoubtedly assume a traditional position of servitude in Manet’s painting, she also moves beyond stereotypical representations of Black figures, prevalent in nineteenth-century French painting. Curator and art historian Denise Murrell, whose research draws attention to art history’s Black muses, points out that Manet has broken with hypersexualised representations of Black women, popular among his peers: ‘She’s not bare-breasted or in the gorgeously rendered exotic attire of the harem servant’.
Instead, dressed in contemporary fashion, Laure appears as a member of the new free Black community who had come to Paris following France’s abolition of slavery fifteen years earlier. Within the composition, she is also directly engaged in the action, symbolising her status as a working-class woman. As Murrell argues, ‘she almost seems to be a friend of the prostitute, maybe even advising her’. Both women play an equally important role in the painting, through which Manet was offering a snapshot into the realities of modern Parisian life in the 1860s. As Murrell concludes, this painting ‘shows the limits of freedom in a society which is still essentially racist and sexist, those limits of freedom for both these women’.
Identifying, and understanding the lived experiences of, depicted muses adds real depth to our understanding of renowned artworks, such as Olympia. Laure, who lived just a short walk from the artist’s studio, appears in another two paintings by Manet, who referred to her as ‘very beautiful’ in his notebook. But, given Eurocentric notions of desirability still abound in art history’s narratives of the muse, many Black sitters have been overshadowed by their white counterparts. Just as Meurent has eclipsed Laure, the preoccupation with Siddall has meant that other Pre-Raphaelite muses, including Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton, have been overlooked. Meanwhile, a deeply personal poem, written by artist and performer Oroma Elewa in 2011, has been misattributed to Frida Kahlo:
I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better.
Since sharing her words online, Elewa’s poem has been posted across the internet alongside paintings by the Mexican artist, printed on merchandise, and woven into the constructed and commodified Kahlo brand.
While Elewa reclaims her poignant words, many other contemporary artists deliberately challenge, deconstruct and replace outdated tropes with an expanded vision of the muse. Not only has Awol Erizku framed Beyoncé as a divine figure of fertility in her pregnancy photoshoot, but he has repeatedly inserted Black sitters into the frames of famous works with photographs such as Girl with a Bamboo Earring (2009) and Elsa (2013) in which an Ethiopian sex worker replaces Manet’s white model. Similarly, the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Kim Leutwyler and Chris Ofili form collaborations with muses as a means of carrying important messages about race, identity and gender. In turn, their subjects feel proud to have been represented; to be seen and have others see you is an empowering form of validation.
As we leave behind misrepresentations of the muse, it’s crucial that we all play a part in recognising, applauding and commemorating the real and varied contributions that these individuals have made. As this book has demonstrated, each muse brings their own talents, qualities and personality to dynamic artistic partnerships; given this level of commitment and input, we must also advocate for muses to be treated with fairness and respect, and acknowledge their rights. Therefore, as we enter a new era for the emancipated muse:
The myth of the muse – sitting pretty, silent and submissive – has been exploded. Instead, this book has shown that we must see the muse as a crucial and active agent of art history, who inspires one or more artists in their own unique way. From changing the course of an artist’s career to defining movements, muses have assumed an active and influential role, at times using it to their own advantage. Rather than abandoning outdated and reductive ideas of the muse, we must reclaim it in all of its increasingly diverse realities.
There is no doubt, we still need the muse.