Carol Duncan Essay, Research Paper

Carol Duncan?s article “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth

Century Vanguard Painting” focuses on female nudity and the artist?s motive behind this. She believes the female nudes were used in the decade before World War I by a number of European artists with a similar style and content which reflected the sexual appetite of the artist. – Examples Kess Van Dongen, Reclining Nude (1904-05); Munch, Reclining Nude (1905); Kirchner, Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella (ca. 1909)

H.W. Janson?s (Selection on early modernism from A Basis History of Art) study of some of these works reflects his preoccupation with the artist,his style,and place in history and art in particular. Janson asserts that Fauves were a flock of young painters who came out of the morbid and decadent mood of the 1890?s. Several of them developed a radical style using violent colors and bold distortions. Their work was so shocking they dubbed the name Fauves.

In contrast Duncan expresses that “Fauves and the Brucke, were youth and health cultists who liked noisy colors and wanted to paint their direct experience of mountains, flags, sunshine and naked girls”. In her opinion they were reactionary in the sense that they shared similar view with their predecessors that art is about the central problem of existence and the struggle of the middle class male against bourgeois society.

In the case of Picasso?s “Les Demoiselles d?Avignon” (1906-07) Janson describes it as a masterpiece and a turning point in the history of art. “The Demoiselles unlike The Joy of Life by Matisse can no longer be read as an image of the external world. It?s world is its own.” It is a revolutionary style which dubbed the new style Cubism. Janson acknowledges that some of the bodies in this work have distortions and barbarian qualities of certain types of ethnographic appeal of African and Oceanic sculpture. It was Picasso?s intention to use “primitivist art as a battery ram against the classical concept of beauty”.

Proportions, organic integrity and continuity of the human body are distorted here “resembles a field of broken glass” as Janson?s puts it.

What comes out of what appears to be a destruction of classical form is a new style called Cubism.The figures as well as their setting is broken up into angular wedges.The shading effect gives them the illusion of three dimensionality.It is hard to see at times whether they are concave or convex.

Duncan on the other hand dismisses all historical importance of this moment and explains “no painting of this decade better articulates the male – female dichotomy and the ambivalence men experience before it than Picasso?s “Les Demoiselles d?Avignon”. She adds that Picasso has joined the structural foundation underlying both femme fatale the new primitive woman.

This work she explains shows many opposing faces. “Whore and deity, decadent and savage, tempting and repelling, awesome and obscene, looming and crouching, masked and naked, threatening and powerless”. She sees women being desecrated icon slashed and torn to pieces. She criticizes Matisse?s Red Studio for having eight female nudes out of eleven art objects on the wall which surround the Young Sailor (1906), a tough and “male” a character as Matisse ever painted. Next to the Sailor forming a vertical axes of the painting is a tall phallic clock.

Janson on the contrary present this work as “genius of omission” mastered by Matisse at work. “By reducing the number of tins to a minimum, he makes color an independent structural element”. The result is a new balance between the “two – D” and “three – D”.

Duncan is under the assumption that the Fauves and the Bruckes formed by the chain of events, possibly a reaction to the gloom and boredom in the decay of 1890?s, were revolutionaries. Although there were radical off-springs advocating new changes (not fundamental, however) such as anarchists and pacifists,they represented a middle class based movement of style and form and a breakaway from the traditional forms.

As Janson puts it “Matisse (the leader) was never stirred by the same agonized discontent with the decadence of our civilization”.

In parallel Duncan explains that”the artist wants to but cannot escape the real world of rationalized bourgeois society .He is tied to it economicly as he is bound within it?s cultural and psychological constructs.”