A Modern(ist) Love Story, 2014, 4:37

Auto-Portrait, 2015, 2:09

Some Music, 2016, 2:22

The Muse Trilogy investigate cultural definitions of “the muse” that perpetuate not only gendered stereotypes but obsequious notions of artistic enterprise. Incorporating a series of ambiguous narratives and gestures, these works seek to disclose the irretrievable biographies of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, Jeanne Hébuterne, and Musa McKim. (A fourth piece entitled Mnemosyne uses Edouard Manet’s notorious model Victorine Meurent as its subject, an addendum to the muse theme.)

This series began as a collaboration with Virginia-based writer, LeeAnn Thomas, whose prose poem “Madame Cézanne’s smile, a modern love story” was used as the basis for Devine’s performative interpretation, A Modern(ist) Love Story. This video-performance, completed in 2014, is also based on what little is known of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, wife of painter Paul Cézanne. An ambiguous set of actions in a limited space animates the seated Hortense, who defiantly chops the apples reminiscent of her husband’s still lifes, tears a book symbolic of the patriarchal literature that disavowed her, and ultimately moves in a chair to which she was so often tethered in his portraits of her.

This video became the basis for further research on other such women, lost to history and subsumed under the greatness of the men they loved and aided. The subject of Autoportrait is Jeanne Hébuterne, the companion of Amedeo Modigliani. Like the previous video, this piece was shot in an interior space. Some Music, explored the life of Musa McKim, wife of American painter Philip Guston, and was shot both in studio and outdoors. For both of these works, Devine interviewed and collaborated with leading art history scholars and surviving family to glean appropriate imagery. Along with A Modern(ist) Love Story, these works can be shown on monitors as a trilogy.

The agency of the female subject in these video-performances, elusive and enigmatic, is intended to subvert patriarchal readings that were once the basis of modern art historical analysis. Still, these works also acknowledge and rely upon the cultural assumptions regarding the relationship between male artist and “muse,” disarming the gendered roles and stereotypes we more broadly take for granted.