She was looking past the glass wall shielding the shop and its many wonders. Her eyes widened in innocent wonder at the beautiful clothes of myriad hues adorning the white mannequins. Her heart at first enraptured and then sunk, upon realizing that they were much beyond her means. Disappointed, she kept slurping her ice-cream, oblivious of the gaze beholding her.
Indeed, she made a beautiful image to him- a childlike face cast in the body of an Italian Madonna. Her mobile features were switching expressions nonchalantly in the flicker of a moment. That mysterious paradox of innocence and seduction! She dawned on him like an aurora of the morning sky, making him feel like a search had ended, a journey was about to begin. A compelling desire to reproduce her in his dormant canvas!
“I’m Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together!”, accosted the immortal Cubist Painter Pablo Picasso to the adolescent Marie Theretze Walter in January of 1927. Although unaware of the artist, she visited his studio after which started an explosive, a sexually-compelling love affair that propelled Picasso to fame beyond his cubist frame but confined Marie to his canvas.
History knows her only as one of his many muses in the greater line of the magnificent women who inspired his paintings. She lived her life and continues to live even after death in the shadow of her philandering and brutal artist-lover. But, who really is Marie-Theretze, beyond the frame of Picasso’s Muse?
Muse: the Sufferer? (A Historic Reference)
History accounts for several romantic relationships between a usually male artist and his female muse as they wander through their cyclic, (mostly) fatal attraction. At the same time, the readers or the viewers feast on the art or literary work, the ultimate fruit of their attraction. The muse triggers inspiration, and the artist materializes it. The muse provides the life-force of his art, and the artist immortalizes it.
But, too often, the muse gets blanketed by the artist and the art’s fame, and little does one come to know about the wellspring of inspiration that propelled the art in the first place. Who might have been the anonymous inspiration behind the well-known painting of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Girl with a Pearl Earring”? Nobody knows.
A love story that could result in some of the most-celebrated art is perhaps the most pleasant
experience. The world hails the artist who pens that unforgettable lyric, but what happens to the muse who fuelled the song as he moves in search of another?
In a very touching tale as narrated by one of Rabindranath Tagore’s muses, Lady Ranu Mookerjee exclaims, "Our times couldn’t let us be together, so you left me to get married off to the one my parents chose. Yet I kept burning in your memories. And then one day I hear the news about your new poem and your new muse. Can you even make the slightest of guess, how much it pained me to know? The world heaped you with praises while I kept burning in the endless pain of lost love…. "
One is tempted to say, the muse, too often, is the one who suffocates while blanketed in the chills of the artist's success.
An art-scholar once said the muse is there to bring out the feminine part of the artist, and the muse is indeed his feminine half, the one who provokes his realization. And on the other hand, my feminist mind cannot stop but question the antics of the usually female-muse and male-artist, so earnestly looked forward to by us. It has formed the theme of several chartbuster biopics, (“Shakespeare in Love” or “Rangrasiya” for instance). Do they really respond to an inherent patriarchal psyche that positions the male as the doer and the female as the receptive and suffering?
Nonetheless, our world would have been robbed of half it’s riches if not for the genius that these artists displayed. Yet who can ignore the eclipse that the muses have to face on the other side of the consuming radiance of the artist?
Back to Marie
…..And so Marie continued to inspire the series of Picasso’s greatest artworks, 'Repose”, "Sleeping Girl,” so on and so forth. He never married her, and she held on to him in faithful perseverance, serving him, suffering him. “No woman refuses Picasso,” she claimed.
Then one day, she discovered his passions, and his paintings found another person to muse by. Critics and fans continued to shower him with admiration. “Women can be either Goddesses or doormats!”, announced he when confronted and left Marie and his new muse to duel it out.
Years later, he would continue to remark humorously that the duel between them was the “choicest of his memories.” As for Marie, she committed suicide four years later, after the great Picasso’s death.
She continues to live quietly as one of Picasso’s passionate muses, but who is she beyond that? That is, of course, a blanketed muse.
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