Irina Ionesco

Irina Ionesco - Contortionist, painter and photographer

Irina Ionesco was born in Paris on 3rd September 1930. Her parents came from Romania, her father was a violinist and her mother a trapeze artist, and at the age of four, little Irina was sent to Romania and placed in the care of relatives who worked as circus performers. When the Soviet Union invaded Romania, Ionesco returned to Paris at the age of 15, where she performed as a contortionist for seven years. She began her artistic career as a painter before increasingly turning to photography in the 1960s. In 1974, her first exhibition at the Nikon Gallery in Paris was a great success, quickly followed by further exhibitions all over the world and numerous publications in magazines. For ten years, she shared her life with the Dutch painter, sculptor and poet Corneille, who had co-founded the CoBra artists' group. 

Pictures of her daughter made Irina Ionesco world-famous

Irina Ionesco had her only child in 1965, a daughter, Eva Ionesco, who became the artist's best-known and most controversial model. From the age of four, Eva was a frequent subject in her mother's work; when she was eleven, she modelled for a series of erotic nudes that appeared in magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse, and even the German magazine Der Spiegel featured the naked eleven-year-old on a scandalous cover in 1977. Her mother also supplied Eva as a nude model to other photographers such as Jacques Bourbolon. However, after her daughter appeared in explicit erotic poses in the film drama Madolescenza (Let's Play Love), which was banned in Germany, Ionesco lost custody and had to pay Eva 10,000 euros in compensation. The pictures nevertheless made Irina Ionesco world-famous, and it was not until 2012 that she had to surrender all the negatives following a lawsuit by her daughter.

Collaboration with various major fashion brands

Despite all the controversy, Irina Ionesco's photographic work was widely recognised, and in the 2000s in particular she worked with several magazines, including the fashion magazine Stiletto, with the most important brands of French haute couture working with the photographer. Her pictures predominantly show women wearing little or no clothing, but instead display accessories such as jewellery, necklaces, gloves, scarves or other fetish objects and are thus staged in provocative poses as objects of sexual obsession. The actress Sylvia Kristel also modelled for Ionesco, and occasionally she also photographed men (as part of a series of pictures about the literary character Dracula), although this part of her work is less well known. Ionesco also published a number of books of her work, whilst her memoirs were published in 2004 under the title L'œil de la poupée.

Irina Ionesco died on 25th July 2022.