By all means paint Cara Delevingne, but don’t call model your muse

The portraitist Jonathan Yeo has been painting, and enthusing about, model Cara Delevingne. She’s a “perfect subject and muse”, he says, for a series of paintings in which he claims to be exploring the nature of identity in the social media age – in other words, painting her taking a selfie and showing off her tattoos.

Yeo’s paintings are less interesting – much less interesting – than his use of that hallowed word “muse” to describe Delevingne. Is this fashion model of the moment about to become as popular with (male) artists as Kate Moss? A remarkable number and variety of artists have found a muse in Moss. Entire exhibitions have been staged about her image in art; Marc Quinn’s contorted statue and Lucian Freud’s nude portrait have helped raise her into modern legend.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with men making art about women they fancy. The pretentious word “muse”, however, should be banned. It has no place in 21st-century art talk. It’s time to lock this silly term away in the attic with the porcelain-faced Victorian dolls and the Swinburne poems.

The trouble with musehood is that it implies a creative hierarchy of gender. Men create, and women inspire them. The Victorians adored this idea. It was not enough for them to desire a model – they had to raise up their lust into a mystical idea of poetic inspiration. Thus Dante Gabriel Rossetti obsessed artistically about the luscious lips and well-conditioned hair of Jane Morris, in paintings that worship her as much as they desire her. The Pre-Raphaelites’ fascination with muse figures – Elizabeth Siddal, who posed as Ophelia for Millais , being another – was a typically Victorian confusion of lust and spirituality.

In the same age that these British painters were cloaking desire under a veil of sentimental poesie, the French modernist Edouard Manet was repeatedly painting his favourite model Victorine Meurent naked and clothed. Yet it is inaccurate to call Meurent a muse. She was simply a paid model, and the no-nonsense directness of her gaze as she poses naked in Manet’s Olympia makes a mockery of the dreamy associations of that old word “muse”.