Group 5-Presentation Summary

Abstraction in painting and sculpture were developed simultaneously during the first decade of the 20th century. The art was formed after post-impressionism, and cubism resulting in the high spiritual content. This was the time when artists started exploring into decorative arts and textiles with geometric abstraction. According to “Modernism, Abstraction, and the New Woman” by Whitney Chadwick, “Geometric abstraction when worn, come to signify modernity and, at the same time, to obscure very real kinds of social change that would ultimately erode the ideal of individual artistic freedom”(252). Fashion played a major role at this time, there were modern influences in fashion during this period.
One of the well-known artists during this period is Sonia Delaunay, she was a Russian artist that moved to Paris in 1905 (Abstraction was more prevalent there). She worked with her husband and is best known for the way she used colors, and used geometric patterns creation abstract art.

This art by Sonia Delaunay was the first piece of decorative art and the first completely abstract work

. This was influenced by Russian Peasant design.

She was yet another woman that decided to give up her career and dreams to support her family, husband specifically, so he can get ahead in his career. Working with textiles and embroidery lead her to break down forms and emphasize surface structure in her work. Her husband later commenting on her painting that “the colors are dazzling.They have the look of the nationals

or ceramics, of carpets – that is, there is already a sense of surfaces that are being combined, one might say, successfully on the canvas” (Chadwick page 262).

Another art by Sonia Delaunay, created during the Russian Revolt. She used ballet costumes as instruments for combining visual art with theatrical design.

Modernism was a period during which the female nude bodies were the main subjects of paintings.Men were shown as creatures with high sexual energies and women were just portrayed naked and powerless.

• Women artists like Suzanne Valadon and Paula Modersohn were the first women artists to work with female bodies.
• These women artists started painting naked bodies of women and themselves but in a way that is empowering and not sexual
• Most arts from this period were getting attention from feminist art historians, as they were considered an erotically based assault on the female form.

Suzanne Valadon, a French painter became one of the first women artists to use the female naked

body in her paintings. She showed women in domestic settings doing things that they do on a daily basis. She also often used her family members as her models. Many of her paintings include her mother, father brothers and herself in a family setting.

A painting by Suzanne Valdadon called "Young Girl in front of a window"

Paula Modersoh-Becker is another such artist. she was the second woman after Artemisia Gentileschi to use her own naked body as the subject of her paintings. Her nude self-portraits maybe the first such paintings in oil by a female artist. But, as such they reveal all the contradictions inherent in the women's artists attempt to insert her own image into existing artistic conventions. Her art is considered a clash between modernist ideology and social reality. 

The picture above is by Paula Modersohn-Becker, it is an Archetypal fertility image, Subject to fertility is nurtured with dignity, and this shows womanhood. Modersohn-Becker is shown here embracing motherhood, but ironically, she died after giving birth to her son.

works Cited:
Chadwick, Whitney . Women Art and Society . 4th ed., Thames and Hudson, 1990. New York, N.Y