I discovered this Goddess du Jour, Taryn Andreatta, while searching around for beautiful, inspiring, erotic images. Taryn Andreatta is a modern-day model, and I’m well aware of that fact. But, when I look at her, I can’t imagine she exists in reality. There is something more to her beauty than meets the eye. She has a timeless beauty, evocative of Renaissance paintings, Pre-Raphaelite romanticism, and oxidized daguerreotype mysteries.
The Offering was artfully shot by photographers Mark Sink and Kristin Hatgi.
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light … (Christina Rossetti)
She is a Gauguin goddess of flowers and island nature
A Pre-Raphaelite beauty of ethereal radiance
I could imagine Amadeo Modigliani falling in love with her and painting her raw sensuality
The Lover “La Amante” by director Stephan J. Bell
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Kiki? She deserved her reputation as the queen of Montparnasse. ~ Andre Salmon
A young girl of barely eighteen, porcelain skin, short, deep black hair, sauntered through the bar with feline grace and a certain aura of sexual verve. She wore a threadbare shawl over her dress and shoes that made her seem like a little girl playing dress up in her mother’s heels. Her beauty captured the artists of Montparnasse.
Alice Prin, nicknamed Kiki, charmed the artists with her unique appeal. She posed for Kisling, Man Ray, Soutine, Per Krogh, and Foujita. She was the darling art model during the time of Picasso and peacetime Paris. She was their muse and inspired them to create photographs, make paintings, and love.
Born in Chatillon-sur-Seine, Côte d’Or, Burgundy, France on October 2, 1901, she was born out of difficulty to a single mother in Côte d’Or and literally born in the street. Little Kiki lived with her grandmother and a bunch of cousins, and her mother did what she could to send money from Paris. When Kiki was twelve, she decided to join her mother in Paris, leaving her grandmother’s home. She was in and out of schools, troubled and unable to tolerate the structure. She found a job at a printing press as an apprentice binder, and, for fifty centimes a week, she bound the Kama Sutra.
At fourteen and a half, she was taken care of by a baker on the Place Saint Charles. She woke early and delivered bread. Then she did housework, errands, cooking, and helped the baker’s son. The son was a healthy boy of fifteen and began to make sexual advances towards Kiki. She refused.
Sometime soon after, Kiki witnessed two lovers kissing in the square, she “felt all funny! I rolled around on my bed and it felt good… then I got frightened.” Overwhelmed by the discovery of her own sexual desire, Kiki decided to try her newfound seduction techniques on the baker’s son, and in the act of kissing and caressing, realized she was still afraid to go further.
She began to wear make-up on her face, and this was not done! She was emerging as a woman, and her sexual energy was floridly steeped in the grungy decadence of 1920′s Paris. Soon she was posing for artists in their studios in the nude. Kiki’s mother discovered that her daughter was posing for an artist, and came to the artists studio to find her nude before a man much older. Horrified to find her daughter this way, she exclaimed, “Whore! Miserable whore!” Accusing her and running off distraught. Kiki did not see her mother again.
Kiki became a maid for a while until she was fired from her job. Young Kiki had nowhere to go except with her girlfriend, Eva, who lived in a tiny room. Her friend Eva was a young prostitute who used her little bed to take men that paid for her time with them. She instructed Kiki on how to do as she did, but fifteen-year-old Kiki confessed to her friend that she was still a virgin.
This began her training in sex, as her friend Eva guided her on how to pick up wealthy men and get paid for her sexual attentions. They went to cafes and solicited the older well dressed men that bought them croissants and café crèmes. Kiki was learning how to use her feminine wiles in order to get what she wanted. She had a few older men treat her nicely and found that it wasn’t such a bad way of life.
Then, Soutine. Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish painter from Belarus and friend of artist Amadeo Modigliani. Soutine discovered Kiki and kept her warm in his place at the Cité Falguière. Soutine introduced her to all of his artist friends, but still Kiki had not found the love she was looking for.
Then she met the Polish painter, Maurice Mendjizky, who gave Alice the nickname “Kiki” — a loving diminutive of “Alice” in Greek. Maurice Mendjizky was the first man in her life. She posed for him and artists Foujita and Kisling.
The eccentric Japanese artist Foujita hired her to pose for him one day. Kiki went to Foujita’s studio on the Rue Delambre. She wore a coat and was otherwise barefoot.
“Take off your clothes,” Foujita requested.
