2026 Celebrating the Figure Model

Kiki de Montparnasse with the painter Foujita. Photo Iwata Nakayama 

On January 30 and 31, 2026 I led a tour to The Metropolitan Museum of Art with the focus of discussion shifted to Figure Models and Muses. The tour had a duration of a little over an hour. I selected seven works to highlight. This post serves as a  recap of a very special  #modelsocial designed to kick off 2026 as the Year of Celebrating the Figure Model. I'd like to congratulate the Bay Area Art Models Guild for 80 years of existence. You inspire me! Erika Chamberlin 

1. Kiki de Montparnasse  Our first stop was Man Ray When Objects Dream an exhibition which ended February 1, 2026. We honed right in on Kiki de Montparnasse and she was a lot of fun to get to know a little better. Kiki born as Alice Prin in 1902 died in 1953. She is buried in Pere LaChaise cemetery. Having just completed her memoires, I'd characterize her as an extrovert. A country girl raised by her grandmother with five other children all abandoned by their fathers, her life is a revelation, a celebration, an education of a growing up in the streets of Montparnasse. I think of her as the first totally modern model because she invented herself charting her own path through life though the school of hard knocks with a keen sense of personal style. For example, her "makeup" routine initially began by her using the charcoal left over from burnt matchsticks to draw in her eyebrows. Talk about inventive and resourceful! Kiki was already living in Paris by the age of 13 because the realities of poverty demanded she find employment to support herself. After working at a series of menial jobs she finally found her tribe in the artistic milieu of Paris of which Montparnasse was the epicenter. There is no doubt that she and Man Ray were collaborators during their eight years together but there was so much more to her. Kiki was a painter, a chanteuse who booked engagements in Saint Tropez, Berlin and Paris and eventually became a cabaret owner of Chez Kiki. She had a very successful exhibition of her work in 1927 that sold out. In 1929 she'd published her memoirs Souvenirs de Kiki or The Education of a Young Model. She was all of 28. The foreword was written by Ernest Hemingway, the introduction by Tsuguharu Foujita. It would be translated and published in the United States by Blak Manikin press and later banned for it's raw content. She worked with so many artists in the avant garde movement,she not only made the scene, she  was the scene. It was a pleasure to read about cafe life in Paris and her interactions with painters Utrillo, Modigliani, Soutine, Kisling, and Japanese painter Foujita by whose side she is striding down the street in the photo above. Kiki appeared in ten films between 1923 to 1933 such as Etoile de Mer and Ballet Mecanique. Known as the Queen of Montparnasse during the Jazz Age or Les Annees Folles she was quite the dresser known for her extravagant makeup. Kiki is the model for Man Ray's best known photograph Le Violin D'Ingres (1924) and Blanc et Noire. While the Met commentary doubted Kiki's statement that she gave Man Ray his art, I don't doubt it at all. Models are so rarely given credit as contributors to artistic creations because we move in silence in support of the artists need to concentrate. But an artist doesn't create in a vacuum. Man Ray painted hundreds of paintings of Kiki and also applied her eyeshadows in blues and greens rendering her a living painting once she stepped out on the street. Fun fact: Man Ray was a child of Russian immigrants from New York City whose given name was Emmanuel Radnitsky.

2. Diadoumenos  "youth tying a ribbon around his head"  Year 69 - 96 AD| Artist: Polykleitos of Argos |Original 430 BCE |Gallery 153. Now this is a super interesting piece for many reasons. Polykleitos is credited with inventing the kanon (which means rod) or canon of proportion in Greek sculpture. A sculptor and a teacher he used meticulous measurement and mathematics to instruct his students on how to create accurate anatomical work that reflected the divinity, the symmetry and harmony in the most beautiful creation known as the human being and in particular the male form. It is said that Polykleitos created the foundation in Western sculpture which would stretch right through the Renaissance and arguably the Gilded Age. (see Adam by Tullio Lombardi Gallery 504)  For any figure model working in the contemporary art scene it is no secret that the field is dominated in the 21st century by the female figure. What is interesting is that this was not always so. There was a time when the male figure was dominant but that would change as we got enter the middle ages with the depiction of the Virgin Mary picking up speed and secular art becoming popular among the upper classes. Diadoumenos was the "athlete of the year" and may have been originally crafted in bronze. Bronze as a material was preferred by the Greeks for its ease of use in mimicking human movement like contrapposto and it's resemblance to the bronzed skin of a person living in the Mediterranean. It's funny to think that the French word for getting or being tanned is "bronzer". Because the Greeks were warring people they melted down bronze statuary to forge weapons of which there are many examples in the cases of the Greek wing. Fortunately for us, Romans were big fans of Greek art and made marble copies. Diadoumenos would have been reproduced many many times to stand in the lyceums where young men would work out. The sculpture presents an ideal with everything in perfect proportion. Diadoumenos was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of  Pumping Iron in his day. Unlike Adam by Lombardi, his genitals are not covered by a fig leaf. "Adam in Eve were naked in the garden and they were not ashamed." The Church and it's Dogma would introduce shame and bring the death of classical knowledge. That period is known as the Dark Ages.

