Every artist has a muse, or wishes they had one, or need one but don’t know it.  Some choose an aspect of nature; some, a beautiful women — the way Roger Vadim chose Brigitte Bardot; or photographer Mario Testino  Kate Moss, or the artist Mel Ramos, who chose his wife, Leta, a true beauty with her dark hair and olive skin. She has been celebrated for nearly fifty years, riding a rhinoceros, sitting on a Coca Cola top…

Leta became an iconic pop image, always nude, always provocatively posed, always conveying the siren on parade.

Not long ago I was looking at books about interior design and came upon the “Interiors Now” series, published by Taschen. Among the photographs was one of a summer house in Rio De Janeiro. The house is as exotic as you can imagine and accessible only by boat. The structure consists of two reinforced concrete boxes, one on top of the other and a span of glass windows. It reminded me of an Eichler-style house, but with two levels. And then in one of the photos, on page 350, I noticed an unexpected detail: there, hanging in a hallway,  a picture of Leta, as a surfer girl in her bikini, with colorful surf boards behind her.

Which made me think how muses become an inspiration not only for the artist but many of the art collectors who come in contact with the work.  And so muses end up in the minds of people they could not imagine and in places they might be very surprised to be in —perhaps in a bond trader’s Upper East Side penthouse in Manhattan;  or maybe in some historic Fin De Siecle building in Vienna, where a collector fell in love with that image. And perhaps she’s in somebody’s house in Beverly Hills, in someone’s bedroom, along with photos of Eva Gardner, Marilyn Monroe and other classic beauties. At the other extreme, perhaps she’s in a castle in Scotland, hanging on a thick rock wall, in a recently redecorated living room, along with family portraits of people with flaming red hair and furious expressions, family ghosts dating back to the 1500s….

It would make a great book:  “the muse’s journey”; Such a book would be about the connectivity of art, collectors, interiors, as well as the  effects of obsession.