{"id":562204,"date":"2026-05-22T09:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/numero.com\/non-classifiee\/who-is-lisa-lyon-mapplethorpes-muse-and-performance-pioneer\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T15:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T13:37:10","slug":"who-is-lisa-lyon-mapplethorpes-muse-and-performance-pioneer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/numero.com\/en\/art-design\/photography\/who-is-lisa-lyon-mapplethorpes-muse-and-performance-pioneer\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Lisa Lyon, pioneer of performance art and muse of Mapplethorpe?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Lisa\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Lisa Lyon, 1982.\n\u00a9 Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.\nPhotograph published with the permission of the author and the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London \u2013 Paris \u2013 Salzburg \u2013 Seoul. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Lyon, bodybuilder and muse of Helmut Newton and Andy Warhol<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

She began weight training in 1977, after meeting Arnold<\/strong> Schwarzenegger<\/strong>. A model and actress who posed for Andy Warhol<\/a> and Helmut Newton<\/a><\/strong> (she was one of the four Big Nudes<\/em>), she patiently built a physique that caught the attention of the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe<\/a>, who produced a series of over 200 images of her, as well as inspiring the British sculptor Barry Flanagan<\/strong>. Though she studied art, it was with a view to becoming a medical illustrator. Things turned out rather differently, and Lisa Lyon, the first female bodybuilding champion, invented what was perhaps a strange artform of which her body was the instrument. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1953, the daughter of a surgeon and an interior decorator, she grew up in Los Angeles. \u201cMy childhood was dark. My parents didn\u2019t realize how dark. It was very dark. I never liked horror movies because I had my own<\/em>,\u201d she later said about the nightmares that assailed her every night. \u201cI evolved a whole cult of ritual practices to close this stuff out\u2026 It had to do with numbers, counting, touching things. I was seeking an equilibrium, getting up at night to perform these rites running around the house three times counterclockwise.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet she trusted the little voice that told her, \u201cWhen you\u2019re 12, all this will be under control. You just have to tough it out<\/em>.\u201d After high school, she studied anthropology at the University of California, as well as ballet, flamenco, and jazz dance, before discovering art and kendo, a form of Japanese sabre fencing. At the university\u2019s kendo club, where she was the only female, she experienced something new: \u201cIt was the first time I was not being treated as a woman and not being treated as weak.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lisa\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Lisa Lyon, 1982.\n\u00a9 Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.\nPhotograph published with the permission of the author and the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London \u2013 Paris \u2013 Salzburg \u2013 Seoul. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow, in the 80s, women are building up their bodies without sacrificing beauty or femininity<\/em>.\u201d \u2014 Lisa Lyon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

