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Sydney Morning Herald
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Comparisons are odious, but all art is not created equal
I agree with Jacqueline Maley in principle that works of art should neither be timid in expression nor resile from being contemporaneous (' We may have just failed the only worthwhile test of social cohesion ', July 6). I hesitate to agree on what she regards as an art work as opposed to an assembly of objects or so-called tailored video installations being categorised as art, however much they may reflect the present day and/or the availability of technology for expression. Comparing Picasso's Guernica with anything the esteemed subjects of her article have produced is not only unfair to them and to the public, but especially to Picasso. However, if history is any guide, works such as Guernica, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David or Sistine chapel, offer timelessness, radiance, movement, emotional stimulation, thus engendering meaning and appreciation for all peoples for all time and for every epoch in history. Frederick Jansohn, Rose Bay I agree with Jacqueline Maley that our ability to support freedom of expression and diversity of thought are worthwhile tests of social cohesion. But I disagree that it is the only worthwhile test. The real test is our ability to agree on the limits of free speech, especially its transition into calls for violence, and enact and enforce sensible legislation in this regard at the moment when it urgently matters, which is right now. Raymond Schwartz, Bellevue Hill Data mine on the line The rail unions have negotiated two days in which Opal fare meters will be turned off ('Free train days follow union wage deal', July 6). We will not now how many people used public transport on those days. However, it would be better if the unions negotiated 'zero fare' days on which the meters operated so we could see the effect of reducing fares across the many different socioeconomic communities in NSW. For people interested in city building, this is a major data opportunity. Peter Egan, Mosman Church scandals It's pretty clear that society has had more than a gutful of child abuse (' Sermon after child abuse conviction shocks victims ', July 6). It especially hates a cover-up, and the church's reputation there is woeful. Some of us don't believe in your god and don't care if you wear a frock, a cross or whatever. We don't hear your 'Do unto others' speeches when your house is hiding evil. Ted Bush, North Epping The flip side to priest Alexis Rosentool's warning to his followers is the Bible's stern 'Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture' (Jeremiah 23:1). Steve Ngeow, Chatswood Loneliness and health Loneliness and social isolation aren't new, but little has been done to address them. The fact that some children and young adults now rely on AI bots for friendship is deeply disturbing (Letters, July 6). It's well known that social isolation and loneliness are deleterious to physical and mental health. These factors have been linked to suicide, dementia, premature death and domestic violence. The NSW government continues to abdicate its responsibility regarding mental health. Without adequate intervention, the problem will grow, and the financial burden will increase. Graham Lum, North Rocks
Time of India
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
How Willy Chavarria turned his Paris runway show into a protest against migrant detention
Source: X/@Fashionography Art has always found ways to quietly yet assertively challenge authority and express dissent. From Picasso's Guernica confronting the horrors of war, to Oskar Rabin and the Bulldozer Exhibition defying Soviet censorship, creative expression has long served as a powerful response to injustice. On Friday, that spirit of protest lived on — not in a gallery or street mural, but on the red-carpeted runway of the Spring/Summer 2026 show at Paris Fashion Week. Willy Chavarria, the Mexican-American designer known for infusing activism into fashion, opened his show with a moment that was less about spectacle and more about reckoning. As reported by Vogue , 35 men walked solemnly down the runway in white T-shirts and shorts designed in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), then knelt with heads bowed — a deliberate reference to the posture forced upon inmates at El Salvador's mega-prison and migrants held in U.S. detention. The runway's silence was deafening. Each model — still, kneeling, expressionless — became a living sculpture of the voiceless. The garments, stark in their simplicity, held more than fabric; they carried a message. Inside the label of each T-shirt read a striking line: 'THE ACLU DARES TO CREATE A MORE PERFECT UNION – BEYOND ONE PERSON, PARTY, OR SIDE.' This wasn't just fashion — it was a public reckoning. Chavarria, whose past collections have explored themes of masculinity, immigration, and identity, used this show to directly comment on the systemic criminalization of migrants. The opening tableau drew direct parallels to the Salvadoran mega-prisons, where thousands are incarcerated under mass arrests with little due process. Source: Getty Images Speaking to Vogue , Chavarria tied the performance to real-time horrors: 'Today and as of yesterday, ICE is attacking the town of Huron. There are tanks rolling through the streets, and there are armed militia surrounding homes. So it's a state of horror,' he said. He added that the opening scene was intended 'to contrast against the beauty of the people that are actually being kidnapped and shipped away, broken away from their families. The chaos that we're seeing right now.' Source: X Even the show's invitation carried the weight of resistance. Guests received a replica of a legal summons, similar in design to the documents many migrants receive from U.S. immigration authorities. But Chavarria's version had a quiet defiance etched into it: the top read 'NOTICE OF RIGHT TO EXIST' — a radical, humanizing declaration in a world where migration is too often treated as a crime. The invitation also featured a mock Social Security card, replacing government-issued numbers with the attendee's seat assignment. Willy Chavarria has long been known for blurring the line between politics and fashion, but this time, the message was not embedded subtly in form or tailoring — it was stark, spoken aloud, unmissable. In a time when spectacle often overshadows sincerity, he used the runway to restore purpose.
