Picasso’s shy teen muse finally bares her soul
BRITAIN: Pablo Picasso was renowned for his charming entreaties to persuade women to pose for him. The artist approached one of his muses in the street in Paris with the chat-up line: ‘‘We can do great things together.’’
To attract Sylvette David he dangled a sketch of her over his garden wall and asked: ‘‘I want to do your portrait, would you mind?’’
However, David, who has since changed her name to Lydia Corbett, always guarded her privacy in front of the artist and refused to pose nude.
The muse, who was 19 at the time and is now 82, has urged young people to follow her example and be protective of their privacy at the most vulnerable time of their lives.
She recalled she became known as ‘‘the girl with the ponytail’’ for her depiction as a painfully shy teenager whose image hangs in galleries around the world.
It was during a hot summer in Vallauris, on the French Riviera, that she caught the attention of a 72-year-old Picasso.
For months she sat in a rocking chair while she modelled for more than 40 paintings, drawings and sculptures – an experience that would eventually influence her own work when she began painting in her 40s.
However, she was the muse who ‘‘didn’t want to show her body to anyone’’, forcing Picasso to paint her topless from his imagination.
Corbett revealed her fears that children are overexposed to technology.
‘‘I wish children would not sit in and watch the box [television]. Here, children in cities don’t have much nature to look at. A little TV is all right, but not the gaming and Facebook and all this – it’s too much. We have a lot of imagination but if you use machines too much, you become in another world, not really there.’’
Regarding Facebook, she added: ‘‘Why do we show our daily lives on a screen for people who don’t know you? It’s a bit odd. It might be a way of doing things nowadays but I don’t feel like doing it myself.’’
Corbett, who changed her name from Sylvette David when she got married and moved to England in the 1960s, is mother-in-law to Lawrence Dallaglio OBE, the former England rugby captain. She has already exhibited her paintings and ceramics in London, Japan, the United States and Germany.
Despite her concerns, she admitted she enjoyed reading books on her iPad and that her grandchildren helped her use technology.
‘‘I have not been born with it so I can’t understand it. But I loved my youth because I didn’t have all these things – we lived in the animal and plant world. We had a radio but it wasn’t allowed in the war. We played games and made music.
‘‘I think it’s a shame just to be sitting and watching a box, but of course it depends on the parents to stop them doing it too much. You have to take them out to play games, swimming and dancing and music. Children are lucky if they learn art because it’s a lovely thing to make your life happy.’’
Corbett said that posing for Picasso had helped to inspire her creativity. Despite his requests, she had been adamant that she would never pose nude.
On one occasion she came into his studio to find a picture of her topless as he said: ‘‘I hope you don’t mind, I painted you as a model’’. Corbett promptly replied ‘‘no thank you’’.
‘‘He never made a pass directly but he made games like that trying to get me to be more at ease but I was shy,’’ she said. ‘‘I didn’t want to show my body to anyone. He was like a father figure. He helped me to this day really, it was like a gift for life.
‘‘I’m nothing much but a muse, you know what I mean? [Although] of course I’m a painter now and I paint my own portraits in Picassostyle.’’ – The Times