She nonetheless felt that she didn\u2019t have the physical strength to fight her male opponents, and began weight training, which had been a rather marginal discipline until the release of the 1977 film Pumping<\/em> Iron<\/em>, which followed bodybuilders who were preparing for the 1975 Mr Universe and Mr Olympia contests, among them Schwarzenegger<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 16 June 1979, after seeing an advert, Lyon took part in the world\u2019s first professional female bodybuilding championship, organized by the International Federation of Bodybuilding<\/strong> in Los Angeles. She won the top trophy, becoming the first female champion of a sport that few women practised at the time, two years before Jane<\/strong> Fonda<\/strong><\/a> published her Workout Book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The victory made Lyon a media phenomenon, and Playboy offered her a cover shoot, which she accepted for reasons she later made clear. \u201cThe fact is, I didn\u2019t need another photo in Muscle Magazine<\/em>,\u201d she told The Washington Post<\/em> in 1981. \u201cThe people who read Playboy are the ones that need to be educated to this concept of femininity \u2026 In the 50s, you had women like Marilyn Monroe<\/a> who were strictly sex objects. In the 60s you had Twiggy, who started the undernourished, androgynous style. In the 70s there was Farrah [Fawcett]. Now, in the 80s, health is a reality. Women are building up their bodies without sacrificing beauty or femininity. <\/em>Vogue this month is all about the active body. It\u2019s talking about optimum weight for health \u2013 not skinniness. I feel I represent a trend. And this isn\u2019t just some vain, vapid thing I\u2019ve done. This isn\u2019t, \u2018Ladies, want to get in shape for the summer?\u2019 \u2013 Give me a break!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lisa\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Lisa Lyon, 1981.\n\u00a9 Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.\nPhotographs published with the permission of the author and the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London \u2013 Paris \u2013 Salzburg \u2013 Seoul. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Robert Mapplethorpe photographed her more than 200 times<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When the International Body-building Federation <\/strong>invited her to take part in the following year\u2019s championship, she declined, declaring that she felt she was less of an athlete and more of a performance artist. Indeed, it was shortly after winning the contest that she met Mapplethorpe<\/strong>, at a party in a SoHo loft. The man who had proclaimed that \u201cphotographing women is not the experience I am seeking<\/em>\u201d was fascinated by her body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over a period of two years, he took over 200 shots of Lyon, and she became by far his most photographed subject. Six of Mapplethorpe\u2019s Lisa pictures were published in the avant-garde review Artforum<\/em> in 1980, others were shown at Documenta 7, while a greater number was gathered together in the book Lady Lisa Lyon by Robert Mapplethorpe<\/em>, which came out at the same time as the exhibition Lady, Photographs of Lisa Lyon<\/em> at Leo Castelli\u2019s gallery in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSession after session, Lisa posed as a bride, a doll, a playgirl, a beach girl, a bike-girl, a gym-girl, and a boy-girl. She appeared as a frog-person, a mud-person, a flamenco dancer, a spiritist medium, an archetypal huntress, a circus artist, a snake woman, a socialite, a young Christian, and a kink,<\/em>\u201d Bruce<\/strong> Chatwin<\/strong> wrote in the book\u2019s introduction. \u201cThe photographer and his model have conspired to tell a story of their overlapping obsessions. Their glorification of the body is an act of will, a defiance of nihilism and abstraction, a story of the Modern Movement in reverse.<\/em>\u201d In the short text accompanying the Artforum images, Lyon explained, once again, that she defined herself more as a conceptual artist than a bodybuilder. And in 1979, she told WET<\/em> magazine<\/em>, \u201cI\u2019d like to be a proponent of social change and a representative of a new artistic standard.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lisa\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Lisa Lyon, 1980.\n\u00a9 Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.\nPhotographs published with the permission of the author and the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London \u2013 Paris \u2013 Salzburg \u2013 Seoul. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A pioneer of bodybuilding and performance art in the 1970s<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While Lyon<\/strong> has not yet gone down in history as an artist, this perhaps surprising declaration resonates with some approaches to art today. With The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art<\/em> (1970), American artist Tom<\/strong> Marioni<\/strong> made an artwork out of boozing, while the year before Gilbert & George were already declaring themselves \u201cliving sculptures.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the context of 1970s British and American performance art, Lyon\u2019s claim doesn\u2019t seem so strange after all, and in that light we might take her artistic pretensions seriously. Arguably, certain conventions, sedimented by time, stand in the way. How does Lyon\u2019s participation in Mapplethorpe\u2019s image-making constitute an \u201cartwork\u201d? Her name doesn\u2019t appear among the artists who took part in Documenta 7<\/em> because the photographer is listed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But perhaps we should go beyond these old-fashioned understandings. By entering into the spirit of the 1970s, and by observing how today the frontiers between the different arts are ever more blurred, we can accept the premise that Lyon set out the framework of an artform without any commercial goal \u2013 something that nowadays either frightens or fascinates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Lisa\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
Lisa Lyon, 1980.\n\u00a9 Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.\nPhotographs published with the permission of the author and the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London \u2013 Paris \u2013 Salzburg \u2013 Seoul. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In her recent article about Lyon in the Gagosian<\/em> Quarterly<\/em>, Fiona Duncan <\/strong>pushed the argument in precisely this direction, in particular noting that none of her \u201cperfomances\u201d were ever recorded. \u201cPainter Nancy Reese recalls seeing Lyon perform naked and covered in graphite circa 1979\u201380 in Venice, California<\/em>,\u201d Duncan writes. \u201c\u2018She used sand and stones,\u2019 Reese remembers, \u2018like the ones in the Kyoto temple gardens as her stage set. The audience was rapt, mesmerized, as she slowly and powerfully moved around the small stage assuming various archaic poses. It was like seeing some sort of zen version of Nijinsky dancing in Afternoon of a Faun. I can\u2019t recall if there was music or total silence. The performance seems to me now not as an actual event but the memory of a dream<\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But perhaps we don\u2019t need such evidence to follow Lisa Lyon\u2019s logic. When she died last September, at the age of 70, the French singer Bernard Lavilliers, who was briefly married to her from 1982 to 1983, repeated it once again: \u201cFor her, bodybuilding was a form of performance<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Lyon, bodybuilder and muse of Helmut Newton and Andy Warhol She began weight training […]<\/p>\n

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