Nico

Nico was born in Germany in 1938, one year before the beginning of World War II. Her earliest years coincided with the Nazi regime, the war and the bombing of German cities, while her adolescence unfolded in a devastated and divided postwar Germany. During the 1950s, Paris, Rome and New York were becoming international centers of fashion, cinema and new artistic movements. Nico moved between these different worlds, passing from European fashion and Fellini's cinema to the American underground scene of the 1960s. In Andy Warhol's New York, the boundaries between music, painting, film, photography and performance were increasingly being challenged. It was within this environment that Nico first emerged as a mysterious European presence alongside the Velvet Underground. Her later career, however, became an effort to move beyond the role of model, muse or singer for another group and establish her own artistic language. With The Marble Index and Desertshore she turned away from the pop and psychedelic conventions of the period and developed an austere, dark and experimental sound that would influence later generations of musicians.