A Genius and His Muse: The Essence of Inspiration

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main text
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Art has never been an exact science, and there is still no formula for awakening the stream of creative thoughts. However, at all times, the artists have had a reliable and inexhaustible source of inspiration, which is a Woman. A female image is a central issue of all fields of art, including literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and cinema. The pages of every artist’s biography tell us about tumultuous feelings and incredible love stories. An author may keep his muse in bondage or pamper and cherish, or even admire her distantly like desperate Don Quixote admires his Dulcinea. It would be rather interesting to disassemble the mechanism of inspiration and to find its essence: what does the muse give to the genius, and is there any ideal relationship for the inspiration?

Main text

Helena Diakonoff, a woman from the bank of the Russian river Volga, became the only person who managed to make Salvador Dali say, “I love Gala more than my mother, more than my father, more than Picasso and even more than money” (Descharnes and Neret, 1992, p. 25). She was ten years older than her Salvador and was able to conquer any man in her environment. This woman’s face always expressed decisiveness and passion; she had shining black eyes, small mouth, and long black hair. Gala enjoyed her life, and the only thing she seemed to be interested at was the pleasure for her heart and body, as well as money and luxury.

Having become a mother or at least an elder friend for young Salvador who was odd and infantile, Gala captured both his heart and his soul. They seemed to be two halves of a unity: Diakonoff’s essence needed a genius, and she was looking for him among the artists around her; Salvador’s nature required a cult figure, having chosen a Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, then an avant-garde director Luis Bonuel, and finally, his divine Gala. An artist and his muse had lived together for 53 years. They often seemed to torment each other; probably, this was the price for their incredible passion and breathtaking happy moments.

However, while Dali was expressing his admiration to Gala by means of depicting her eyes in all his pictures, his “colleague” Pablo Picasso also maintained his inspiration with the help of numerous love relationships. Picasso seemed to be able to get inflamed from a single gesture or an elusive sign. Sitting in the café, the artist saw a charming black-haired woman playing with a sharp knife; suddenly a woman made a wrong movement – and blood appeared on her hand. This view astonished Picasso, and he saved the woman’s glove in his cupboard for a long time; as for the woman, whose name was Dora Maar, she became his muse (Life, 75).

It is impossible not to recollect the “love theory” of a French author Roland Barthes, a specialist in semiotics, who considered a love at first sight to be one’s reaction on a certain “sign”, which can be a gesture, a sentence, or anything else (Barthes, 1979, p. 188). Thus, Picasso managed to catch his future muse’s accidental sign from the first sight.

Other Picasso’s love stories were also rather dynamic and often started with an accidental meeting or a glance, or a word. At the same time, they brought serious changes into his artistic life: when he met Fernande Olivier, his prevailing colours became pink and light blue instead of dark blue; Marcelle Humbert made his paintings vivacious and optimistic; Jacqueline Roque became Picasso’s muse when he was seventy years old and inspired the new wave of his mature works (Life, 68-80). However, his relationships were exhausting and magnetic: after his death, many of his beloved women committed self-murder or went mad, or entered the monastery. It looks like the energy of these women fed the artist and helped him to create more than fifty thousand works.

The history knows several cases when the relationship between an artist and his muse led to the disaster. The famous French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was inspired by his wife Consuelo. In fact, it was her whom he embodied in the character of a coquettish Rose in his The Little Prince. Once Consuelo found a batch of his husband’s passionate letters to a mysterious Rose in his pocket; this discovery broke their family happiness and gradually led to Consuelo’s madness and the writer’s death. The letters turned out to be Exupéry’s drafts for the future The Little Prince.

Thus, it is impossible to generalize the way the relationship between an artist and his muse may evolve: either mutual enrichment, like in case with Dali and Gala, or one-sided energy “nutrition”, like between Picasso and his women, or even mutual destruction similar to Exupéry and Consuelo’s story. The incredible diversity of the relationship “schemes” between a genius and his muse leads to a following idea: in the image of his woman an artist finds what he needs himself. A woman may be fragile or in flesh, thoughtful or flippant … The only thing that seems to matter is the magical image which tells the genius something new about this world and makes him express the discovery in his work of art.

Conclusion

This reminds about a two thousand year-old fascinating idea expressed by Plato in his Symposium: he explains that the aim of love is perpetual obtaining, which implies that in order to obtain eternity, one has to exist forever (Plato, 2001). This makes people incarnate themselves in their children, the memory of their deeds, and the immortal works of art. By means of a slight gesture, a word, or a silhouette’s winding, the muse makes a silent promise for enriching the artist’s life with something he needs in order to rich his goal of immortality. Being perceptible to any slight nuance, an artist bursts out into the streams of new ideas and embodies them in his works, depicting his muse standing in the suit of an ancient goddess or looking at the viewer from a picture with an unpretentious name “Portrait of My Wife”.

References

Anon (1968) Picasso: his women. Life, 27, 64-90.

Barthes, R. (1979) A lover’s discourse: fragments. London, Cape.

Descharnes R, and Neret, G. (1992) Salvador Dali: 1904-1989. Köln, Benedikt Taschen.

Plato et al. (2001) Plato’s Symposium. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

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A Genius and His Muse: The Essence of Inspiration

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