Women's Studies 2158A/B Lecture Notes - Women Artists, Middleground, German Expressionism

• School: Western University
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: Women's Studies 2158A/B
• Professor: Sonia Halpern

Document Summary

Ii male artists: sexualized images of nude women. Iii female artists: the unerotic nude. Cubist style; two components: 1) artist wants to divide everything up into geometrical shapes, 2) simultaneous multiple viewpoints; seeing multiple sides at the same time, art doesn"t have to resemble nature; avant-garde, modernist approach. Avignon refers to the red light district in madrid, spain. Not avant-garde in terms of subject matter; images of nude prostitutes have been around for a long time. Work was huge; 8 feet by 8 feet, very large image of prostitutes never before had such a pedestrian matter been done on such a large scale. Challenges whole notion of the figure-ground relationship; harder to decipher the figure- ground relationship because both the figures and the background consist of geometric shapes. Rejecting mathematical perspective; don"t see foreground, middleground, background, like we do in a conventional background, because a mathematical formula hasn"t been applied.