Irish Times
26-06-2025
- Irish Times
How plans for new Guggenheim museum have triggered major biodiversity row in Spain
It's easy to forget today the proposal to build a franchise for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain , was deeply divisive when first proposed in the early 1990s. The idea that the autonomous Basque authorities would finance every aspect of the museum, while exercising no control over its internationally-orientated artistic policy, was anathema to many who saw Basque culture fighting for its own survival. Yet today, architect Frank Gehry's monumental titanium palace has become the icon of the regeneration of this once decayed industrial city, as many of its erstwhile critics have conceded, and it attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists annually. However, a project aspiring to repeat the 'Bilbao miracle', and extend the museum into the heart of the region's most important biodiversity hotspot, has sparked equally furious and perhaps better-informed opposition, and the outcome remains very open. The plan, under consideration for nearly 20 years, is to build a hub and conference centre in the historic town of Guernica, officially Gernika in Basque. Much more contentiously, this hub is to be linked with an entirely new museum on the site of a decommissioned (though still active) shipyard, at Murueta. This site lies at an especially sensitive point on the Urdaibai estuary, which carries Guernica's river Oka to the sea. READ MORE These two points would be connected by a walkway/cycleway/light rail route right along the vulnerable edge of the water body. The estuary is a major migration flyway, as well as a wintering ground and a breeding area for marine and marshland birds. On paper, Urdaibai enjoys a very high level of environmental protection. It is a Unesco biosphere reserve, a Ramsar-recognised wetland of international importance, including two special bird protection areas (SPAs) and three special areas of conservation (SACs) as part of the EU's Natura 2000 network. But as we know all too well in Ireland, such protections offer few real-world guarantees. Seventy-seven local, national and international environmental groups, from the Mediterranean Alliance for Wetlands, and 250 scientists, have recently supported a 'red alert' manifesto, appealing for the Guggenheim plan to be abandoned, directed to the Spanish ministry for ecological transition, Unesco and Ramsar. 'What they plan here is an ecocide,' says one of the opposition, Joseba del Villar, who works in the area as a biologist and photographer. 'Destroying nature in exchange for massive tourism and cement.' View of the Urdaibai estuary from the eastern margin. Photograph: Joseba del Villar It's certainly true that the new tourists will hardly be coming to see the birds: Urdaibai already boasts a discreet but very well equipped observation centre for nature lovers. The view from the Guggenheim side of the argument is, unsurprisingly, different, if often hard to pin down precisely. The museum claims the project is a significant attempt to engage contemporary culture with issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and degradation, with many of the artworks, both along the walkway and in Murueta itself, to be dedicated to these themes. A senior Guggenheim source, close to the project from the outset but who prefers not to be named, argues there has never been a more appropriate time to bring these two themes together, with many artists already engaged in such synergies, and that Urdaibai is an ideal place to highlight their work. He also notes the hinterland is the second-most depressed area economically in the Basque Country, and says the project will bring badly needed jobs and services. Certainly, some local mayors and their supporters want to see the new Guggenheim project happen. He is dismissive of claims extra visitors (up to 140,000 during the summer months) would cause significant disturbance to the bird life, and claims the walkway connection was chosen precisely to minimise such impacts. Besides, he says, 'Urdaibai is not the Amazon. The beaches in summer are already packed with people.' He does not grant much credibility to the scientific credentials of the opposition, though he cannot name a single scientist who has supported the Guggenheim-Urdaibai project. 'Many of these opposition groups are very ideologically motivated,' he says,' adding they would not be so opposed to the initiative 'if it did not bear an American and Jewish name'. Aitor Gallarza, a biologist with long experience in the area, agrees only that there is already far too much disturbance for the area's important bird populations. 