Dina Vierny

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Dina Vierny is a French model who posed for ten years for the sculptor-painter Aristide Maillol. When Maillol first saw Vierny she looked to him like one of his works come alive, and he claimed it was her body that he had been sculpting all along. Later Maillol sent Vierny to Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, both of whom attribute a renewed inspiration for painting and sculpture to the model.

Dina began as an artist model in her mid-teens and evolved from being a simple muse to taking a serious interest in the business of curating the art of those for whom she worked. She regarded Maillol as her finest benefactor and mentor. He in turn produced so many works based on her inspiration that some of the maquettes remained uncast until well after the artist's death. One such example is entitled "Nymph," a life size figure study modeled when she was 17 but not cast until 1953, and is on permanent display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

After Maillol’s death, in a car crash, Vierny collected the work of Maillol and dozens of his contemporaries, including Matisse and Bonnard, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Ilya Kabakov and Vladimir Yankilevsky. These works are now displayed at the Maillol Museum in Paris.