But he suffered a lot because his wife would not allow him

But he suffered a lot because his wife would not allow him to have other models or to see his friends. I was the only woman who ever posed naked for him except her, and I once said to him, ‘Matisse is just nearby. Why don’t you go and see him?’ But his wife wouldn’t let him.”Fortunately, Vierny did not suffer from the same restrictions and spent several months with Matisse in Nice “We were very close,” she says affectionately “He was adorable Not at all like how he is portrayed in books. If Maillol was my father, then Matisse was my uncle.” Matisse executed numerous drawings of her and even tried to persuade her to pose for a “Matisse Olympia”.

“Until the age of 30, I did look like Manet’s Olympia,” says Vierny, “but I asked him how long it would take ‘Six to eight months,’ was the reply. I couldimagine the expression on Maillol’s face and sent him a telegram saying, ‘Matisse wants to do an Olympia with me.’ ” She received a pithy reply within days – “Come back immediately.”Picasso was one artist whom she did not meet through Maillol, but simply through artistic circles during the war. “I used to cross over the demarcation line to go and have lunch with him,” she recalls. “The fact that I took the risk pleased him enormously.” They later lost touch when Picasso joined the Communist Party, but Vierny remembers bumping into him in the middle of the street years later. “He insulted me and said, ‘Why did you disappear?’ “After the war, Matisse persuaded Vierny to open a gallery at Saint-Germain- des-Pres and launched artists like Poliakoff in the Fifties. In the late Sixties, she returned to her native Russia (which she had left at the age of seven when her family took up exile in Paris), and discovered three of the finest contemporary Russian artists – Kabakov, Yankelevsky and Bulatov – in the space of one evening.Yet her most enduring mission has been to promote the work of her old “master”, Maillol. In true style, she invited yet another “great man of her times” to open the museum last January – the then French president, Francois Mitterrand.

“My daughter-in-law was there and was very pregnant,” she says. “Mitterrand put his hand on her stomach and she went into labour immediately. My grandson, Alexandre, was born before the end of the opening.”n Musee Maillol, Paris (00 331 42225958). It’s not quite the Turner Prize. There’s no televised dinner and it will never make the front page of the Sun. But what the John Moores Prize lacks in razzmatazz it makes up for in art.

For the past 38 years this biennial award has been quietly plodding away, doing its best to encourage British painting. The list of prize-winners, from John Bratby in 1957 through Heron, Blake, Hockney and Hodgkin, makes an impressive litany. A visit to this year’s show of work by prize-winners and 60 others confirms the undimmed potential of the medium It also offers some important lessons. At the cutting edge of contemporary art, painting is too often neglected or maligned. The truth, though, as evinced in the best of this show, is that paint remains unique.

Its very nature suggests alchemical, almost magical, properties. How can crushed stones and beetle shells be transformed into the endless variety that artists are able to call forth from pigment?
This exhibition includes some fine examples of that variety – from Expressionism to Super- realism and abstraction. Unfortunately, however, it also includes some works that would have been better forgotten. To simply daub paint on to a canvas may have satisfied a 1970s audience, desperate to reclaim the medium in the face of an apparently irresistible conceptual revolution. But 20 years on the legacy of that Expressionism has become merely an excuse for bad painting. To be effective this style must be utterly self- assured and resolved.