'There are fewer birds here all the time, and people can enter from all points, denying the birds the space and tranquillity they need.' But what is required, he adds, is not a new cultural industry but the ecological restoration of sites such as Murueta, which have been degraded for decades. 'This new museum could be anywhere,' he says, 'they have given no explanation why they want to do it here. They have given us no detail of what the museum will really consist in.' He is sceptical about the attachment of labels such as 'ecological' to the walkway. 'We can't have more people all over the place and call it sustainable.' An osprey eating a fish in Urdaibai; this species remains a passage migrant in the estuary, but attempts to reintroduce it as a breeding species have failed so far, possibly due to already existing tourist numbers. Photograph: Joseba del Villar Lore Terri, the local Greenpeace representative, says 'culture should not threaten biodiversity, especially where there is a nucleus of protected sites'. 'This place is very rich in species. It is the second most important migratory pathway for the spoonbill, and a significant area for osprey and Egyptian vulture, all species that need places to rest in quiet. It was home to the critically endangered European mink.' The latter is now awaiting a reintroduction programme. 'We talk about the European nature restoration law, and then they want to do all this building and subsequent disturbance, which will have the opposite effect, no matter what they say,' she says. The claims made by the only major report on the museum's plans, made in a 2009 draft by New York architects Cooper Robertson and updated in 2022, are vague if ambitious. While recognising the need for more stakeholder input, the report states that the Murueta museum will be 'as radically new a paradigm for the area as the Guggenheim was for Bilbao'. The report, which is summarised on the museum's rather sketchy account of the project on its website , lays great stress on the idea that the visiting experience will be much less frenetic than is the norm at its giant urban forbear. It asserts that, through consideration of the environment and sustainability in the context of the biosphere reserve, the museum will respond to climate change and 'be a positive influence on its surroundings'. It goes so far as to say the museum will have 'an important role in advanced ecology' and in 'regenerating endangered and damaged ecosystems' as well as effecting social and economic transformation. But it is distinctly thin on the specifics, just as it is on how the museum will 'host artworks attuned to the local landscapes and ecosystems'. An artistic focus on ecological themes is certainly desirable, but hardly at the cost of damaging and disturbing crucially important ecological sites. Eider Gotxi, chair of the citizen's group Guggenheim-Urdaibai STOP, questions these aspirations. She freely acknowledges the site in the local capital city has done much to 'recuperate a degraded area'. But she emphasises, unlike Bilbao, with its rich infrastructure, Urdaibai cannot support a new influx of tourists: 'We just don't have the resources.' She is concerned about amendments to the laws protecting the coastline around Murueta, which are being reduced from 100m to 20m to facilitate the construction of the museum, she claims. She seems to feel her side may be gaining ground. In a recent meeting with the new director of the museum, Miren Arzalluz, she extracted the information that no decision has been taken by the Guggenheim's complex Basque governing trust as to whether to proceed with the plan or not. 'It is still all under reflection,' Gotxi claims Arzalluz conceded. Arzalluz told The Irish Times it was too early in her tenure to give an interview on the project. But she did send a tentative statement about it which claimed: 'The initiative will encourage appreciation and understanding of ecology and nature by increasing and improving the range of environmental, artistic, educational and cultural experiences available to the public.' Gotxi responded with what is perhaps the central point of the debate: 'For us, the reserve is already a living museum of incalculable value in its landscapes, biological, geological and cultural heritage.' In the UN Decade on Restoration, a Unesco biosphere reserve would surely be better employed by enhancing the biological resources of such a natural treasure rather than putting them in further danger through creating a new artificial one; however attractive it might be.
