Models as muses: when fashion inspires art

Jonathan Yeo inaugurated his personal exhibition on March 20, which will be on until June 30, at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Some of the work on display features model and actress Cara Delevigne. The artist met Cara, a social media icon and he was impressed by her attitude by her friendliness and her ability to change facial expression in an instant; he decided to celebrate this in a painting series. Cara was obviously not the first model to become an artist’s muse.

Alice Ernestine Prin, a.k.a. Kiki de Montparnasse, was a Parisian icon in the liberal, roaring Twenties. As a model, she posed for painters, photographers and sculptors, such as Chaim Soutine, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau and her own partner Man Ray. She was a painter herself, as well as a writer and an actress. More recently, Kate Moss was portrayed by many, among which Chuck Close, Lucian Freud and Alex Katz. Katz said about her: «the fact she is actually the girl next door makes her extraordinary».

Francesco Clemente, from Naples, portrayed several models wearing makeup with a very Cubist touch, with sensational results. How does it feel to see models in another light, portrayed in such a different context from the most common social networks, or fashion photo reportages? Isn’t that maybe cracking the system, pushing us to open our minds a little more? Albert Einstein said that creativity is contagious, and that it should be spread. We absolutely agree on that, and we believe that is is a beautiful thing to see the world from someone else’s more poetic perspective, to stop and extraordinarily observe something, in today’s increasingly fast, homogeneous reality which is ruled by the instant.