Kiki removed her coat and there was nothing underneath. She was completely naked and hairless around her pubic area. Foujita, fascinated, examined her skin, and exclaimed, “You don’t have any hair!” Kiki found a black pencil in the artist’s work space and with it drew in pubic hair.
“How’s that?” Kiki said tartly.
“Amusing,” Foujita stated.
Then Kiki moved Foujita away from his easel and took his place. She drew a portrait of the artist. When she was finished, she demanded to be paid.
“The fee for my modeling session, please.”
Foujita, gobsmacked by her chutzpah, paid her. She grabbed the drawing of Foujita that she created and said goodbye. She went off to Café du Dôme. The following day, Foujita found her at the Rotonde. He demanded she come back to his studio to paint her. It was then that Foujita painted a large canvas titled Reclining Nude of Kiki. The painting was sent to The Salon d’Automne.
The painting of Kiki was a sensation. It was talked about in the press, and bought for eight thousand francs. Foujita gifted his lovely model with extra payment after he sold the work. With the money Foujita gave her, she went out and bought a new dress, a coat, and shoes. Foujita saw Kiki in her new garments and was dazzled, immediately wanting to paint another work of her. But she said she had another artist to pose for. Kisling.
“All I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red [wine]; and I will always find somebody to offer me that.”
~ Kiki de Montparnasse
Kiki was the Queen of Montparnasse. She has been immortalized in many famous works, including Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres. She was the mistress of Man Ray and a friend of Chaim Soutine, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst and other artists and writers like Ernest Hemingway and Tsuguharu Foujita.
From Wikipedia:
Adopting a single name, “Kiki”, she became a fixture in the Montparnasse social scene and a popular artist model, posing for dozens of artists, including Chaim Soutine, “Julian Mandel” (a pseudonym), Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Arno Breker, Alexander Calder, Per Krohg, Hermine David, Pablo Gargallo, Mayo, and Tono Salazar. Moise Kisling painted a portrait of Kiki titled Nu assis, one of his best known.
Her companion for most of the 1920s was Man Ray, who made hundreds of portraits of her. She is the subject of some of his best-known images, including the notable surrealist image Le violon d’Ingres[1] and Noire et blanche.[2]
She appeared in nine short and often experimental films, including Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique without any credit.
** credit to Dan Franck’s book Bohemian Paris for the biographical information on Kiki de Montparnasse
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Isabel Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile. She worked as as journalist until she began writing fiction. Her first novel, The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) (1982), was made into a film.
When Isabel Allende worked as a journalist, she wrote an interview with Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet. Neruda, during the interview, told her that she had “too much imagination to be a journalist” and suggested that she become a novelist.
I have admired Isabel Allende’s writing, having read The House of the Spirits, Portrait in Sepia, and my favorite, Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses.
I have loved Isabel Allende’s writings because she weaves such intricate threads with her words into tapestries of stories. Layer upon layer, the emotions and fragments of beauty come through like sunlight through a stained glass window, creating colors and shadows, and nothing is purely sunny nor is it dark. Her feminine intuition and wisdom comes through, as a deeper understanding of people as human beings.
Even her translation of love and eroticism within fiction has human frailties and passion within the pages.
Imagine how excited I was to find this erotic passage written by Isabel Allende in a Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women:
Our Secret (1989)
“She let herself be caressed, drops of sweat in the small of her back, her body exuding the scent of burnt sugar, silent, as if she divined that a single sound could nudge its way into memory and destroy everything, reducing to dust this instant in which he was a person like any other, a casual lover she had met that morning, another man without a past attracted to her wheat-coloured hair, her freckled skin, the jangle of her gypsy bracelets, just a man who had spoken to her in the street and begun to walk with her, aimlessly, commenting on the weather and the traffic, watching the crowd, with the slightly forced confidence of her countrymen in this foreign land, a man without sorrow and anger, without guilt, pure as ice, who merely wanted to spend the day with her, wandering through bookstores and parks, drinking coffee, celebrating the chance of having met, talking of old nostalgias, of how life had been when both were growing up in the same city, in the same barrio, when they were fourteen, you remember, winters of shoes soggy from frost, and paraffin stoves, summers of peach trees, there in the now-forbidden country. Perhaps she was feeling a little lonely, or this seemed an opportunity to make love without complications, but, for whatever reason, at the end of the day, when they had run out of pretexts to walk any longer, she had taken his hand and led him to her house. She shared with other exiles a sordid apartment in a yellow building at the end of an alley filled with garbage cans. Her room was tiny: a mattress on the floor covered with a striped blanket, bookshelves improvised from boards stacked on two rows of bricks, books, posters, clothing on a chair, a suitcase in the corner. She removed her clothes without preamble, with the attitude of a little girl eager to please. He tried to make love to her. He stroked her body patiently, slipping over her hills and valleys, discovering her secret routes, kneading her, soft clay upon the sheets, until she yielded, and opened to him. Then he retreated, mute, reserved. She gathered herself, and sought him, her head on his belly, her face hidden, as if constrained by modesty, as she fondled him, licked him, spurred him. He tried to lose himself; he closed his eyes and for a while he let her do as she was doing, until he was defeated by sadness, or shame, and pushed her away. They lighted another cigarette. There was no complicity now; the urgent anticipation that had united them during the day was lost, and all that was left were two vulnerable people lying on a mattress, without memory, floating in the terrible vacuum of unspoken words. When they had met that morning they had had no extraordinary expectations, they had no particular plan, only companionship, and a little pleasure, that was all, but at the hour of their coming together, they had been engulfed by melancholy. We’re tired, she smiled, seeking excuses for the desolation that had settled over them. In a last attempt to buy time, he took her face in his hands and kissed her eyelids.”
