PARIS — When she was a student, Marie-Laure couldn’t count on her parents’ financial support, so she worked a succession of “side gigs.” Her most traumatic memory is street canvassing in Paris’ Place d’Italie, asking them to try out different brands of food products. “You had to have the gift of gab, and I don’t at all. It was awful.”
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In search of a more comfortable situation, she decided to listen to a drawing teacher who had seen “a Renoir painting” in her curvy figure, and agreed to become a live model for compensation. The principle was simple: undress and offer her naked body to an assembly of drawers, varying the poses. For Marie-Laure’s mother, a rather traditional, “uptight” type, it was a real tragedy. “She thought it was disgusting, whereas for my father, it looked like a lot of fun,” she recalls. Even today, her family imagines her lying in an armchair, staring at the ceiling for hours on end.
In reality, the supposedly bohemian life of Marie-Laure, 48, involves five hours a day in public transportation, between Nemours, southeast of Paris, where she lives, and the various Parisian studios that call on her, sometimes located at opposite ends of the city. She sometimes changes between two doors or in unlit toilets, before settling down, naked, in front of an audience of artists, offering them poses ranging from three to 45 minutes.
Sculpture classes require the longest sessions. Perched on a pedestal, Marie-Laure sometimes has time to escape into her thoughts, but more generally, she anticipates the next position or concentrates to avoid pain. A good model never dozes off but strives to “produce something” to satisfy the needs of the designers. “Sometimes you can tell when people are there without being there, and everyone gets bored,” Marie-Laure says.
For her colleague Annie, who has been in the business for 30 years, posing is anything but “a pleasant pastime” as romantic depictions might suggest. “On the contrary, it’s a very demanding job, which is physically damaging!”
23 euros an hour
In the Paris region, there are some 300 live models working full- or part-time, including around 100 employed by the City of Paris’ Ateliers beaux-arts (fine arts workshops), which offer painting, drawing, sculpture and engraving courses to amateurs of all levels. Having not seen a pay raise since 2009, the models staged a protest last winter, posing clothed. In the end, the city hall increased its rates in March, from 14 euros per hour to 23 euros before taxes. A substantial increase, which Annie sees more as a “catch-up” than a gift. Art schools such as the Institut Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, École Duperré and Atelier de Sèvres generally pay more, up to 38 euros before taxes, but teachers there may be more demanding.
These self-employed workers, sometimes involved in a parallel theatrical or artistic career, live a precarious lifestyle. Jean-Jacques, who at 69 and with 40 years of experience is certainly the oldest of the Parisian models, lives alone in social housing and has no children of his own. He admits to making do with very little. Passionate about flora and fauna, he occasionally leads nature outings for schools and leisure centers.
The practice is often compared to exhibitionism, or even the expression of a deviant tendency.
Cyrielle, 33, works full-time — until eight months into her pregnancy and one month after giving birth — and earns between 800 and 2,000 euros a month. But this money doesn’t just fall into a bank account at the end of the month. Every month, it takes painstaking, organized work to assemble a mountain of certificates and pay slips from dozens of different employers. To this must be added a few under-the-table payments and the occasional supplements provided by the “cornet,” a sheet of drawing paper rolled into a cone, which students are invited to tip at the end of class. This practice is generally initiated by teachers and officially forbidden by Paris City Hall.
“What, are you posing naked?”
This profession, which is as unstable as it is misunderstood, is subject to so many fantasies among the uninformed that Marie-Laure doesn’t talk about it at all when she meets new people — “otherwise it’s questions for hours,” she jokes. The practice is often compared to exhibitionism, or even the expression of a deviant tendency.
Cyrielle has seen it all, whether it be seen wide-eyes and exclamations of horror — “What, you pose naked?” — or suggestive comments like, “Well, those are lucky artists.” Often annoyed by this ironic and slightly contemptuous perception, the models don’t see their activity as an attack on modesty.
Marie-Laure says she’s “very complex, modest and reserved in life,” but has no trouble with her nudity in the studio, differentiating between “the real me and the model me.”
“I remember being embarrassed for the first three seconds after taking off my bathrobe for the first time,” says 43-year-old Alejandro, but never again.
As for the artist participants, the voyeurism question is never off the table either. But this misconception that nude classes attract more than the plainly inquisitive — people fascinated by the nude scene in Titanic, for example — seems irrelevant in the industry. In 30 years, painter and drawing teacher Daniel Fisher has “never had a kinky person” sign up for his workshop.
The women we interviewed confirm the studious, respectful atmosphere at most sessions. On one rare occasion, Cyrielle ended up slamming the door on the individual she was posing for, who, after making numerous comments about the special relationship between artists and their muses in art history, went so far as to say, “If I were blind, I would have to touch you in order to model you.”
Nude modeling in the 20th century — Photo: Beaux-Arts & Entertainment via IG
Museums and art books are full of stories of painters and sculptors falling in love with their subjects… with an attraction that is usually far from reciprocal. The representation of the human body from life, a great Western tradition, has irrigated the artistic landscape for centuries, from Caravaggio to Manet. But the practice is being lost, according to Fisher, who notes with regret that it has declined over the last few decades.
People no longer know how to draw in art schools.
“After 1968, people thought it was a good idea to teach drawing in a different way, to abandon figurative art in favor of abstraction and breaking free from the classical rules,” he explains. As a result, the focus of fine arts instruction gradually veered away from human anatomy, which, in the professor’s view, is at the very heart of learning to draw. He continues: “Under France’s Third Republic [1870-1940], drawing classes were part of mandatory education, and just look at the generation of Impressionists that emerged 30 years later…” Today, it’s hard for the average person to name even one figurative artist in France, when there are so many in the English-speaking world, including David Hockney [British painter exhibited at the Fondation Vuitton until August 31] and Lucian Freud.
On his own scale, Alejandro, a French citizen born in Mexico, made the same observation: “I have the impression that people no longer know how to draw in art schools. Something is being lost, and it’s the artistic heritage of France and Europe.” Today, he hears many teachers inviting their students to let themselves be guided by “their feelings” and “their sensations,” the rigorous application of a technique or the search for accuracy no longer being their priority. “This seems to me to be essential for artistic directors, fashion designers and animators.”
At the same time, the number of amateur workshops run by the Paris City Hall has also declined, for economic reasons, in favor of less expensive lessons. Nevertheless, despite the “rotten retirement” she foresees, for the naturally optimistic Marie-Laure, “nude drawing can’t be dying out when you witness the passion and talent of certain artists.” They wouldn’t express that enthusiasm for a still life.