Sydney Morning Herald
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
She was the face of Picasso's Weeping Woman. But there was more to Dora Maar than a woman crushed
A notable surrealist photographer and painter in her own right, Dora Maar is best remembered for her eight-year relationship with Pablo Picasso. Often regarded as a muse to Picasso's genius, Maar modelled for many of the artist's anguished 'weeping women' portraits, painted while he created his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica. Yet, Paris-born Maar also painted Picasso, transforming him into her subject and similarly distorting his features. 'What most people also don't realise is that Maar was a radical, subversive and respected artist before she met Picasso,' says David Greenhalgh, the National Gallery of Australia's expert on international art. 'Her photography, her politics and her Surrealist provocations challenged Picasso.' Maar's artistic legacy is highlighted alongside Picasso's in the National Gallery of Australia's blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie which runs until September. The exhibition draws from the extraordinary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who, after World War II, established a small gallery on Paris's Left Bank and collected avant-garde works. The exhibition will feature some 100 major works by six modern masters – Picasso, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. These will be shown with 75 works from the National Gallery's collection to demonstrate the revolutionaries' influence on Australia's leading artists. The exhibition notably features works by Maar, with whom Berggruen felt a particular affinity, perhaps due to his empathy for her tragic life and tumultuous, ultimately destructive relationship with Picasso. 'She never quite recovered from her separation with Picasso, and turned away from her great talent as a photographer and a painter,' Berggruen's son Nicolas says. Long-overdue credit finally came to Maar with a 2019 retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, part of an international curatorial effort to reframe collections with greater biographical honesty. This move followed the highlighting of Cézanne's muse, Hortense Fiquet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne exhibition five years earlier. Cézanne to Giacometti offers another important opportunity, says co-curator Deirdre Cannon, to examine who these women painted by the modernists were and their true role in the creation of the art. Maar's most striking photograph, Portrait of Ubu – an extreme close-up of an armadillo fetus – will hang alongside four other works by her. Her 1936 pastel of Picasso similarly depicts her lover in a fractured, Cubist-inspired style, emphasising his wide cat's eyes, moustache, distinctive nose, and wide mouth in cool green shades, all composed like an inverted comma. 'We acknowledge now that artists do not work in a vacuum, and the idea of the sole, primarily male genius making art from god-given talent or through an act of divine intervention has been repudiated for a long time now,' Cannon says. 'This has included a reappraisal of the subjectivity of the muse. These individuals, often artists in their own right, influenced other aspects of artists' practice and personal lives.' The concept of the muse dates back to Greek mythology, where nine sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, served as patrons of the arts. Homer himself invoked these ethereal women of divine inspiration to narrate the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad. Later, masters from Raphael to Rembrandt embraced the muse as an object of beauty, personifying their creative expression. In the 19th century, model Elizabeth Siddal embodied the ideal of virginal beauty and rectitude in John Everett Millais's Ophelia, leading the BBC to describe her as art's greatest supermodel. 'Often, those identified as muses are depicted in a very idealised manner and described in literature as having striking physical attributes or a distinctive presence,' Cannon says. 'Or, in the case of an artist like Picasso, their likenesses are rearranged and experimented with in pursuit of breaking new artistic ground. Traditional understandings of the muse involve feminine subservience to the creative will of men. 'The term itself has specific connotations that prompt reflection on the role of inspiration in visual art.' Among European modernists, Cézanne's radical yet doubt-laden experiments in colour and composition were the first to challenge accepted artistic ideas of the figurative form, emboldening generations of subsequent artists. 'Every artist in Cézanne to Giacometti is linked in a huge genealogy or family tree of influence, as they found inspiration in each other's example,' says Greenhalgh. 'In a sense, the 'muse' we investigate is how artists inspire each other.' Cézanne's model across two decades of often plodding experimentation was Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his only son, Paul, whom he first met in 1869 when she was a 19-year-old model. Among the works on display in Cézanne to Giacometti are one of 29 paintings and four of the approximately 50 drawings he made of Fiquet, including Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Her inscrutable expression has led historians to suggest emotional distance between the pair or to interpret it as evidence of Fiquet's dour character. British critic Roger Fry even described her as 'that sour bitch,' and her husband's friends nicknamed her 'La Boule' (French for 'the ball'). However, Greenhalgh argues that characterising muses like Fiquet as 'crones' or Maar as 'unstable' is simply an example of misogyny. 