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.
