#Muse theory skin

Dante never laid a hand on Beatrice, nor Petrarch on Laura. Physical congress with one's muse is hardly possible, because her role is to penetrate the mind rather than to have her body penetrated. Then Kitaj exalted her as the source of all his creativity, and an aspect of the divine, just as Dante had Beatrice and Petrarch, Laura. One 20th-century wife who could claim the title of muse is Sandra Fisher, wife of RB Kitaj, not because of the role she played in life, but because of the role she played in Kitaj's intellectual life after her untimely death. Since then, artists as different as Rubens, Bonnard, Renoir, Charles Blackman and Brett Whiteley have painted their wives over and over again, but their wives were their subjects rather than their muses. Andrea del Sarto, an Italian painter born in 1486, was famously married to his muse, Lucrezia, whose features so closely approached his ideal that he made all his female figures in her likeness, at a time when most other painters were building their beautiful female images on the well-loved bodies of boys. Painters don't claim muses until painting begins to take itself as seriously as poetry. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind. The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. If Freud can be said to have had a muse, Bowery was it.Ī muse is anything but a paid model. He was allowed to pose standing erect, above Freud's eyeline, with his eyes open and focused, as no woman ever was. Bowery's big, glossy body was for Freud 'perfectly beautiful'.

Freud tried again and again to reduce him to anonymity and failed.

#Muse theory skin

Bowery was the one subject Freud's ego could not subdue, partly because he wore his skin the way other people wear evening dress. At the same time, Freud was struggling to 'work off' (his own expression) the sumptuous nakedness of Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery. Tilley posed for Freud a couple of days a week over a period of nine months in 1995, for the miserly sum of £20 a day. The thrilling news that Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping had fetched £17.2m at auction had the BBC and the Times so overexcited that they dubbed the model for the painting, Sue Tilley, Freud's muse - as if she didn't simply lie heaped on a sofa with her eyes shut while he painted her, but inspired him as well. Lucien Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. Or Algorithm, with its none-more-jackbooted synth bass line, urgent strings, and Bellamy emoting about how “algorithms evolve / Push aside / Render us obsolete / This means war.” That’s when you feel yourself seized by an unaccountable desire to march through the streets waving a massive flag, warning your neighbours that the robots are coming to kill us all.A big inspiration.

Propaganda sounds like Muse are trying to be Prince, which isn’t entirely convincing, while Get Up and Fight bolts on a power ballad chorus to an elegantly restrained verse.īut it’s still the less poppy moments that are most exciting: the cascading arpeggios of Blockades, giving way to furious power chords. New producers are on board, among them Shellback and Timbaland, charged with finding a new face to Muse. So Simulation Theory comes trailed as Muse’s synthpop album (it’s not), heavily inspired by the 80s (well, in its cover art less so in much of the music).

After all, there are probably only so many times you can record wildly overblown songs about your pathological dread of the power structures of a future world without wondering whether it’s a fit pastime for an adult. Which, naturally, is the point at which he chose to trail Muse’s eighth album with the most conventional rock-star gripe of all, on Something Human, a partially acoustic, countryish lope about how hard the life of the touring rock star is: “10,000 miles left on the road / 500 hours until I am home / I need something human.” No, Matt! Bring back the drones and the robots and the alien overlords! You can, however, perhaps see why he felt Muse needed a change. Yes, we thought he’d been spending too much time on the outer edges of YouTube, but he looks a bit less peculiar in the age of Cambridge Analytica. After all, he’s spent much of Muse’s career warning us about technological conspiracies to take over the world. Perhaps Matt Bellamy is the greatest thinker of our age.