Mking And Inventing Poem by gershon hepner

The difference between making and inventing
is great as that between a model and the art
that she inspires. God can’t do repenting,
but artists can correct His faults, and play a part
in the creation process that is more
profound that that which He initiated, and
get paid for what they do while they explore
the path He did not take or maybe understand.
God also sets a price for His invention,
demanding that His creatures follow all His laws,
and suffers from the great misapprehension
that He should never lose control since He’s their cause,
but artists are more liberal, allowing
their works of art the freedom that comes from their re-
interpretation without stale kow-towing
to their intentions required by each devotee.

Inspired by an obituary of Dina Vierny, Aristide Maillol’s model, by William Grimes (“Dina Vierny,89, model for Maillol’s sculptures, ” NYT, January 27,2009) :

Dina Vierny, the model whose ample flesh and soft curves inspired the sculptor Aristide Maillol, rejuvenating his career, and who eventually founded a museum dedicated to his work, died on Jan.20 in Paris. She was 89. Her death was announced by the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, which she founded in 1995. In the same period when she was modeling, Vierny, who had joined the French Resistance during World War II, led refugees from Nazism across the Pyrenees into Spain as part of an American organization operating out of Marseille.
Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father's, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums. For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Vierny was Maillol's muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches, or 1.57 meters. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic. After his death, she worked tirelessly to promote his art and enhance his reputation, eventually creating the Maillol Museum and donating 18 sculptures to the French government on the condition that they be placed in the Jardin des Tuileries. She later added two more.
Vierny was born in Kishinev, in what is now Moldova, in 1919 and was taken by her parents to France when she was a child. Vierny, who was intent on studying physics and chemistry, took to the role of artist's muse reluctantly at first, posing during school vacations and glancing, but the generous modeling fees and Maillol's sense of fun won her over.
For the first two years, though, she kept her clothes on, not out of modesty - she and her friends belonged to a nudist club - but because of Maillol's timidity. She herself later proposed that he try some nude studies. Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, 'a living Maillol, ' memorialized in works like 'The Seated Bather, ' 'The Mountain, ' 'Air, ' 'The River, ' and 'Harmony, ' his last, unfinished sculpture.
In the early 1970s, Vierny decided to start a Maillol museum. She began buying up apartments on Rue de Grenelle in Paris, selling off her collection of 654 dolls along the way. In 1995 she opened the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, whose permanent collection also includes work by Degas, Kandinsky, Picasso, Duchamp and others. It was at the museum that Vierny lived the rest of her life.


1/27/09