Artists and their muses — such fabled relationships, so fraught with excitement, creativity, and yes… scandal. Let’s meet some of the enchanting, free-spirited, tortured women and men that inspired great artists to do great works of art. A warning: Some of our muses are more bohemian than others, so this one’s not for the sensitive types. Another warning: Some are more tragic than others, so break out the tissues now. From Gala to Eddie to Kiki to La Cicciolina, here come the muses, their triumphs and pitfalls in tow.
Ilona Staller a.k.a. La Cicciolina
By the time Jeff Koons married Hungarian-born Italian blond bombshell “La Ciccolina”(“Cuddles”), she had achieved notoriety as both a hardcore porn actress and a member of parliament, simultaneously. She was the first to bare her breasts on Italian TV, a member of Italy’s first Green Party, then a Libertarian, then a founding member of the “Party of Love” — protesting nuclear power, championing human rights, and offering to sleep with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace. Then, there was more hardcore porn, that is, Jeff Koons’ Made In Heavenproject — explicit XXX painting and sculptures of the couples’ antics, shocking the 1990 Venice Biennale. They married in 1991. After the marriage soured, Staller took off to Italy with their 2-year-old son Ludwig Maximillian, and a grim custody battle lead to the founding of the Koons Family Institute on International Law and Policy. Scandalous all around!
Gala
Russian-born “Gala,” aka Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, met the poet Paul Éluard at a sanitarium in Switzerland when they were both teenagers. The two later married, caroused with the artists of the Surrealist movement, and lived in a ménage à trois with Max Ernst for three years in the ’20s. A young, Spanish up-and-comer ten years Gala’s junior broke up that marriage. Salvador Dalí, allegedly a virgin, was madly in love. He painted her. He signed his paintings “(i)t is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures.” And, as her new husband he tolerated, nay, heencouraged her extramarital affairs with younger men for decades to come, including Gala’s generous dalliance with “Jesus Christ Superstar”/Black Sabbath singer/future televangelist Jeff Fenholt. Uh… Rowr?
Kiki de Montparnasse
Alice Ernestine Prin earned her fame posing nude for sculptors at the age of 14, soon becoming a regular in the Parisian Montparnasse art scene as a model and a bohemian free-spirit, hence the moniker Kiki de Montparnasse. She played muse to Chaim Soutine, Moise Kisling, Jean Cocteau, and oh so many more. Man Ray made hundreds of portraits of and with her in the 1920s, some of them seriously kinky. Kiki was also a painter, a cabaret performer, a nightclub singer, and enticing memoirist and, at 28, was crowned the Queen of Montparnasse. If not for the Nazi occupation of Paris, a Queen she’d remain.
Marie-Thérèse Walter
The cubist muse behind some of the world’s most expensive paintings, a teenaged Marie-Thérèse Walter began her secret relationship with a then 45-year-old Picasso in the late 1920s. Picasso’s Russian ballerina wife left him once Marie’s adulterous baby bump popped up. When the crusty, lusty Picasso moved on to a “dark” and “weepy” French photographer, she and Marie-Thérèse had a confrontation that turned into a wrestling match over him — as the master was paintingGuernica. And there you thought its conception was all heavy and serious, meanwhile Picasso was enjoying “one of his choicest memories.”
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