This erotic passage read beautifully to me. It shows two people as erotic and human. There is no idealization of the erotic, no fixation of body parts or intentions. The passage felt beautiful, melancholy, and real.
The book I love of Isabel Allende’s the most is Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses.
“I repent of my diets, the delicious dishes rejected out of vanity, as much as I lament the opportunities for making love that I let go by.” ~ Isabel Allende
Aphrodite‘s non-linear form is a melting sensual pot of her romantic and culinary recollections. She blends in her stories like a chef in the kitchen, adding spices and herbs. The book has recipes, erotic excerpts, mythology, poetry, travel notes and stories, and aphrodisiacs. Aphrodite is “a mapless journey through the regions of sensual memory, in which the boundaries between love and appetite are so diffuse that at times they evaporate completely.”
“Appetite and sex are the great motivators of history … All of creation is one long interrupted cycle of digestion and fertility.” ~Isabel Allende
In Aphrodite, Isabel celebrates the aphrodisiacs of many dishes with given recipes and sensual suggestions for their uses. Caviar, for instance, is “the supreme stimulus for lechery” and tells the tales of caviar and its sordid history. When cooking omelets, like making love, “affection counts for more than technique.”
Allende describes her dream of swimming in a pool of creamy arroz con leche, her favorite dessert. She gives her precious recipe for the soul food of rice pudding at the finale of her book. She suggests that we can slather it on a loved one, and slowly lick it off. She notes that, in this instance, the calories would be justified.
Sensuality and food is explored, revered, and celebrated in this saucy book of erotica excerpts, personal stories, aphrodisiac ingredients, and orgies are mentioned along with possible menus for such decadent events.
Isabel Allende’s Works
Born into poverty in a squalid East St. Louis slum, a child out of wedlock, wearing newspapers for shoes, she hustled for food and was subjected to abuse. Her grandmother then took her in, loved her, and brought her up on fairytales. Later on, as a young woman, she created her own fairytale as a supreme goddess.
She was the darling of Paris. It was 1925, the curtain rose at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, revealing an all-black revue. Goddess Josephine! There she was in her magnificent splendor of gyrations, legs flying, arms hypnotic, mesmerizing everyone with her Charleston dance. She was the “Ebony Venus” and “Creole Goddess” of the day. She gave all of Paris an erection.
Completely nude except for a bright pink feather between her thighs, she ushered in the Jazz Age with her black magic. Now, Jazz used to be Jass, which was a euphemism for “screwing,” and that was a smutty term for the uninhibited swing of music during those days. Jazz… Josephine was Jazz. She was a sorcière du jour, and men everywhere fell under her spell. La Belle Sauvage she was called. She was most famous for her “banana dance” or “La Danse Sauvage,” wearing only bananas.
Picasso painted her, Calder sculpted her.
The author Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw.”
She had a sexual appetite of an Amazon goddess to boot. She was super sexed, erotic, and commanded the right of a sex goddess to have as many lovers as she pleased. Having tried conventional ways (she was married numerous times) no one could pin her down or put her in a gilded cage— she had Counts, Princes, and Lotharios alike all showering her with gifts, money, jewels, and adoration.
Even in her 60′s she still had the magical aura of a goddess and captivated the world with her sexuality.
Josephine Baker has been compared to an African female deity, Mawu, a creator goddess, associated with the sun and moon, with a “personality like thunder.” The Brazilians believed she actually was a goddess, because as she danced, she revealed the cosmic secret of the drum, and brought that power to the earth.
