9 Muses Who Were Artists

Beginning in 1884, Camille Claudel worked as an assistant in the studio of sculptor Auguste Rodin, and she became his muse and mistress almost immediately. The passionate, tumultuous relationship deteriorated and ended by 1892. Claudel, though tormented by Rodin long after they had parted ways, continued to create sculptures. Her best known include The Age of Maturity (1893–1900) and The Gossips (1897). Sadly, her career was cut short when she was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1914, and she remained there until her death in 1943.

Like many muses, Elizabeth Siddal emerged from a working-class background. While working for a milliner, she had a chance encounter with an artist who drew her into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) artists’ circle. She sat for most of the PRB artists but soon became exclusive to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, appearing in paintings such as Ecce Ancilla Domini (1849-50), Regina Cordium (The Queen of Hearts) (1860), and Beata Beatrix (c. 1864–70). Encouraged by Rossetti to begin painting and writing, she too produced PRB-esque works and exhibited with the group in 1857 and 1858. Unfortunately, she was tormented by jealousy throughout her affair and marriage to Rossetti, was in poor health, and suffered an addiction to laudanum. At age 32 she died of a drug overdose, probably suicide. Rossetti buried Siddal with the manuscripts of most of his poems, but he had her body exhumed in 1869 to retrieve them.

In the span of six years (1868–74), Édouard Manet painted Berthe Morisot 11 times, more than any of his other models. Two of his best-known paintings of her are The Balcony (1868–69) and Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872). Morisot then married Édouard’s brother, Eugène, and became one of only two artists who made her way into the Impressionist boys’ club (the other was Mary Cassatt). Contemporary critics, however, were less impressed by her than were her peers. She exhibited often but sold very little in her lifetime and was not recognized by critics and scholars as a great talent until about a century later.

She played muse to master photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but, as everyone knows, Georgia O’Keeffe became a Modernist painter with a reputation that holds its own, arguably surpassing that of Stieglitz. She’d been painting for several years when Stieglitz discovered her work in 1916. The two fell in love and eventually married in 1924. Stieglitz supported her financially so she could paint, and he exhibited her work on a regular basis until he died in 1943. He also photographed O’Keeffe over the course of 20 years, producing more than 300 individual pictures of her. Unlike many muses of art history, O’Keeffe outlived her companion (by more than 40 years!) and enjoyed a long successful career.

Born into poverty as Alice Ernestine Prin, Kiki de Montparnasse became the muse of Surrealist photographer Man Ray in the early 1920s but also sat for Modernists Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Calder, Moise Kisling, and others. Man Ray made her the subject of hundreds of works, most famously Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), in which her back is made to look like a violin. During the 1920s she was also painting naïve works of circus and city scenes. She signed them “Kiki.” She had a hugely successful exhibition of them in Paris in 1927. She also published her memoirs in 1929, which were shockingly honest about her uninhibited lifestyle. The next decades brought trouble, overindulgences, and poverty. She died in 1953 and was buried in the cemetery in her beloved Montparnasse.

Though she had a troubled childhood, Lee Miller was a beautiful and bright young woman, and those qualities opened doors for her. Before meeting Man Ray, she studied painting and drawing and became a high-fashion model. About 1929 she sought out Man Ray in Paris to teach her photography, but the two also fell in love. Her image appears in numerous works of his, including the famous Observatory Time—The Lovers (c. 1934), which prominently features her lips. She collaborated with Man Ray in developing the photographic process they called “solarization.” (Later on, Man Ray took full credit for that work.) When they split up, she went on to have a photography career, even serving as the first female war correspondent to accompany the Allied troops on the front lines of World War II. She married and had a child after the war but suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism for the rest of her life. She was forgotten by art history until her son discovered some 60,000 negatives, 20,000 prints and contact sheets, documents, and writings boxed up in her attic after her death in 1977.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera married in 1929 and embarked on an epically tumultuous decade together. The two made some of Mexico’s most-iconic works of art, though nearly opposite in theme and style from one another’s: Kahlo’s was personal and emotionally expressive, whereas Rivera’s was public and monumental, projecting bold universal messages. They were significant artistic influences on one another and appeared in one another’s works (e.g., Kahlo’s Diego on My Mind [1943] and The Arsenal from Rivera’s mural Political Vision of the Mexican People [1928]). Though Rivera may have been the more-celebrated artist in their lifetime, Kahlo’s reputation has arguably surpassed his since her death in 1954.

An artist before she met Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar studied painting and photography and had made a significant contribution to the Surrealist movement, particularly with her iconic photograph Portrait of Ubu (1936). She met Picasso through her Surrealist peers, and the two embarked on a decade-long relationship in 1936. She photographed him, notably while he worked on his epic painting Guernica, and he painted and drew her, and they collaborated on projects. She appears in some of his most-famous works (e.g., Portrait of Dora Maar [1937] and Weeping Woman [1937]). As is often the case in such passionate affairs among artists, relations soured, another woman took her place (see below), and Maar lived reclusively and tormented by Picasso for the rest of her life. Her reputation as an artist pales in comparison with her reputation as Picasso’s muse.

Françoise Gilot and Picasso met in 1943—she was 21 and he was 62—and Picasso was still entangled with Dora Maar at the time. Gilot spent 10 years with Picasso, inspiring works such as the La Femme-fleur (1946), in which Picasso painted her as a flower, and Woman Drawing (Françoise Gilot) (1951). As the latter title suggests, Gilot was also an artist. She was independent and continued to generate her own work throughout their relationship, which included the two children they had together. Gilot walked out on Picasso in 1953 and painted for the rest of her life. Though still often first recognized as Picasso’s former lover, she had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States and published books on her life with Picasso and about his relationship with Henri Matisse.