'But we must remember that history is a discourse, and that we can always see things from new perspectives.' Context is everything. Cézanne and Fiquet lived an unconventional life; she resided in cosmopolitan Paris while the artist painted the Provence countryside. Their relationship was characterised by social and financial inequality, common in many marriages of the period. They only married to secure his family's inheritance. 'Cézanne was incredibly slow when he painted, and it is thought that this was because he doubted everything he created,' Greenhalgh says. 'It drove his sitters crazy, as they had to pose motionless for a dozen hours each day, sometimes for hundreds of sittings, only for him to abandon the painting. 'There are letters that demonstrate Fiquet's supportive business dealings to try and sell Cézanne's work, but the most direct and simple evidence we have of her importance to his practice is that she sat for Cézanne's paintings time and time again, and that to me is a demonstration of their love for one another.' European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist's talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. 'When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,' Walsh says. 'It's only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.' Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, 'as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting'. In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt's 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape. Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus's impregnating shower of 'golden rain' that glossed over rape in the original painting. Walsh has since painted fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters. It was a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize. Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse's Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem's African heritage. Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso's gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh's Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, 'We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.' Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso's depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. 'All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,' she says. 'Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar's practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women.' According to independent curator and writer Julie Ewington, the reevaluation of women's roles has significantly increased over the last 50 years, running 'absolutely hand in glove with social movements' like women's equality and #MeToo. 'By 1975, when the UN recognised International Women's Day, it was already well established that women were not just the subject of other people's pictures, they were the makers of their own,' Ewington says. 'Younger women are very clear where they stand on all this. That doesn't mean there isn't still a lively trade in pictures of beautiful and desirable women.' Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a pioneer of self-expression, famously declared, 'I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.' She depicted her disability, physical pain, and emotions, even as her relationship with Diego Rivera influenced both their lives and art. Julie Ewington also points to earlier female artists who challenged norms: Suzanne Valadon defied 19th-century conventions by painting nudes of herself and other women, and German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to depict herself pregnant and nude. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose fame was initially overshadowed by her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is now celebrated as a feminist icon, her legacy casting a far greater shadow today. Progress, says Walsh, is when 'everyone becomes a muse to someone'. It doesn't have to be a beautiful, young woman serving the artist in some way. If we embrace all kinds of perspectives, then all kinds of muses can come into being. Artist Deborah Kelly, whose animation Beastliness was included in Art Gallery of NSW show Her Hair, a collection of 'sexy and salty' collage and animation works, now considers an artist's muse to be 'the curator who believes in your work, encourages your wildest dreams, and helps you realise them.' Her Hair examined how female hair has functioned as a powerful symbol in art, with braided hair representing profane love and long, unruly hair signifying penitence, virginity, or youth. Loading 'For me, it's mainly been other women who are keen to enable the more preposterous of my aspirations – I mean, right now, I'm founding a religion of climate change and queer identity and giving it meaning and expression in art and performance – and I see this as a significant historical shift from the era when women were supposed to view each other primarily as rivals for male attention,' Kelly says. 'So that makes me think that the idea of the muse is obsolete – but that actual human beings make and hold space for artists and their support is priceless.' As new generations of artists find fresh inspiration, so Dora Maar is being recognised as a more fully rounded artist. Only Maar was allowed to photograph the painting of Guernica. Her radical leftwing politics stood behind Picasso's rage at the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which gave rise to his masterpiece, painted in a monochromatic style, almost photographic in its detail, and said to have borrowed from her work.
