Picture girls. Muses and artists: from Velazquez to Anatoly Zverev

Anna Matveeva is a prose writer, finalist of the Big Book and Yasnaya Polyana awards, author of the novels Every Hundred Years, Dyatlov Pass, or the Secret of the Nine, The Enviable Feeling of Vera Stenina, the collections Hidden Rivers, Lolotta and other Parisian stories", "Armastan. I love you too" and the documentary book "Picture Girls". In the new book “Picture Girls. Muses and artists: from Velazquez to Anatoly Zverev” Anna Matveeva continues to talk about the fates of models and muses of famous artists and about the artists themselves. The characters of the book are Diego Velazquez and Margarita Teresa, Jacques-Louis David and Juliette Recamier, Ivan Aivazovsky and Anna Burnazyan, Ivan Kramskoy and Neizvestnaya, John Singer Sargent and Virginie-Amelie Gautreau, Edvard Munch and Dagny Yul-Pshibyshevskaya, Boris Kustodiev and Yulia Proshinskaya , Arkady Plastov and Natalya von Wieck, Fernand Léger and Nadya Khodasevich, Anatoly Zverev and Ksenia Aseeva. “This book is the second part of my free research in the field of art history, a collection of essays about the models of outstanding artists and, of course, about the artists themselves, including Plastov and Aivazovsky, David and Sargent, Munch and Léger. The topic of the relationship between the model and the master is inexhaustible, you can talk about it forever... There are ten stories in the new book. And the questions that I posed to myself during my work remained unchanged. Who was the woman we see in the familiar picture? What was she like? Would an artist be able to become a master without it? (Anna Matveeva)