"Breaking the Frame"

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Hassold, Cris

Keywords

Women Artists, Nudes, 19th and 20th Centuries

Area of Concentration

Art History

Abstract

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw for the first time an enormous number of woman artists painting the female nude. These nudes often transform the traditional tropes used by male artists for the subject. Both the art and artists changed not only the way in which artists see the nude, but also how the viewer sees the nude. These new ways of representing and thinking about the nude implicitly show the social changes occurring during this time period that not only expanded women�s roles in society, but also allowed them to have identities outside of and beyond the archetypes of virgin, whore, mother, and wife. I begin by examining the Western tradition of representation of the female nude and the scholarship on the subject, specifically Kenneth Clark�s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956). The remainder of the thesis is divided into 3 sections that examine these new depictions of feminine experience. I explore nude selfportraiture, the depiction of the nude within religious context, and new looks at intimacy, pregnancy, and childbirth. These chapters examine the implications of radically new ways in which women artists manipulate tropes for the female nude that have often existed in traditional Western Art and also introduce new representations of the female nude.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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