The Age
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
She was the face of Picasso's Weeping Woman. But there was more to Dora Maar than a woman crushed
A notable surrealist photographer and painter in her own right, Dora Maar is best remembered for her eight-year relationship with Pablo Picasso. Often regarded as a muse to Picasso's genius, Maar modelled for many of the artist's anguished 'weeping women' portraits, painted while he created his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica. Yet, Paris-born Maar also painted Picasso, transforming him into her subject and similarly distorting his features. 'What most people also don't realise is that Maar was a radical, subversive and respected artist before she met Picasso,' says David Greenhalgh, the National Gallery of Australia's expert on international art. 'Her photography, her politics and her Surrealist provocations challenged Picasso.' Maar's artistic legacy is highlighted alongside Picasso's in the National Gallery of Australia's blockbuster Cézanne to Giacometti: Highlights from Museum Berggruen/ Neue Nationalgalerie which runs until September. The exhibition draws from the extraordinary collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen, who, after World War II, established a small gallery on Paris's Left Bank and collected avant-garde works. The exhibition will feature some 100 major works by six modern masters – Picasso, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. These will be shown with 75 works from the National Gallery's collection to demonstrate the revolutionaries' influence on Australia's leading artists. The exhibition notably features works by Maar, with whom Berggruen felt a particular affinity, perhaps due to his empathy for her tragic life and tumultuous, ultimately destructive relationship with Picasso. 'She never quite recovered from her separation with Picasso, and turned away from her great talent as a photographer and a painter,' Berggruen's son Nicolas says. Long-overdue credit finally came to Maar with a 2019 retrospective of her work at Tate Modern, part of an international curatorial effort to reframe collections with greater biographical honesty. This move followed the highlighting of Cézanne's muse, Hortense Fiquet, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne exhibition five years earlier. Cézanne to Giacometti offers another important opportunity, says co-curator Deirdre Cannon, to examine who these women painted by the modernists were and their true role in the creation of the art. Maar's most striking photograph, Portrait of Ubu – an extreme close-up of an armadillo fetus – will hang alongside four other works by her. Her 1936 pastel of Picasso similarly depicts her lover in a fractured, Cubist-inspired style, emphasising his wide cat's eyes, moustache, distinctive nose, and wide mouth in cool green shades, all composed like an inverted comma. 'We acknowledge now that artists do not work in a vacuum, and the idea of the sole, primarily male genius making art from god-given talent or through an act of divine intervention has been repudiated for a long time now,' Cannon says. 'This has included a reappraisal of the subjectivity of the muse. These individuals, often artists in their own right, influenced other aspects of artists' practice and personal lives.' The concept of the muse dates back to Greek mythology, where nine sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, served as patrons of the arts. Homer himself invoked these ethereal women of divine inspiration to narrate the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad. Later, masters from Raphael to Rembrandt embraced the muse as an object of beauty, personifying their creative expression. In the 19th century, model Elizabeth Siddal embodied the ideal of virginal beauty and rectitude in John Everett Millais's Ophelia, leading the BBC to describe her as art's greatest supermodel. 'Often, those identified as muses are depicted in a very idealised manner and described in literature as having striking physical attributes or a distinctive presence,' Cannon says. 'Or, in the case of an artist like Picasso, their likenesses are rearranged and experimented with in pursuit of breaking new artistic ground. Traditional understandings of the muse involve feminine subservience to the creative will of men. 'The term itself has specific connotations that prompt reflection on the role of inspiration in visual art.' Among European modernists, Cézanne's radical yet doubt-laden experiments in colour and composition were the first to challenge accepted artistic ideas of the figurative form, emboldening generations of subsequent artists. 'Every artist in Cézanne to Giacometti is linked in a huge genealogy or family tree of influence, as they found inspiration in each other's example,' says Greenhalgh. 'In a sense, the 'muse' we investigate is how artists inspire each other.' Cézanne's model across two decades of often plodding experimentation was Hortense Fiquet, the mother of his only son, Paul, whom he first met in 1869 when she was a 19-year-old model. Among the works on display in Cézanne to Giacometti are one of 29 paintings and four of the approximately 50 drawings he made of Fiquet, including Portrait of Madame Cézanne (c. 1885). Her inscrutable expression has led historians to suggest emotional distance between the pair or to interpret it as evidence of Fiquet's dour character. British critic Roger Fry even described her as 'that sour bitch,' and her husband's friends nicknamed her 'La Boule' (French for 'the ball'). However, Greenhalgh argues that characterising muses like Fiquet as 'crones' or Maar as 'unstable' is simply an example of misogyny. 'But we must remember that history is a discourse, and that we can always see things from new perspectives.' Context is everything. Cézanne and Fiquet lived an unconventional life; she resided in cosmopolitan Paris while the artist painted the Provence countryside. Their relationship was characterised by social and financial inequality, common in many marriages of the period. They only married to secure his family's inheritance. 'Cézanne was incredibly slow when he painted, and it is thought that this was because he doubted everything he created,' Greenhalgh says. 