KEY POINTS:
One of the most photographed women in the world should not, on the face of it, present much of a temptation to artists.
The so-familiar image cannot be escaped from. An artist can only add to a colossal number of frozen photographic images whose end is gossip, celebrity, or the presentation of an idealised, unrealistic, sometimes digitally improved beauty.
None of those ends have much to do with the purposes of art.
And yet Kate Moss, who is nothing more than a commercial model, is turning into one of the great subjects of modern British art, what Lizzie Siddall was to the pre-Raphaelites.
She has been depicted by Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Gary Hume,Julian Opie, Stella Vine, Juergen Teller and many others, not even beginning to think of those fashion photographers, like Mario Testino, with pretensions to high art.
And now she has been put into the park at Chatsworth, three metres high and in painted bronze, in an extraordinary sculpture by Marc Quinn.
Her limbs are entwined self-adoringly and yet agonisingly in an impossible yoga embrace; the imperturbable face peers out between curtains of hair, poised, surely deliberately, over what Courbet called The origin of the world, straining against the leotard.
Private and public parts of the body are confused and exposed, pushed at us and left blank under our obsessed gaze.
It's called Myth (Sphinx). The title is a clue, not just to Quinn's intentions, but to those of almost every artist who has engaged with her.
What, actually, is there behind the face and the reputation? Is there any "there" there at all?
The great psychologist of modern art, Lucian Freud, registered a rare failure with his portrait of her.
He succeeded in cracking the Queen; upstairs at Chatsworth are some remarkably frank images of the Devonshires. ("That's my wife," Andrew Devonshire is supposed to have said to a tourist of one of these. "Well, thank God it isn't mine," was the reply).
But Moss was almost unrecognisable in his portrait, and became almost anonymous in his attempt to humanise her.
The audience knows almost nothing about Kate Moss. She rarely speaks in public; she presents "looks", and provides material for ongoing red-top narratives which could, really, be about anyone at all.
The best images of her are those which recognise that quality of useful blankness.
There is one in Julian Opie's reductive manner; or the brilliant and pioneering Gary Hume, in which she is just a shape in polished metal.
Quinn, like all these artists, has had to try to escape from a woman in Stalinist control of her own image.
He has done this by presenting an image of exactly that control.
There are a number of impossibilities in his image, from the scale of it, to the perfect balance of its physiology, to the empty and slightly repulsive model's professional smile on a body at the extremity of distortion.
"Sphinx" is apt; but these days, like many artists, we are more readily going to think of Kate Moss as Wilde's "sphinx without a secret" than of Oedipus's, the keeper of the answers to life's riddles.
She has done nothing so very wonderful, but look; she can put her feet behind her head, and smile.
- INDEPENDENT
