Dina Vierny was a muse to French sculptor Aristide Maillol and model for painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. Vierny, who began modeling for Maillol at age 15, was his greatest fan and a leading force in making his acclaimed figurative bronzes available to the public.
(From The Guardian)
When an artist refers to his
model as his muse, it is usually his way of dignifying their joint extramural
activities. But in the case of Aristide Maillol's model Dina Vierny, who has
died aged 89, she genuinely was his muse, not his mistress. She met him in
1934, when she was 15 and he was 73, and inspired a fresh direction in his
sculpture - most evident in The River, one cast of which is on display in the
Tuileries gardens in Paris, while another sprawls on the ledge of a pond in the
garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Her death breaks the living link
through Maillol with the Nabis, a short-lived group of 19th-century artists
inspired by Gauguin's Tahiti paintings that included Pierre Bonnard and Édouard
Vuillard as well as Maillol.
She was, besides, a remarkable
woman in her own right. Her attributes were perhaps best caught by Françoise
Gilot, not yet Picasso's partner, who met Vierny at Picasso's Paris studio in
1945. Maillol had died the previous year in a car accident, and yet Vierny had
blossomed. "Her bearing was regal," said Gilot. "More than a
muse, she was a priestess of art." As for Picasso, Gilot wrotes in
amusement: "He was deferential and attentive... as if beguiled by her
charm and mastery. If he had not been afraid of being pursued by Maillol's
ghost [Picasso was notably superstitious], he might have expressed his
admiration more openly." And Gilot said of herself: "I would have
loved to befriend Dina, but her triumphant femininity made me shy."
All of this goes some way to
explaining how this young, untutored immigrant model for a sculptor of nothing
but female nudes was able to tackle the legendary André Malraux, by 1965 De
Gaulle's minister of culture, and persuade him to take a gift of 18 of
Maillol's sculptures and put them on permanent display in the Tuileries - thus
fulfilling, in her role as an executor of Maillol's will, the sculptor's dying
wish.
Vierny was born in Chisinau, the
capital of Bessarabia (now Moldova). Her father knew Trotsky, but made no
attempt to hide his own social-democratic inclinations, and by 1925 it became
apparent that the new Russian hegemony was not good for their health. They fled
from Odessa in Ukraine and fetched up in Paris without a rouble in their
pockets. However, they survived, and Dina, a dutiful student, seemed destined
for a conventional career until Jean-Claude Dondel - later one of the four
architects of the Palais de Tokyo - met her and wrote to his friend Maillol,
saying that she was a walking Maillol sculpture. He persuaded her to visit
Maillol's Paris studio.
There was a double irony.
Firstly, Maillol's ideal was not a Jew from the Soviet Union, but the typical
peasant girl of Banyuls, his Catalan home town close to the border with Spain.
Secondly, the sculptor felt no need to acquire a model. In a journal entry,
Gide reported Maillol saying: "A model! A model! What the hell would I do
with a model? When I need to verify something, I go and find my wife in the
kitchen, I lift up her chemise, and I have the marble."
But Vierny's figure was a
revelation; broad hips, big thighs, high breasts. By 1934, when they met,
Maillol's career was running out of steam. All his work, whether war memorials,
monuments to heroes, allegorical figures for city centres, consisted almost
without exception of female nudes. The massive dignity of the calm,
Mediterranean classicism that came easily to Maillol, a reaction against the
vivid movement of Rodin's work, was beginning to bore the public. Vierny's
dynamic personality changed all this and inspired the approach that produced
The River, a figure with the usual Maillol characteristics - the fully rounded
and hollowed-out forms - but in vivid action, sprawling full length, Vierny's
wavy hair a metaphor for the running water.
During the second world war,
Vierny helped European intellectuals, including a son of Thomas Mann, to avoid
the Nazis by escaping to Spain along a rocky, tortuous path through the Pyrenees
shown to her by Maillol. She was arrested on suspicion and then sprung by a
lawyer paid by Maillol, whereupon she departed for Nice with letters of
introduction to Matisse and Bonnard, suggesting they should "borrow"
her.
She was only one of a bevy of
Matisse models, but the admiration between the artist and Vierny was mutual,
and although she had to remain still when she modelled for his drawings, he
allowed her to talk. By contrast, Bonnard, living at nearby Le Cannet,
instructed her to strip off but not to pose, and to forget that he was there.
"He didn't want me to keep still," said Vierny. "What he needed
was movement. He asked me to 'live' in front of him. He wanted both presence
and absence." Bonnard's 1941 painting Le Grand Nu Sombre was the fruit of
this association.
With Maillol, Bonnard and Matisse
all dead within a few years of the war's end, Vierny set up her own
well-regarded art gallery where, as well as her collection of modern, western
art and temporary shows, she exhibited the work of dissident Soviet artists.
But she continued to carry a torch for Maillol and established the Dina Vierny
Foundation, which led to the creation in 1995 of the Fondation Dina
Vierny-Musée Maillol in the left-bank rue de Grenelle. Maillol's former home in
the family vineyard above Banyuls is now another Maillol museum.
The two sons who survive her,
Olivier and Bertrand Lorquin, run the Paris museum, but Maillol's great
monument, the Tuileries gardens display, immortalises her as well.
• Dina Vierny, artist's model and
art dealer, born January 25, 1919; died January 21 2009
