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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Dina Vierny


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