Artists' Models: Paris 1926.

The question of live models for artists has been a recurring topic since the beginning of the 19th century, often only touched upon, with bawdy undertones, since people who pose nude, especially women, can only be of loose morals. In the mid-1920s, Montparnasse supplanted Montmartre, one generation of models was disappearing, another appeared, more diverse and cosmopolitan, with new features, and people were also wondering, with cubism and abstraction helping, about the very future of models. In the left-wing newspaper Le Quotidien, the journalist Denise Moran published an investigation into models between January and May 1926. This series of articles has the merit of being based on real encounters with models of both sexes and of various ages. The investigation, admittedly sometimes rapid and seeking a certain picturesqueness due to the constraints of the daily press of the time, nevertheless offers a good overview that will be of interest to readers today, a century later. Denise Moran's texts are followed by a file devoted to one of the most astonishing models of the time, Carmen Visconti. No serious research has yet been conducted on this model present in Montparnasse for more than forty years, often confused with other Carmens, and whose biography is full of contradictions, mysteries and gray areas.