Monique Knowlton, ’60s-Era Model and Provocative Gallerist, Dies at 87
A Vogue cover girl in the early 1960s, she later pivoted to contemporary art, opening a gallery where being “outrageous counts as a plus,” one critic wrote.
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. .
By the mid-1960s, 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.
