Jonathan Jones / Why artists just don't get Kate Moss

Kate Moss

Why artists just don't get Kate Moss

She's been depicted in plastic by Allen Jones, tattooed by Lucian Freud and snapped by the world's greatest photographers. But as Moss turns 40, she's a beauty still waiting for her Picasso

by Jonathan Jones
THE GUARDIAN
Thursday 16 January 2014

Full exposure … Lucian Freud's portrait of Kate Moss. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Reuters

Lucian Freud's portrait of Kate Moss

Kate Moss creates a timeless bubble around herself where feminism never happened. In this archaic realm, women are bodies and men are eyes. This has proved a lot of fun for male artists, who can make the kind of art about Moss that in any other context would be dismissed as 1960s-style misogyny.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider how she has revived the career of Allen Jones. In the 1960s, Jones made fetishistic pop art that fantasised freely about sex. His sculptures even turned women into pieces of furniture. One of these works in the Tate was attacked in what is thought to have been a feminist protest.

Plastic fantastic … Kate Moss by Allen Jones. Photograph: Christie's Images

But Allen Jones is hot again – thanks to Kate Moss. In a sale at Christies that celebrated her as a "muse", his images, including a Goldfinger-like photographic work and a plastic model, were the most publicised and high-selling works (at £32,500 and £133,875, respectively).

A beauty that can redeem Jones is not to be sniffed at. And, of course, Moss has also "inspired" Gary Hume to portray her with an empty silver face, Marc Quinn to depict her doing yoga, looking like some mythological goddess, and Lucian Freud to paint her as a reclining nude when she was pregnant.

Bendy … Marc Quinn's 18-carat gold Siren sculpture of Moss

Yet I don't buy into the idea that Moss is a great "muse", a word I don't understand or like. "Muse" is a stale Victorian concept thatsentimentalises the messy realities of desire and art.

There's another problem: Moss doesn't live in a great age for beauty in art. I think she may know this. Her relationships with artists are actually quite tantalising. Jones, Quinn and a legion of fashion photographers have been allowed to capture her image, and yet an image is all they have taken away – you get sense that the real Kate Moss has eluded them. Their excitement is so obvious, so puppyish. The chance to put heterosexual excitement into contemporary art is so rare that they just shoot their aesthetic load with a splat.

Kate's many faces … Peter Blake's print on canvas sold at Christie's in 2013 for £31,250

Moss apparently wanted something more, for she embarked on a potentially far more serious encounter with the one artist up to the job.Titian and Picasso were not around to paint her, but Lucian Freud was. Their relationship was intimate enough for him not only to paint her nude but also, as she has revealed, to tattoo her body. Using skills he learned in the merchant navy in the second world war, the great painter turned amateur tattoo artist gave her an image of two tiny birds on her lower back. That's what I call body art.

If Freud had met Moss 10 years earlier and portrayed her over and over again, if the intimacy that tattoo betokens became a complex passion between painter and model, then we could really say she inspired great art. As it is, Kate Moss is the muse who has never found the right artist. Where's a sexist voyeuristic genius when you need one?

THE GUARDIAN