Bodies as mediums of modernity

Modern artists are justly celebrated for their direct observation of the changing world in which they and their viewers lived and for the formal innovations they deployed in the process. So why did pictures of women, often nude or naked—a staple of Salon art—remain prominent in European and then American avant-garde art from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth? Why did the drive to depict the nuances of sexual difference, especially heterosexual difference, possess artists, both male and female, working in a variety of styles?  

Key works by artists such as Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning have become canonical, while works by artists such as Paula Modersohn-Becker and Frida Kahlo are being added to the canon. This lecture will revisit these works with these questions in mind. It will examine the understudied topic of exchanges between certain male and female artists—notably Degas and Suzanne Valadon—as they tackled these challenges.