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theses

The nude has long been regarded as the gateway to artistic prominence. In the early twentieth century, it was the consummate subject whereby male painters expressed their virtuosity, ingenuity, and sexuality. For female artists to compete for eminence within the avant-garde as creative maestros of the modern nude was dubious, if not impossible. Even with newly gained access to life study, challenging masculine conventions of the genre or expressing sexual consciousness in art was considered unacceptable for women. Yet three important female artists who were painting in France during these years turned to the nude and the nude self-portrait and effectively claimed a place within this historical narrative. Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy, and Marie Vassilieff attacked the nude without inhibition to express physical pleasure, contest gender binaries, and subvert time-honored approaches. They explored uncharted territory for female artists: the nude self-portrait, the male nude, and the lesbian body. Stylistically distinct, each artist transformed the nude in accordance with her own perception of gender, sexuality, and desire. Valadon, Charmy, and Vassilieff defied gender, as they effectively redefined the nude. Rather than a monolithic account of women artists in early twentieth-century France, this dissertation spotlights a heterogeneous trio of contemporaneous painters. No single theory or concept can succinctly illuminate their oeuvres. Therefore, each artist is the subject of a separate case study, with a different methodological approach. Chapter one posits that Valadon captured the female body through a specific lens – the model’s gaze. From this embodied vantage point, she disrupted the normative cultural frameworks for the portrayal of the female nude and represented woman as subject. Chapter two focuses on Valadon’s male nudes, overlooked by art historians. She experimented with diverse styles and media, creating various manifestations of the male form. Depicting the male body in consonance with her own desires, Valadon reversed traditional sex roles in art. Chapter three illuminates the parallels between Charmy’s nudes and the writings of Colette, in particular, the suggestive veiling and unveiling of female sexuality. I argue that Charmy crafted an aesthetics of female jouissance, collapsed the standard subject-object dichotomy, and recast the relationship between artist and model. Chapter four shows how in her Cubist nudes Vassilieff leveraged avant-garde styles and theories to unhinge normative conceptions of femininity and masculinity. Through her androgynous male and female bodies, Vassilieff fused genders and conceived a radically new image of the nude. Finally, chapter five examines the understudied nude self-portraits by all three artists and demonstrates how Valadon, Charmy, and Vassilieff reclaimed the body, asserted agency, and pioneered modern body imagery.

ETD_8908

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Lauren Jimerson

doi:10.7282/T3ZC86BK

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.