Adrienne Fidelin, The Hidden Muse
Adrienne “Ady” Fidelin cut a striking figure, whether it was in a candid shot or on the cover of a magazine. Thanks in part to her close affiliation with surrealist artist circles—she had a relationship with Man Ray and was friends with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar—Fidelin’s image spread far and wide during the early 20th century. But history still tried to erase her.
Humble Beginnings
Born in Guadeloupe in 1915, Fidelin eventually emigrated to Paris. She soon met Man Ray and his Bohemian circle, and started dating the artist despite being 25 years his junior. Besides dancing and occasionally acting, Fidelin quickly began posing for Man Ray and is identifiable in many of his works. Yet her romantic life is hardly the limit of her career.
On September 15,1937, she appeared in a spread in Harper’s Bazaar, likely the first time a Black model was in a mainstream American magazine. Upbeat and self-assured, when Fidelin first met Picasso, she reportedly gave him a languid hug and then said, “I hear you are quite a good painter.” Indeed, historians very recently named her as the subject of Picasso’s “Femme Assise sur Fond Jaune et Rose, II,” indicating that Fidelin had been “hiding in plain sight” all this time, almost forgotten.
The Hidden Muse
This forgetfulness, too, was an insidious part of the world she lived in. After all, although Man Ray and his friends were interested in Black women as artistic subjects, they tended to render subjects as both primitive and invisible in their art. Moreover, seeing her as a mere “muse” to a “greater” artistic impulse, art history didn’t always think Fidelin worthy of remembering.
Tragically, Fidelin’s real life followed much the same pattern. After WWII dispersed the group, Fidelin and Man Ray fell out of touch, and even when she came back to Paris, she never found herself back in the Bohemian inner circle. In 2004, at the age of 88, Fidelin passed in an assisted care facility 450 long miles south of Paris, stripped of the glamorous life she once reveled in.
Yet though she is gone, though we forgot her, it doesn’t mean we can’t remember her now.
