Alba Clemente interview: a life on canvas

Waiting for Alba Clemente, I reflect that at least I'll have no problem recognising her. Not only is she a member of New York's arty A-list, appearing regularly at gallery openings and in the social pages, but she's played muse to the world's most iconic artists. Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe and her husband Francesco Clemente are just some of the artists who have immortalised her dramatic features.

We meet at the Blain Southern gallery in London, where her husband recently had an exhibition, and in the flesh she is dark, petite and elegant. At 59 and in knee-high Prada boots, a purple wool dress from Paul Smith and a huge silver chain necklace, she exudes an almost cartoonish sexiness - a pocket Julia Roberts with her wide mouth and big eyes. Her personality is just as forceful. We are sitting in a huge, echoing room of uncompromising austerity, but she laughs and chats in a surprisingly deep voice as if we were at a cocktail party.

I want to find out exactly what it's like to appear in works by some of the greatest artists of this century and last. Certainly, the title modern-day muse carries more than a whiff of glamour. But Alba waves away any notion of celebrity or personal vanity. 'When you're there, posing for the artist, it's not about you. It's about what the artist sees through you. None of this was about my ego.'

Are there portraits she doesn't like? 'Plenty,' she chuckles, her Italian accent untouched by three decades in New York. 'But a portrait isn't a photograph - it's not meant to be identical.'

Indeed, some of the portraits (which are mostly held in private collections) hardly look like Alba at all. One, a mixed-media portrait by Basquiat, is virtually unrecognisable: in it ultra-feminine Alba looks like a man in a fur vest. 'Oh, I didn't pose for that one,' she says with a laugh. 'Jean-Michel was staying with us in Rome and used Francesco's pastels to make this portrait of me.'

Alba's Portrait by Basquiat, 1984

As she talks, it becomes clear that she and Francesco were friends with most of the artists who have painted her. 'We knew everyone,' Alba says simply of the close-knit 1980s New York art scene. Basquiat, for instance, lived near the Clementes on Broadway. A graffiti artist turned neo-expressionist who died from a heroin overdose in his twenties, he painted Alba in 1984. 'In the evening, we'd go clubbing and we'd get home at 10am. We met him when he was maybe 20, so he had just seven or eight years to work. It's amazing - when did he have the time to make so many things?'

Every artist, says Alba, had their own way of working. A Mapplethorpe shoot, she recalls, was often drug-fuelled. She sat for the celebrated photographer (who lived with Patti Smith) on several occasions, including in 1985 as a Madonna-like figure.

'He was doing a series of portraits with a circle of light behind. We were very good friends,' says Alba, who asked Mapplethorpe to be godfather to her son shortly before the photographer died of Aids in 1989.

Not all the artists she's worked with have been such tragic figures. The figurative painter Alex Katz has portrayed Alba on numerous occasions over the years; these portraits were made as banners for a Neapolitan square. 'You sit three times,' Alba explains. 'The first time he makes small, detailed paintings that look like you. The second stage he does a larger drawing and it starts to lose the resemblance. And then he does the final huge painting and it doesn't look like you anymore.' Alba enjoys sitting for Katz. 'He has an artist's studio in SoHo and it's so peaceful. Everything stops, there are no phone calls, it's very concentrated.'

She sat for her portrait by the artist and film-maker Julian Schnabel soon after discovering she was pregnant with twins in 1987. 'He asked me to hold my smile for three or four hours. That's not easy.' Where Katz insists on quiet, Schnabel prefers to work in an atmosphere of constant stimulation. 'With one hand, he was painting, with the other hand he was holding the phone, talking to Vogue…'

But it is her husband for whom Alba, naturally enough, has proved the most enduring obsession. He has painted a series of portraits of his and her faces amalgamated. 'They say people get together because they look alike and we do somehow, although Francesco has blue eyes.'

The giant oil simply titled Alba was the first in a series of outsize horizontal paintings. 'Francesco experimented with me,' says Alba. 'I was on the floor lying on a piece of cardboard for hours. When Francesco paints, he likes silence. He doesn't want you to look at what he's doing, he doesn't want anyone moving around and he paints very fast.'

In the painting, Alba is wearing a blood-red Comme des Garçons dress and an Indian bracelet Francesco bought her. The image would become the poster for his 1999 Guggenheim show. 'I remember all the buses in New York had me on them. It was weird but nice…'

Alba by Francesco Clemente

Alba finds the idea of herself as a muse irresistibly amusing. 'Feminist friends of mine in New York think it's ridiculous, but I've always loved it,' she chuckles.

