Muse, Models, Museum

Barnes’s own future would be intimately, but always somewhat inscrutably, intertwined with the translator of the African folktale that had appeared in the May 1926 issue of Opportunity. Violette de Mazia probably entered the collector’s life several years before she was publicly identified with the Foundation in the magazine’s note on contributors. Her given name was a present to herself because she liked the flower violet. Originally she had been Yetta. ¹ Her father, Jules Sonny de Mazia, was a Russian Jew. The French government granted him the honorific “de” for commercial services to the republic in 1887–88. His family name may have been Portuguese. Jules was trained as an engineer and had interests in cigar manufacturing as well as the arts. He married a French woman, Fanny Frenkel. Their daughter was born in Paris on August 30, 1899, five years after her only sibling, Georges. Surviving photographs of the de Mazias taken in the first decade of the last century show a handsome, well-dressed family; in one of them the children are on holiday with their parents at the Black Forest spa of Baden-Baden. For some years they lived in Belgium. In her Brussels secondary school, Yetta excelled in mathematics. She also was a gymnast, a competitive swimmer, and an aspiring actress. When the family moved to London about the time of the First World War, she studied at St. John’s Wood Priory House School and the Camden School of Art. As a French citizen, she could have returned to France after the Armistice, and it is not clear whether she met Barnes in Paris, London, or elsewhere. Or even precisely when.