The Arts
November 2022
Painting her pleasure
Three women artists and the nude in early twentieth-century Paris
by Lauren Jimerson
In France, women were banned from studying live nude models in public art institutions until the end of the nineteenth century. Social mores discouraged women from gazing at their own naked bodies, let alone another woman's. But three artists, Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy and Marie Vassilieff, painted the nude without inhibition, rupturing conventions and reversing gender roles. This book sheds light on these pioneering women, previously marginalised within art history, each of whom recast the nude in accordance with her own perception of gender, sexuality and the self. At the same time, it argues that the participation of women artists was the very thing that made modernism modern.