3. Audrey Munson aka Miss Manhattan - Work Mourning Victory Artist Daniel Chester| Charles Englehardt Scupture Gallery| American Wing Audrey the super model of her time was also known as Panama Pacific Girl, American Venus and Exposition Girl.Born 1891 in Rochester New York, dying in Ogdensburg in 1996 at age 104. Miss Munson is buried in New Haven Cemetery. Discovered while window shopping on Fifth Avenue by photographer Felix Benedict Herzog, Audrey posed for him at the Lincoln Arcade on 65th and Broadway. While she did pose for Dana Gibson and became the Gibson Girl, her career really took off as a sculpture model. She had moved to Washington Heights in 1909  with her mother pursuing her ambition to be a chorus girl but fate had something different in mind. Soon she was working with top tier sculptors like Daniel Chester French and Alexander Stirling Calder. We stopped by two works of Audrey that can be found in the Charles Englehardt Sculpture Court in the American Wing. The gorgeous  Mourning Victory honors the memory of the three brothers who died in the Civil War. It was completed between 1906-08 and it's reproduction was a  gift to The Metropolitan in 1912 by Boston businessman C. Melvin. We also looked at Memory both of Audrey also by Chester French who was known to work in allegory.When you walk around New York City you can see our supermodel in many New York City monuments today: 1. The Appellate Court Building on 25th Street 2. Pomona at Grand Army Plaza Pulitzer fountain 3. & 4. She appears at Brooklyn Museum of Art as Brooklyn and Manhattan personified (1916) 5.This one is sad. The Old Penn Station by McKim Meade & White was demolished in 1955. A work previously mounted on the facade was saved from a landfill in New Jersey. 6. Sailors Monument facing Columbus Circle 8. Three Graces Astor Ballroom (1909) 9. Greenhut Mausoleum door, Salem cemetery Brooklyn (1913)  10. Gates Mausoleum door, Woodlawn cemetery Brooklyn (1913) 11. Bas relief Diana at the George Jay Gould Mansion (1910) 12. Frick Museum 70th street pediment  13. Manhattan Bridge Commerce (1915) designed by Carrere & Hastings sculpted by Carl Herbert. West Coast Fame: Audrey was all over  the Panama Pacific Expo 1915 in San Francisco Her figure was repeated 99 times atop the colonnades of Court of the Universe alone created by Alexander Stirling Calder ( father of Alexander Calder)  She appears in Wisconsin State Capitol, Wadsworth  and Longfellow memorial Cambridge, MA. Like Kiki she appeared in films four in number and nude posing for a painter. To say this was risque for the time is an understatement and it would cause her to be hounded by the press, arrested in Saint Louis, cause her loss of employment, contribute to her mental instability as her world came crashing down around her. Committed to a mental institution by her mother she would remain there until the day she died.

