Subversive Selves: Women Artists' Nude Self-Portraits

The nude has long been regarded as the gateway to artistic prominence. In the early twentieth century, it was the consummate subject whereby male painters conveyed their ingenuity and sexuality. For female artists, challenging masculine conventions of the genre or expressing sexual consciousness in art was considered unacceptable. Yet three important female artists painting in France during these years tackled the nude without inhibition. Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy, and Marie Vassilieff turned to their own bodies and ventured into territory that few artists had dared to explore – the nude self-portrait. Scholars have spotlighted Modersohn-Becker’s groundbreaking nude self-portraits, however, Valadon, Charmy and Vassilieff, who explored this subgenre contemporaneously, have been overlooked. In 1909, Valadon painted herself unclad alongside her partner in Adam and Eve. Later, with a truthful and unflattering eye, she depicted her aging figure. In the first known old-age nude self-portrait (1931), Valadon captured her sagging body in a manner which prefigures Alice Neel’s Self-portrait (1980) and resonates with Simone de Beauvoir’s later writings on aging. Charmy often substituted her own body for a model’s in the studio. Only subtly recognizable as self-portraits, her nudes collapse the long-established division between artist and model, subject and object. Moreover, through an aesthetics of female jouissance, Charmy revealed female pleasure and autoeroticism. Portraying herself as a sexually androgynous nude poupée-portrait, Vassilieff pushed the bounds of gender in representation. Through their nude self-portraits, Valadon, Charmy and Vassilieff asserted agency as well as a liberated, sexually conscious self, and pioneered modern body imagery.