Why does she think she's been so inspiring to that generation of male artists? Is it her sex appeal? 'Posing for a picture is incredibly intimate,' she concedes. 'The way they look at you - sometimes they look through you.'

But she prefers to attribute her muse status to her spirit, rather than her appearance. 'I went to art school, I always felt part of the art world. I have huge respect for that creative moment.' 'A muse opens the door,' explains her husband. 'And each door is particular to an individual. Each artist sees himself in his muse.

So Alex Katz paints Alba for her style. Julian Schnabel paints her because he doesn't understand her. Robert Mapplethorpe saw her ambiguity. David Seidner portrayed her out of nostalgia for a woman of character. Basquiat painted Alba out of affection, and Kenny Scharf out of friendship. Agnes Martin said she admired her glamour and Joseph Beuys her simplicity. I paint her because I love her.'

Born Alba Primiceri, she grew up in the southern Italian town of Amalfi. From early childhood, she seems to have been determined to rebel. 'I shaved my head when I was nine,' she says. 'By the time I was 12 I talked only of politics.'

At university, she studied costume and set design, before going into the theatre, where, she says, 'I was almost always naked. In those days it made sense to break out of the conventions - now you wish people would put some clothes on!' At 23, she met the then comparatively unknown 24-year-old Francesco Clemente in Rome and moved in with him, giving birth to their first child, Chiara, out of wedlock. Her parents refused to speak to her for several years.

The couple finally married and spent several years living in India before moving to New York in 1981. The children - Chiara, then four, and her baby sister, Nina - were brought up in bohemian fashion in the loft-cum-studio where 'there was music playing day and night, people coming in at all hours… I don't know how we did it, really.'

They spent their nights club-hopping between the Palladium, the Paradise Garage and Danceteria with the likes of Andy Warhol. 'We loved him. He was very bitchy about women, but in his diary he said about me "she looks like a movie star, and she can even cook!"'

Warhol begged Alba to pose for him in the nude but by then she had become self-conscious about her body. 'I was 32, I wasn't so confident anymore.' Eventually she agreed, wearing a crucifix around her neck to feel less naked. 'It was the most special experience,' she enthuses. 'He worked with different cameras, dancing around me - it felt almost as though he were tickling me.'

But Warhol died suddenly before the photographs had been silk-screened. Alba was asked if she wanted the portrait made anyway, but declined. 'I said, "He's dead, what's the point?" Now I regret it. I would have loved that portrait. And those Polaroids are everywhere!'

Alba's Breakfast by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol

Today the Clementes live in a house in Greenwich Village that belonged to Bob Dylan in the 1970s. They lead a glamorous existence among the art world, and their circle includes the writer Fran Lebowitz, the actress and model Lauren Hutton (Nina's godmother) and Salman Rushdie, as well as artists such as Schnabel, Katz and Brice Marden.

Their children are equally glamorous. Chiara, 35, is a respected film-maker, Nina, 31, is a television chef ('we were a little shocked but she thinks she's an artist'), and the photogenic twins Pietro and Andrea, 25, both work in advertising.

Now her offspring are independent, Alba has rediscovered her early passion for set and costume design. She has been asked to create the costumes for the New York City Ballet's production of Powder Her Face, Thomas Adès' opera about the scandalous Duchess of Argyll, and is also helping to redesign the lobby of the Lexington Hotel. Somewhat bizarrely, she also acts as occasional lyricist for the pop group Pink Martini ('a very chic group of boys'), whom she met through a friend who worked at Warhol's Factory.

When the Clementes aren't working, or attending friends' art shows, or at the ballet, theatre or opera, they like to be at home. 'It feels so good when you have four incredible invitations and you decide to stay at home! We are at a stage now when we love to be peaceful,' says Alba.

Naturally, home is full of museum-quality art by the likes of Damien Hirst, Willem de Kooning and Keith Haring. But none of the portraits Alba has posed for over the years are on display.

'I don't even like seeing photographs of myself, or my children,' she confesses. 'We have a few Polaroids of family life in the kitchen, but that's all. I don't know how to explain it, but when I see a portrait of myself, I feel as though I'm dead. I'm here, so what's the point of seeing a picture?'

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