4. Hettie Anderson - Victory -  American Wing  Gallery 771 |Artist Augustus Saint Gaudens

Hettie Anderson left her home in South Carolina having set her sights on becoming a model in New York City and she did it! I love her story. When Hettie arrived in the Big Apple in 1895 she was 22 years old. She lived at 698 Amsterdam Avenue. Although she'd work with many artists,  it seems she got her start at The Art Students League of New York where one of the most important American sculptors Augustus Saint Gaudens taught. This statuesque beauty would become his model for one of the most striking sculptures in New York that stands across the way from The Plaza Hotel near the Fifth Avenue entrance to Central Park at Grand Army Plaza. Hettie as Victory cast in bronze covered with gilt, is leading William Tecumseh Sherman riding horseback celebrating the Norths victory over the Southern states at the conclusion of the Civil War. Saint Gaudens described Hettie as  "Goddess like" when he wrote to his niece adding that he should know as he had seen many models during the course of his career. How poetic that this metisse born in a family of freed people would be destined as the model for this piece in her adopted city. Saint Gaudens gifted her a bust of herself that she refused to allow out of her possession when his family wanted to make reproductions for sale after the sculptors death. She understood it's inherent value and we suspect this refusal angered the family eager to cash in on his legacy. This may be why Andersons importance as a figure model to Saint Gaudens was erased until now. It is important to note that Hettie was earning a living wage at $1.50 or the equivalent of $60 an hour while posing during the Gilded Age. Hettie worked with other notable sculptors Daniel Chester French, John La Farge, Anders Zorn, Bela Pratt, Adolph Alexander Weinman, and Evelyn Beatrice Longman. Her likeness appeared on $20 gold coins known as the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle. President Theodore Roosevelt deemed Victory "one of the finest figures of its kind."

5. Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi (Statue of) Liberty| 1875 | Gallery 556| European Decorative Arts and Sculpture Model: Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi, mother of the artist she was born in Alsace 1801 and died in Paris in 1891 at age 90. Artist: Frederic Auguste Bartholdi

Of course we had to stop by the committee model that was one of many replicas created as a fundraising tool to help pay for the stone pedestal which the copper and iron sculpture formally known as Liberty Enlightening the World stands upon. Lady Liberty is the most celebrated work of art in the world today a masterpiece of art and engineering. The conceptualist for the project was the Frenchman and expert on US Constitutional law, Edouard Rene Lebrevre du Laboulaye. An abolitionist, he was elected President of the French Emancipation Committee in 1865. Laboulaye was in so much admiration of the United States due to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 by President Lincoln that he wanted gift the American people for leading the way. And so it fell to Bartholdi who designed the statue and ultimately chose New York harbour as her home. Remember that during the Gilded Age, New York City had become the center for global trade and banking. A project which began in the Parisian salon of Edouard 1865 ran into considerable obstacles missing it's target date of being unveiled on the centennial of the United States in 1876. Various tactics were used to raise the money needed for the stone pedestal and selling terracotta reproductions was one of them. Still only a third of the money was raised after years of trying. After the city of New York declined to pay for the pedestal, which was followed by Governor Grover Cleveland vetoing a bill introduced by the New York State Assembly to grant the project $100,000, which was  followed by the refusal of the Federal government to back the project things had come to a dead end. A Hungarian immigrant by the name of Josef Pulitzer brought it to completion by running the  first crowdfunding campaign to make up the shortfall. Now a publishing magnate and rival to Hearst, Josef owned a daily newspaper called The New York World. In it he asked his readers to send in whatever they could afford. Thanks to Pulitzer $121,000 dollars was raised by ordinary Americans. As a thank you Pulitzer printed the names of all donors in the pages of his newspaper. She is a complete DIY project with no assistance from any government. When asked who was the model for Lady Liberty, Bartholdi replied that it was his mother. Augusta with her patrician brow and long face was the anatomical guide for the Hellenistic face of Liberty. It's notable that Augusta encouraged her sons in the pursuit of the arts from an early age and made sure her children played musical instruments! During his lifetime Bartholdi  completed one hundred commissions. Augusta Charlotte Bartholdi is a great example of how important it is to encourage children in the arts and even pose for them sometimes!  