She spent the rest of her life in France.
The Official Site of Josephine Baker
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I’m drawn to her sensuality. Like a dreamy angel, her skin is opalescent, glowing with the kind of light that comes from translucent clouds filtering the sun, candles within a lantern. There is something within her that burns bright. The facade, external beauty, yet within, her mind, her soul, burns a heavenly blaze that roils in the dark sky. Sovereign Syre: ‘a different kind of sex doll’ is a tag phrase mentioned on her blog : Sans Jupe: Diary of an Erotic Model.
Her gaze into the camera, similar to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, invites the admirer. Yet, what stands out most of all is her mind. She’s quite an intelligent brain, and I would like to share a post from her blog, titled Marilyn:
Marilyn
There was a time when dirt and hormones covered me in a sticky film, so thick I could scrape a trail down my arm, and see my adolescence compacted into a single black arc under my fingernail. When I was thirteen the heat of my cheek withered the grass and I could press my ear into the darkness and hear the world turning on the axis of my atoms. June bugs hissed in the humid folds of my dark blond hair, dragonflies rolled their tongues along the brackish crevices of my knees. The back door creaked and framed my father like a dark knight, the sun beating his retreating silhouette into the pits of my eyes with trailing bullets of color. The wind blew the leaves together in muted applause when I rose up and pushed the bodice of my dress taught over my swollen breasts, knotted with the fibrous lumps of puberty. The neighborhood boys walked past the back gate and rolled their damp eyes over the curve of my back. The pucker of her hard lips pressed my back flat into my bed, the short bursts of their breath spread my thighs in rhythmic worship. There was a time when I spilled out of my dress like an overripe fruit tree, onto the slick pages of magazines and left behind a legacy of sticky fumbling in gas station bathrooms. Words came out of my mouth light as spun sugar, dissolving on the pillows of starry eyed orphans. I came down like an incubus on dark haired soft bellied little girls, coaxing fingers down their throats, and teaching them to turn away from their mothers ashamed. I spent so many years crouched in dark hotel rooms chasing flashes of armor across mens faces that I forgot how the slope of my own nose looked. I woke up thirty years old afraid to look in the mirror distorting me now like a body of water, bloated and blanched and floating. Lines ran down my face the echoes of hidden frowns, tears cast into the corner where no one could look. Age walled me up like an anchoress, counting pills like days, from memory, slowly hardening loneliness. The years bring me grubby fingered minions afraid the world will forget,nailing my picture to the weeping willow overhead, lips spread, arms open. Girls tucked neatly into white cotton panties wet their tender lips with crimson lipstick, and suckled on the pink marble nipple of my grave, until their affection eroded it into the coarse teat of a bitch. In the white silence, the tuning fork of death strikes the earth and shakes loose the pollen. I can hear the morning dew quiver of the web, the roping steps of the spider on the leaf. What you can’t hear. What you can’t know.
Sovereign wrote this piece when she was 18. She says: “My English professor suggested I write a poem about what I thought it meant to be beautiful. We started talking about Marilyn Monroe. Like most poems that you end up liking, I wrote in about ten minutes. It’s early and full of all the mistakes that come with doing something for the first time, but I’m fond of it, because it was the first thing I published.”
In the photographs featured from a recent photo shoot with Holly Randall, she is depicted as an urban angel with wings. Yes, she is lovely. Smoldering. Sensual gaze, reminiscent of Sophia Loren. But what I would like to see more of is her writing. She and her beau have their website Darling House.
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]]> https://eroticadujour.com/goddess-du-jour-miss-ting-ting/feed/ 0(T)HERE is an ongoing project shot via skype. For almost two years now, Thyl Détré is taking pictures of Yi Ting, wherever she could be in the world, as long as she gets an internet connection. She doesn’t see him, he doesn’t give her any indication, they just plan the hour of the meeting, she’s alone in front of her blank screen, he’s taking pictures of his.
The project shuffles the cards of fiction and documentary, taking portraits of the multiple invented lives that constitute the reality of a person.For now, the project resulted in a stop-motion six minutes movie and a collection of pictures that will be collected in a book (sorry, texts are in French). The movie has been shown at the French photo festival of Arles at the Photo Phnom Penh festival. More is still to come.
Some Japanese Rope Bondage photos of Miss Ting x Steve Osada on Deviant Art
by photographer Bruno Sassarone
Beautiful Yi Ting in White
