Monique Knowlton, a German-born model and Manhattan gallerist whose roguish glamour once elevated the covers of Vogue and the work of image-makers like the fashion photographer Bert Stern, died on Oct. 8 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
The cause was breast cancer, said her daughter Olivia Walton.
With a wink and a moue, or perhaps a side eye and a sly grin, Ms. Knowlton epitomized the playful ethos of early 1960s fashion and advertising photography. Mr. Stern was a master of the form, and in one standout image for Vogue magazine in 1962, he paired Ms. Knowlton with Kenneth Battelle, the society hairdresser who was the architect of Jacqueline Kennedy’s signature bouffant.
In that photo, sporting glasses with thick black frames (fashion shorthand for braininess), Ms. Knowlton has a cloudlike bouffant in progress and is engrossed in the ticker tape unfurling from a vintage stock-ticker machine planted on a table in front of her. Mr. Battelle has one hand in her hair and a cigarette clamped between his lips — it was 1962, after all — and he, too, is eyeballing the ticker tape. It’s an apogee of the crisp, arch style of the “Mad Men” era.
Ms. Knowlton, who went by the name Monique Chevalier when she modeled, was a star of that era, ubiquitous in the pages of Vogue — and a frequent cover girl — photographed by Irving Penn, Karen Radkai, William Klein and others. Clad in Dior and Lanvin, veiled and cloched, cloaked in chinchilla and mink, and often draped in Harry Winston jewels, she had a knowing smile that distinguished her from sister swans like Lisa Fonssagrives, Mr. Penn’s muse and wife, whom she resembled.
Ubiquitous as a commercial model as well, Ms. Knowlton appeared in ads for Revlon, Avon, Max Factor and Ponds.
By the mid-60s, she was married to Hugh Knowlton, an investment banker, and had stopped modeling. She opened the Monique Knowlton Gallery, on Prince Street, in SoHo, in 1976; a year later, she moved it into a space on East 71st Street.
“I think she wanted to prove she wasn’t just a pretty face,” Ms. Walton said of her mother’s impulse to become a gallerist. Serge Sabarsky, an art dealer who specialized in German and Austrian Expressionists and who died in 1996, was a mentor.
Ms. Knowlton’s tastes were eclectic and wide-ranging. She was anti-elitist, her daughter said, and her small gallery was a big tent that scooped up collage, jewelry, fiber art and craft. She showed the early work of Betye Saar, whose mystical, intimate assemblages skewered racial and gender tropes. She showed animated plywood clothing by Ron Isaacs, wickedly whimsical dolls by the provocative Chicago artist Phyllis Bramson, and the tiny domestic interiors and urban scenes of the painter Helen Miranda Wilson.
She also showed the work of the modernist painters Marsden Hartley and Oscar Bluemner, as well as photography, including celebrity portraits by Mr. Stern, her former collaborator.
“Monique Knowlton’s gallery is a hospitable haven, in which to be outrageous counts as a plus,” the critic John Russell wrote in The New York Times in 1981, reviewing a group show of 12 artists. Mr. Russell was particularly taken with the loopy domestic narratives of Shari Urquhart, whose medium was tufted rugs. “They are weird through and through,” he wrote admiringly.
In 1983, Ms. Knowlton turned her gallery over to the Lebanese artist Nicolas A. Moufarrege, who curated a show of 102 artists, calling it “Intoxication.” Participants included Francesco Clemente, Red Grooms, Peter Hujar, Christo, David Salle, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and an 11-year-old graffiti artist named On 2. The Times art reporter and columnist Grace Glueck described the show as “assertive, raucous, full of bad taste, but hardly ever boring,” noting that “it reflects the current glitzy scene with genuine fidelity.”
Ms. Knowlton “showed what she found interesting, work that was often humorous and quirky,” said Alison Saar, a Los Angeles-based artist who is Betye Saar’s daughter and who had her first New York show at Ms. Knowlton’s gallery in 1984. “She wasn’t confined to what was à la mode in New York at the time. I always respected her for that. She was open to showing younger artists — that was a great gift to me. It was Monique who gave me my footing in New York.”
Monica Maria Clara Graebener was born on May 24, 1937, in Karlsruhe, a city in southwestern Germany near the French border, the only child of Ingeborg (Kadon-Fuspok) and Otto Graebener. Her father worked for his family’s company, which made packaged soups and other prepared foods.
The family was well off, and Monica grew up in the spa town Baden-Baden, further to the southwest. When she was 9, Monica was sent to a boarding school in England and, later, Switzerland.
She moved to Paris at 17 and took a job as a translator, marrying Francois LeFebre, a bon vivant, a year later. They had a daughter, Kathryn, and Monica went to work as a model because her husband was not the bread-winning type. He was also unfaithful, and they soon divorced.
She took the name Monique Chevalier when she married Pierre Chevalier, her second husband, in the late 1950s. She was scouted by Eileen Ford, the modeling agency doyenne, who brought her New York City. By then she was divorced from Mr. Chevalier and raising two young daughters on her own. Her later marriages to Mr. Knowlton and William S. Sterns, a lawyer, also ended in divorce.
In addition to Ms. Walton, she is survived by another daughter, Emily Hunsicker, and two sons, Will and Stefan Sterns. Her daughter Stephanie Chevalier was killed by a drunken driver in 1977, at 18. Her eldest daughter, Kathryn Knowlton, died in 2014.
In the early 1990s, Ms. Knowlton moved her gallery to Kent, Conn., where it was open for a few summers before she moved it back to SoHo. At the turn of the millennium, she closed it for good.
Her personal collections were as diverse as the work she showed in her gallery. She collected vintage toys, hundreds of them — tin figurines of cartoon characters like Donald Duck, Batman, Betty Boop and Felix the Cat. The contemporary art she owned was thought-provoking, and included works by Cindy Sherman and Ida Applebroog, who often painted scenes of domestic violence. Ms. Knowlton “was interested in what makes people uncomfortable,” Ms. Walton said.
She was also an avid collector of the work of James Nachtwey and Sebastião Salgado, photojournalists known for their coverage of global conflict and injustice. Mr. Nachtwey’s searing images of Romanian orphanages and Mr. Salgado’s portraits of Brazilian coal miners lined a hallway in her New York townhouse, along with Elliott Erwitt’s famous portrait of Mrs. Kennedy at her husband’s funeral, her veiled face stark with grief.
“Coming out of World War II,” Ms. Walton said, “my mother felt that one of the most violent things you could do was look away.”
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