Overview

This book examines nudes by three women: Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy and Marie Vassilieff. Working in avant-garde Paris, these artists pioneered modern body imagery, expressing female subjectivity and sexuality in paint. They experimented with the male nude, Black female nude, pregnant nude and nude self-portrait, a genre which few artists tackled until half a century later. Flouting the period’s scientific discourses and social mores, they breached assumptions about ‘feminine’ art and unhinged expectations about the type of subject a woman could paint. They simultaneously defied prevailing academic and vanguard practices, forging new artistic methods for the representation of the body informed by an acute awareness of self. Contextualising their work within and against modernism, drawing parallels with later feminist artists and philosophers, this interdisciplinary book unravels the complexities of early twentieth-century gender regimes and persistent cultural stereotypes, providing an illuminating history of women, sexuality and the body.

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9781526159830

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Lauren Jimerson, PhD is a Paris-based art historian specialising in women artists and modern European art. Her work has been recognised through grants from the Mellon Foundation as well as a Fulbright Scholarship to France. Jimerson has contributed to exhibitions on women artists at museums such as the Barnes Foundation, Musée de Montmartre, Musée du Luxembourg and Centre Pompidou Metz. Her expertise has also led her to appearances on NBC's The Today Show and France 24 as an art history commentator. Beyond her research, she lectures to diverse audiences through her online art history platform Art with Friends and in museums across the globe. -- .

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