La mujer pintada

Queens, lovers, lolitas, prostitutes, dancers... Until recently, in the history of art, women could only be models: professionals like Kiki de Montparnasse in Man Ray's photographs or random muses like Victorine Meurent, the Olympia of Manet. Avant-garde icons like the crazy Henrietta Moraes, who inspired Bacon and Lucian Freud, or the surrealist Claude Cahun, who in 1930 proclaimed: "Neutral is the only genre that suits me". From the Gioconda's smile to the skin color of Cleopatra, the hair of Botticelli's Venus or the pubic hair that Courbet painted and fascinated Lacan, the mystery of his identities obsessed thieves, moralists and academics. Their faces and bodies still set an ideal of beauty today. A model for decades, Teresa Arijón revisits the history of art in this exceptional book that is both a novel, an essay and a chronicle, and also a sensitive and sensual record of the passage of time in which the roles are reversed and it is the model who portray the artist.