Chadwick, Chapters 9
As he moved toward pure abstraction between 1909 and 1912, these new ways of thinking about surface plane became the carriers for the spiritual content which he believed would ultimately define the ‘new’ art and remove it from the domain of the decorative.
- By abandoning realistic representation, he sought to make form and color themselves convey emotion and meaning. This marks a turning point in modern art — moving from depicting external appearances to exploring the inner, spiritual, or emotional essence of experience. The “surface plane” becomes a space for symbolic expression rather than mere decoration.
The publication of Clive Bell’s Art in 1914 with its emphasis on “significant form” also promoted an aesthetic in which design and color alone were to carry content.
- For Bell and his contemporaries, narrative or subject matter was secondary to the emotional or intellectual response provoked by form itself. This idea deeply influenced artists of the Omega Workshops, who aimed to merge fine and decorative arts by letting design and color become expressive tools rather than mere ornament.
Chadwick, Chapters 10
Modern artists from Renoir (‘I paint with my prick’) to Picasso (‘Painting, that is actual lovemaking’) have collaborated in fusing the sexual and the artistic by equating artistic creation with male sexual energy, presenting women as powerless and sexually subjugated.
- This part exposes how early modernism often grounded its artistic identity in masculine power and erotic domination. The act of painting was mythologized as an expression of male sexual energy, while the female subject was reduced to a passive object of desire. Feminist art historians such as Carol Duncan have argued that this “sexualizing of creativity” reveals deep inequalities in how art history has defined genius and creativity as inherently male. By linking artistic mastery to virility, modernist discourse excluded women from the position of the creative subject and confined them to being represented rather than representing.
Valadon’s female nudes fuse observation with a knowledge of the female body based on her experience as a model. Rejecting the static and timeless presentation of the monumental nude that dominates Western art, she emphasizes context, specific moment, and physical action.
- Suzanne Valadon’s radical redefinition of the female nude from a woman’s perspective. Instead of depicting women as idealized or passive figures for male pleasure, Valadon portrayed them as embodied, active, and self-possessed. Her firsthand understanding of the female body allowed her to challenge the traditional “male gaze” and to replace objectification with authenticity and agency. By situating her figures in everyday, domestic contexts and emphasizing physical presence over erotic display, Valadon reclaimed the female body as a site of lived experience and artistic truth, laying groundwork for later feminist explorations of women’s self-representation.
Chadwick, Chapters 11
Despite such achievements, women of color often faced formidable political and social barriers.
- This statement speaks to the persistent marginalization of artists like Augusta Savage, Pablita Velarde, Mine Okubo, Elizabeth Catlett, and Lois Mailou Jones, whose race and gender limited their recognition even when their work was exceptional. Their stories reveal how institutional racism and sexism are intersected, pushing many to work abroad or outside mainstream art institutions. The quote highlights a broader truth in art history—that progress for women artists was often uneven and conditional, and that artists of color had to navigate both gendered and racial exclusions to claim space within the modern canon.
Women artists active in public arts programs during the 1930s found themselves on a less secure footing in the next decade as government patronage gave way to private art galleries, and as social ideologies promoted sexual difference as cause for removing women from productive labor.
- The art world shifted from the collective, government-supported opportunities of the New Deal era to the exclusive, male-dominated private gallery system of the 1940s. As the art market became more commercialized and Abstract Expressionism took hold, women’s visibility and participation declined sharply. The ideology of “sexual difference” justified their exclusion, reinforcing the notion that professional artistic labor was masculine while women belonged in the domestic sphere. This systemic shift marginalized many women who had flourished under WPA programs and reveals how cultural and economic changes reinforced gender inequality in the art world.
Guerrilla Girls 59 - 91
Together they developed a theory of color they named simultanism, but he got most of the credit for it. Guerrilla Girls shake a hairy finger at any dense-headed critic or art historian who doesn't mention both of them in the same breath.
- This statement exposes the gender bias that often shaped early modern art history. Sonia Terk Delaunay was an innovator whose exploration of color, rhythm, and abstraction was equally as vital as her husband Robert’s work. Yet, like many women artists of her time, she was overshadowed and under-credited. The Guerrilla Girls’ critique reminds us that artistic movements such as Simultanism were not created in isolation by male geniuses but were often collaborative. Recognizing both Sonia and Robert Delaunay equally restores a more accurate and inclusive history of modernism—one that values women’s creative and intellectual labor alongside men’s.
“Only artifice in me, so little primitive. Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never be finished lifting off all these faces.” — Claude Cahun
- Claude Cahun’s lifelong exploration of identity as something fluid, performative, and endlessly changing. By photographing herself in a range of gendered personas, Cahun dismantled traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity long before such discussions were common. Her statement reveals a deep awareness that identity is layered and constructed—never fixed or “authentic”—anticipating postmodern and queer theories of the self.
SHORT POST MODERNISM
In this painting, Laurencin portrays a group of elegantly dressed figures—three women and one man—along with a small white dog. The figures are arranged closely together in a shallow, flattened space, with soft, muted tones of brown, pink, cream, and blue. The flowers in the background add a decorative touch that complements the refined, lyrical quality of the composition. Laurencin’s figures have stylized, mask-like faces and elongated forms, emphasizing mood and harmony rather than realism.
Stylization and Abstraction of Form:
- Laurencin simplifies and flattens the figures, moving away from realistic representation toward a decorative, abstracted style—a hallmark of early modernist experimentation.
Emphasis on Mood and Subjectivity Over Realism:
- The painting focuses on aesthetic harmony, emotional tone, and the artist’s personal vision rather than naturalistic detail, reflecting modernism’s break from academic tradition and its embrace of individual expression.
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