"Revolutionizing the Female Form: 20th-Century Artistic Representations of the Nude"

Extract

[...] At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a questioning of the academic codes of representation of the female nude. The female nude is now an opportunity to represent eroticism associated with male desire. At the end of the 1920s, Henri Matisse worked exclusively on the theme of the female nude. He painted a series of paintings with the theme of the odalisque, a theme borrowed from the Oriental world. The Oriental world has been a source of inspiration for artists since the 19th century under the influence of the Orientalism movement, a literary and artistic current. [...]

[...] The decor surrounding the female body is always simple and colorful, allowing the focus to be on the body. The representation of the female body by Matisse is born from an observation. Through this representation, he seeks to express a feeling, an emotion. About the representation of the woman in his works, he will say: have to paint a woman's body: first, I give it elegance, charm, and it's about giving it something more. I will condense the meaning of this body, by looking for its essential lines. [...]

[...] Indeed, the female bodies fit perfectly between the foliage of the trees. This harmony between nature and the female bodies is explained by Cézanne would like, as in The Triumph of Flora marrying the curves of women to shoulders of hills. ' At Cézanne, the representation of the nude body is the occasion to search for the pictorial and plastic order. It is no longer the representation of a theme possessing mythological or literary allusions. He will say 'To paint, it is not to copy servilely, it is to seize a harmony between many relations.' Appears at the beginning of the 20th century a new artistic movement influenced by the works of Cézanne. [...]

[...] The body and the gesture are an integral part of the painting. The representation of the female nude is also revolutionized by this new artistic movement. In the deconstruction of the female body, there are also the works of Yves Klein. This artist represents the female nude through a series of paintings he calls Anthropométrie. The peculiarity of these canvases is that they are actual prints of the body directly placed on the canvas, as these paintings are made in public using naked bodies covered in paint. [...]

[...] That's what I want.". The fragmentation of the body in Picasso becomes the very definition of the female body. The body thus divided into several fragments, notably the breasts and the sexual parts, thus allows evoking the feminine. From the 50s onwards, a new artistic movement emerges, the Work in Progress. This new movement turns away from painting to focus on the way of painting. The interest is now focused on the work in progress and not on the finished result. [...]