A Silent Immortality: the Artist’s Muse
Nico Gurdjian
Do you wish to be immortal? If so, how do you grasp immortality? I believe it can be attainable through remembrance beyond death. To have a wide plain in future history, vast and lush with legacy. It's a chance to extend consciousness from gravedirt, influence the future and take part in the unfolding world.
Artists are masters of transcending mortality, with work adorning public walls, and their lives fully investigated. Meanwhile, their subjects, often women, are relegated to the background of history; bound in oil, personal legacies erased by time.
Joanna Hifferman was a muse of many during the 19th century beginnings of the Realist movement. I stumbled upon her in the MET; an entrancing, provocative study.
Woman with a Parrot - Gustave Courbet 1866
The quiet paradox unfolds as she poses with tousled red hair. She appears in American painter James Whistler and French Gustave Courbet's works, striking and intangible. Their works are studied widely, privileged to everlasting life, while Hifferman's existence is unquestioned, remaining tied to the world of their art. She is stripped of humanity, not remembered as a woman with agency, a woman with dreams, but merely “Jo, his muse”. She owns no part of her future, existing in the brushstrokes of men at the narrative’s helm.
Whenever I return to NYC, I make sure to greet her, to speak her name aloud, so she will exist in me; because now I know her and now, I love her.
Symphony in White, No. 1: The White
Girl - James McNeill Whistler 1862
Hifferman is not alone in liminal existence; 20th century muses like Victorine Meurent, Elizabeth Soddal, and Jeanne Hebuterne, join her. They begged to be artists in their own right yet, their work is overshadowed, contributions never credited. Their identities are tied to artists' legacies, ambitions erased by association. Known by name and brief synopsis, they may yet lay claim to a semblance of immortality, as useless as it may be.
Black women also faced great erasure; they were frequently anonymous, reduced to hypersexualized stereotypes. Exotified to deny individuality, their contributions invisible in art history. Integral to the painting's composition yet, their identities marginalized beyond anonymity: included to highlight the whiteness of their subject counterparts.
Laure was a French art model best known for posing in Manet's Olympia as a maid attending to a nude figure. Despite her presence in the painting, the study and critic of the work was only in reference to the white courtesan, referring in passing to Laure as "the slave", subject to layers of racial discord, silenced in and out of the frame.
Olympia- Edouard Manet 1863
What is an immortal legacy without personal history? One dictated by the men who painted them. A silent immortality, it leaves a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. Contrary to some, it is not romantic. It is not a gift of perpetual beauty, being a muse offers no space to be a complete dynamic self. Their portraits do not wholly make them immortal but rather trap them in a timeless existence where their identities are no longer their own.
A mirror that refuses to reflect one's own essence, but the desires and ambitions of men who framed them. Stagnant in youth, the complexities lost. We don't see their stories, their struggles, their wrinkled skin. I call it a tragedy: to attain a taste of immortality only to realize, it isn’t yours.
Strike Out,
Nico Gurdjian
Born and raised in Miami, she is studying Psychology/Pre-Med at FIU. She likes creation myths, piano sonatas, puppet shows, and comic books. She dislikes serious letterboxd reviews, Green’s theorem, the Sicilian Defense, and whispering.
