Future Unveiled by French Artist Suzanne Valadon
Painting Brings Up Feminist Art History and Female Sexuality
Aug 15, 2009
Art historical writing was predominantly concerned with male artists whose activities were documented and commented on from the patriarchal point of view and evaluated by masculine criteria.
The Canon of Avant-Garde
While traditional artistic conventions associated with academic values were challenged and rejected by avant-garde, the situation of women artists did not change in any radical way. Feminists claim that the academic canon was merely replaced by modern canon. This led the feminist movement to begin to question the value system of the modern canon.
Male Nude
Feminist art history further reveals the extent to which women's access to artistic education was restricted. At the same time, however, it appears that opportunities for women to study, practice and exhibit were gradually increasing. This trend intensified at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe with the growth of private academies, especially in Paris, offering women facilities to study art.
Importantly, women were at last allowed to attend the life class enabling them to study male nudes. Even so, obstacles never seemed to cease as women remained economically disadvantaged. Significantly higher fees applied to female students than male.
Female Nude in Modern Art
By the beginning of the twentieth century, conventions for representing women had undergone changes. The predominant mode of depicting a woman became a female nude. The subject-matter of female nude actually became one of the criteria for an art work if it was to be considered a modern piece. Subsequently, female sexuality became one aspect of the feminist art history.
Woman Painted by Woman
Suzanne Valadon chose to depict a female nude in her painting The Future Unveiled of 1912. The choice of subject-matter alone signifies her desire to participate in the new developments in art. But Valadon does not adopt a typical masculine approach in representing a naked woman.
She placed her figure in an interior, a private area. Traditionally, a woman's place was within domestic sphere, a household, an interior, a room. The woman is alone, not displayed as an object of desire for a man's pleasure. There is no male to interact with present in the picture. Nor is the interaction with the person (male) viewing the picture made straightforward.
The figure of the woman gives an impression of a very clear physical presence. The horizontal of her reclining body echoes the edges of the long sides of the rectangular format of the painting. The body stands out against the warm dark colours of the room. The brightness of the flesh gives it statuesque appearance. The choice of colours implies a feeling of coldness, specifically the green tones incorporated in the brushwork on the flesh. The brightness and coldness also make the figure to appear distant.
Female Sexuality in Valadon's Painting
The woman reclines on the sofa, her naked body is fully exposed and she assumes a relaxed and confident pose. The figure is bold, weighty and voluptuous. The curved lines suggest calm, harmony and comfort. Despite her exposure and pose, she does not comminicate passive sexual availability or eroticism. She appears to be content in her nakedness as though the nakedness is her natural state, but she does not offer her body as an exhibit for a male spectator. Her eyes are cast down as she watches the fortune teller dealing cards. She is fully absorbed in her own thoughts, disinterested in pleasurable experience of a potential male audience.
Valadon's painting can be seen as a statement that this woman is not to be regarded as an object of male sexual desire and defies male objectification of the female subject.
Source:
- Perry, Gill: Gender and Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999
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