'It drove his sitters crazy, as they had to pose motionless for a dozen hours each day, sometimes for hundreds of sittings, only for him to abandon the painting. 'There are letters that demonstrate Fiquet's supportive business dealings to try and sell Cézanne's work, but the most direct and simple evidence we have of her importance to his practice is that she sat for Cézanne's paintings time and time again, and that to me is a demonstration of their love for one another.' European art history is full of stories where the female perspective is hidden or missing, says artist Natasha Walsh. At best, the women subjects are frequently depicted either as passive vehicles for the artist's talent or in an exploitative and violent manner. 'When artists are painting, they are painting their own perception,' Walsh says. 'It's only problematic when the muse exists solely in the context of the artist, when we look at it as a child does, only within the frame.' Walsh is one of several contemporary artists who are reimagining the portrayal of the female sitter. Instead of a passive subject, these artists seek to show the creative insight originating from the female subject herself, or through a collaborative, reciprocal exchange between the artist and their subject. As a teenage art student, Walsh often faced requests to sit for male painters, which she declined. She recalls one artist advising her to agree soon, 'as if my worth were reduced to solely my physical appearance and my value was temporary and fleeting'. In her series Hysteria, Walsh challenged the male gaze by reinterpreting Gustav Klimt's 1907 painting Danaë, which romanticised an ancient Greek myth of rape. Reimagining herself as the mother of Perseus, she painted her eyes actively gazing back at the viewer – Klimt painted them closed – and vanished Zeus's impregnating shower of 'golden rain' that glossed over rape in the original painting. Walsh has since painted fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters. It was a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize. Walsh has continued to reinterpret art history, painting fashion duo Nicol and Ford in the likeness of the 16th-century Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters (a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize). She also depicted musician Montaigne as Medusa, and posed artist Atong Atem as Matisse's Yellow Odalisque, shifting the focus to Atem's African heritage. Walsh collaborated with writer Bri Lee on a collage of Picasso nudes, created in the Brett Whiteley studio. Their aim was to reimagine a nude free from Picasso's gaze, depicting the figure in an act of self-pleasure. Lee later posed for Walsh's Hysteria exhibition the following year, with Walsh stating, 'We wanted to create a nude that existed for herself.' Walsh is particularly scathing of Picasso's depiction of Dora Maar as an archetypal figure of suffering. It was a portrayal that Maar herself rejected. 'All these portraits of me are lies. They are all Picasso; none is Dora Maar,' she says. 'Picasso does an immense disservice to Maar's practice and rich individual identity present in her work to reduce her to mad crying women.' According to independent curator and writer Julie Ewington, the reevaluation of women's roles has significantly increased over the last 50 years, running 'absolutely hand in glove with social movements' like women's equality and #MeToo. 'By 1975, when the UN recognised International Women's Day, it was already well established that women were not just the subject of other people's pictures, they were the makers of their own,' Ewington says. 'Younger women are very clear where they stand on all this. That doesn't mean there isn't still a lively trade in pictures of beautiful and desirable women.' Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, a pioneer of self-expression, famously declared, 'I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.' She depicted her disability, physical pain, and emotions, even as her relationship with Diego Rivera influenced both their lives and art. Julie Ewington also points to earlier female artists who challenged norms: Suzanne Valadon defied 19th-century conventions by painting nudes of herself and other women, and German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman artist to depict herself pregnant and nude. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose fame was initially overshadowed by her partner, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is now celebrated as a feminist icon, her legacy casting a far greater shadow today. Progress, says Walsh, is when 'everyone becomes a muse to someone'. It doesn't have to be a beautiful, young woman serving the artist in some way. If we embrace all kinds of perspectives, then all kinds of muses can come into being. Artist Deborah Kelly, whose animation Beastliness was included in Art Gallery of NSW show Her Hair, a collection of 'sexy and salty' collage and animation works, now considers an artist's muse to be 'the curator who believes in your work, encourages your wildest dreams, and helps you realise them.' Her Hair examined how female hair has functioned as a powerful symbol in art, with braided hair representing profane love and long, unruly hair signifying penitence, virginity, or youth. Loading 'For me, it's mainly been other women who are keen to enable the more preposterous of my aspirations – I mean, right now, I'm founding a religion of climate change and queer identity and giving it meaning and expression in art and performance – and I see this as a significant historical shift from the era when women were supposed to view each other primarily as rivals for male attention,' Kelly says. 'So that makes me think that the idea of the muse is obsolete – but that actual human beings make and hold space for artists and their support is priceless.' As new generations of artists find fresh inspiration, so Dora Maar is being recognised as a more fully rounded artist. Only Maar was allowed to photograph the painting of Guernica. Her radical leftwing politics stood behind Picasso's rage at the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which gave rise to his masterpiece, painted in a monochromatic style, almost photographic in its detail, and said to have borrowed from her work.
