“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
At the dawn of the 20th century, artists like Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, and Marcel Duchamp “seized the erotic as a means of challenging and transgressing the accepted categories of high art, particularly the tradition of the nude.”1 As sexual transgression became a widespread motif in a new age of stylistic experimentation, representing the female nude continued to signify the artist’s masculinity, virility, and lack sexual inhibition. This served to extend the established norms surrounding the female nude.
The advent of Cubism and the new avant-garde allowed Picasso and Henri Matisse an opportunity to disrupt the classic art historical narrative of the female nude as strictly an object offered up for the consumption of the male gaze. Instead of departing from these traditions, however, these artists used the female nude (and, specifically, bodies of women of color) as a space to assert their dominance in the art world—a battleground for their own ego. In so doing, they left room for future generations of artists to confront this problematic legacy and adopt new approaches to the female nude and subjectivity.
Meghan Dailey writes in Curve: The Female Nude Now that it is “virtually impossible to create an image of a female nude today without invoking its long and complex history in Western art, a history that continues to undergo scrutiny and revision by artists and scholars alike.”2 The female nude in contemporary art dovetails with a variety of inquiries, such as the (relatively) new medium of photography, the power of self-portraiture, and an increasingly intersectional examination of race as it pertains to the female nude throughout art history.
Notes
1. Alyce Mahon, Eroticism and Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 36.
2. Meghan Dailey, Sarah Valdez, and Jane Harris, Curve: The Female Nude Now, New York: Universe, 2003, 15.
Lesley Dill, American, born 1950
Front (The Soul Has Bandaged Moments) from the suite A Word Made Flesh, 1994
Photolithograph, etching and aquatint on tea-stained Mulberry paper, hand sewn onto Arches buff paper
25 7/8 x 21 7/16 in.
Purchased through the Hood Museum of Art Acquisitions Fund; PR.995.7.3
© Lesley Dill
Daniela Rossell, Mexican, born 1973
Untitled (Janita Harem Room, Villa Arabesque, Acapulco, Mexico) from the series Ricas y Famosas, 2001
Chromogenic print
30 x 40 in.
Purchased through gifts from Charles W. Gaillard, Class of 1962, Kenneth I. Reich, Class of 1960, James and Susan Wright, Lee and Marguerite Berlin, Karen Berlin, Class of 1989, Elizabeth E. Craig, Class of 1944W, Jan Seidler Ramirez, Class of 1973, and the Class of 1952. Selected by participants in the seminar "Museum Collecting 101": Sarah Bohlman, Class of 2004, Jeffrey Cooperman, Class of 2006, Joanne Kim, Class of 2005, Amy Kurtz, Class of 2006, Sarah Murray, Class of 2004, Rolaine Ossman, Class of 2004, Arielle Ring, Class of 2007, Catherine Roberts, Class of 2005, Emily Salas, Class of 2006, Liz Seru, Class of 2004, Eleanor Smith, Class of 2004, Miell Y. Yi, Class of 2002; PH.2004.18
© Daniela Rossell, courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
Rebecca Belmore, Canadian (Anishinaabeg), born 1960
Fringe, 2007
Digital print (pigment on archival paper)
Sheet: 26 x 67 1/8 in. Image: 21 x 63 in.
Purchased through the Elizabeth and David C. Lowenstein '67 Fund and the Olivia H. Parker and John O. Parker '58 Acquisition Fund; 2010.65
© Rebecca Belmore
Jessica King Fredel
Jessica King Fredel graduated in 2017 from Dartmouth College, where she was a history major and art history minor, She also served as a Levinson Senior Intern at the Hood Museum of Art. She grew up in San Francisco, California. This project on the female nude and its implications was inspired by John Berger's Ways of Seeing, and by a class King Fredel took on Pablo Picasso in her freshman fall at Dartmouth. This class sparked an interest in Picasso, a paper on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, her academic focus on art history, and her interest in serving as an intern at the Hood Museum.
Tremendous thanks to the Hood Museum of Art and the DALI Lab at Dartmouth for all their help with this project.
Please feel free to contact Jessica with questions or feedback at jkingfredel@gmail.com.
