Description

This art history research paper examines depictions of the female body in two distinct periods of European painting – Neoclassicism (18th-19th century) and Modernism (late 19th-early 20th century). Specifically, it considers how the female body was objectified by the male gaze and how depictions of racial “Otherness” influenced artists in their sexualization of the racialized female body. This paper focuses on a subgenre of Neoclassicism called “Orientalism,” stereotyped and romanticized European depictions of people from North Africa and the Middle East, and compares it to modernist “Primitivism,” which appropriates stylistic distortions based on non-Western tribal art to move toward abstraction. It also presents the stereotype that non-Western people are more sexual and closer to nature than the so-called “civilized” people of Europe. Both movements portray racialized female nudes that are presented as overly sexualized for an assumed male gaze. I use visual and historical analysis to compare and contrast Orientalist paintings of Turkish “Odalisques” by the French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) with “Primitivist” images of nude non-Western women by the Fauvist French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and by the Cubist painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). While the female nude was illustrated as an idealized and beautiful goddess in the language of Neoclassicism, modernist “Primitivist” painters depicted the female nude as a monstrous character. My comparisons demonstrate that 20th-century modernist Primitivism actually built on previous stereotypes in 18th-century European Neoclassicism, thus explaining that Ingres, a naturalistic painter, impacted the two avant-garde painters who pioneered abstraction—Matisse, and Picasso. It also shows the ways in which both movements depicted non-Western females as imaginary fantastical figures who are either vulnerable or extremely exotic. Ultimately, I argue that Orientalist and Primitivist depictions both ignore the realities of non-Western cultures and instead disrespectfully reference those cultures to achieve their artistic goals. Ingres satisfies the erotic desires specifically of the Western male audience by painting a non-Western female nude with white skin. The modernists, Matisse and Picasso startle the audience by creating wild female creatures with exaggerated facial features that look like horrible racist stereotypes and unusual muscular body features.