Vincent Gallo, a downtown New York artist active since the early eighties as a musician, photographer, painter, model, actor, and filmmaker, has a face like a rusty hatchet (needle nose, scraggly beard), damp inky hair, and an unnerving stare.
On the other hand, Berthe Morisot, a worthy but minor painter, figures rather prominently, both as painters' model (as shown in several of the book's illustrations) and as Manet's lover and subsequent sister-in-law.
The complexity of the project may require painters, model builders, carpenters, and the like.
During the many years when she was painting body parts — exclusively male — Ms. Altfest put her models, mostly fellow painters, through physical rigors that rivaled those of her sojourn in the woods and drained most of the old-fashioned romance from the idea of the painter-model relationship.
Think of Suzanne Valadon, a 19th-century painter's model who only after many years and struggles was recognized as a painter; of Camille Claudel, Rodin's model, whose gift for sculpture he jealously belittled.
An artist who has had many gallery shows, Mr. Bennett said he found it tedious to be a painter's model for a change.
The heroine of this galloping comic novel is a painter's model who leaves her native Denmark in the 1880's, determined to track down her lover, a British painter who has vanished deep into the American West.
The painting is an ingenious representation of the artist as both painter and model and it showcases the technological tool — the camera — painters have been using, often covertly, ever since it was invented.
If Freud had met Moss 10 years earlier and portrayed her over and over again, if the intimacy that tattoo betokens became a complex passion between painter and model, then we could really say she inspired great art.
As he hits his stride and the genitalia count starts to mount--as his angle of vision goes down and the distance between painter and model closes to a nose length--the language of MOMA's exhibition catalogue turns in desperation to the decorous conventions of artspeak, becoming ever more formalistic in the face of increasingly outrageous subject matter..
The type of questions prompted by, say, Holbein (What kind of a man was Sir Thomas More?) or Gainsborough (What was the social status of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews?), or when considering a Lucian Freud (What is the relation between painter and model?), are all short-circuited here, replaced by an existential query not much heard in contemporary art: Who is this?