6. Juan de Pareja Model/Painter/Slave  Portrait of  Juan de Pareja  Artist: Diego Velasquez| Gallery 625 | Year 1650

Diego Velasquez painted this living breathing portrait of Juan de Pareja a man of afro hispanic ethnicity who was an accomplished painter in his own right in 1650 while in Rome. Juan de Pareja was enslaved in Velasquez's home for over twenty years. Pareja was freed on condition by Diego through manumission that exists in a handwritten document. The condition required him to remain enslaved for four more years which would push his freedom to 1654. Every time I walk through this gallery I stop to look at the quiet strength and dignity Pareja is emanating from the canvas captured so well by Velasquez. It is warm and realistic in a way that the full length portrait of King Phillip the IV of Spain is not. Like Sargent would do 250 years later, the garments are painted in an impressionistic way which shifts the focus to the head and psychology of the sitter. The texture of his hair, the glow of his skin is beautifully done. Juan is proud and defiant looking directly at us. As a model that has sat in pose for hundreds of aspiring artists, I can testify that there absolutely is a bond and a silent communication between the model/muse and wielder of materials in the private atmosphere of an artists studio. It is an unspoken bond that manifests itself on the picture plane. In 2024 while posing for a  full room, I heard Dan Gheno advise a student to examine this portrait of Juan de Pareja for the way the eyes were painted. Gheno explained that Velasquez had levelled up as a result of studying the work of Titian in Italy. Gheno said to take note of the softness and warmth in the eyes of the subject which was an evolution in the artistry of Diego. Another painting that needs to be paid attention to is Pareja's The Calling of Saint Matthew where his talents conveying Matthew's disinterest in materialism is on full display. De Pareja has taken the opportunity to place himself on the left hand side of the painting standing behind a seated figure in what is a full length self portrait. His look and self assuredness is unmistakable as he fixes the viewer in his gaze. We are just at the dawn of discovering that so many works that were unattributed in famous artists studios had assistants that were trusted to complete a commission due to their immense talents and competence. You can learn more about the origins of the scholarship on Juan de Pareja by visiting this link.   

7. Marie van Goethem model Work: 14 Year Old Dancer |Sculpture Bronze|1880| Artist: Degas Gallery 815

There are so many things to talk about when looking at this work. Standing in the Impressionist galleries it becomes clear that it is a complete break from the classical ideals taught and promoted by the Ecoles des Beaux Arts established in 1664 in Paris. There is nothing idealized about Marie. She was a real person and not a mythical figure like the Esquiline Venus. At this juncture French artists who had previously been obliged to please the nobility or the Church are living in a new era where industrialism has given rise to a middle class that can afford to travel not only physically but mentally. Form, color, light, movement and the average person become the preferred subject matter. For an artist like Degas, the son of a banker and whose family had business interests in Louisiana cotton exports, he was free to do as he pleased.There had also been an influx of African art entering the capitol that was inspiring artists to use multi media instead of working exclusively in one material like marble. Marie is wearing real ballet slippers, has a ribbon in her hair, is wearing a tulle skirt and at one time real hair was on her head. She was originally sculpted in wax. The bronze cast would come later. But what was Degas to do when presented with wooden art objects that had paint, beads and raffia from Africa? Like Picasso, Degas would see these elements and transmute them to incorporate into his own art making. A great artist is always seeking inspiration and the classical world had been plumbed to its depths. The mixed reaction of French art critics and the way she was originally presented sitting under a glass dome like a curiosity signals a lot. For a society accustomed to Greek and Roman ideals this work would be considered unacceptable because it imposes a reality of the physical contours of a real person trying to make a living as a ballerina before ballet had attained the respect and acclaim it has today. The rise of the gig worker and the overlap between dancers and full time Figure Models can be traced back to this avant garde work by Degas. French society did not permit women, what to speak of single women and minors to have bank accounts, vote or have any independence outside of the authority of a husband or father. Working as a maid, a laundress, a seamstress, a nanny,a barmaid , a demi monde or if artistically inclined as a dancer would be career paths. At the audition if you didn't get hired it meant you weren't eating that day. So an option was to pose for Degas and make say five francs. These girls and their plight meant that sex work would be a reality because starving was not desirable. Was Degas really obsessed with ballerinas? Artists are interested in movement and attitude. One may be asked "Are you a dancer?" when an artist is seeking a model.  What they are really asking is if it it's possible for the model to hold a strenuous pose perhaps balanced on one leg for up to 20 minutes without moving.To see examples of these kinds of poses walk to the adjacent gallery to view multiple bronzes of dancers and equines. As for Marie's fate she was dead at 28. Her body in a Parisian morgue upon autopsy had suffered from syphilis and cirrhosis of the liver. French women would not obtain the right to vote until 1944.  They would not obtain the right to have a bank account without their husbands permission until 1965. While it is true that women could open a savings account in 1881 without authorization (from a man) it's hard to imagine Marie being able to save any money at all. She was 14 years old when this work of her was first exhibited. For a wonderful example of a dancers costume from New Guinea and Africa  visit gallery in the Michael C Rockefeller Wing on the first floor.