Karima Nasr Professor Cacoilo Post 3 2017, April 4 This was a time where many movements came to life, such as impressionism, dadaism, abstraction, surrealism, all giving birth to “Modernism”. The 20th century marks a new beginning for women, with gaining the right to vote, to as well as women artists beholding careers. Before this new beginning, the spotlight was only on male artists, leaving female artists backstage. The typical European male artist would be hanging out in cafes, sleeping with as many women as possible, and spent their days drinking. Women artists Today, these men would not be as respected as they were back then. With more freedom in the 20th century, women have become more notable artists, as “new women”. For example, Sonia Delaunay spent most of her life aiding her husband Robert Delaunay, only to turn out more known for her art after her husband passed away. She was born in Russia but then moved to Paris to learn art. This is where she met her husband Robert Delaunay, a Cubist painter.She created an abstract painting called Prisms Isotiques, 1914. This painting was a result of a painting style called simultanism, where the contrast of color and shapes unify.What makes this abstract is the use of a variety of different colors, shapes, and sizes. She also paints Sonia’s Designs For Clothes 1925. The fact that she paints her own self in the painting is significant because not only is she looking professional, but she asserts that a woman was in charge of the painting.(Guerrilla Girls 61) Sonia Delaunay Prisms Isotiques, 1914 (left) Sonia Delaunay Designs For Clothes, 1925 (right)

Artist Claude Cahun fetishized the image of the women, challenging the male gaze. Her “sexual identity was so confounding that some books on surrealism list her as a man” (Guerilla Girls 62). It is always known that women are painted to look good for men, but Claude Cahun twists this ideology on gender roles. The 20th Century was the time where women casualize sexuality. Claude was a lesbian. She paints herself as a man in the following.

Claude Cahun Self Portrait 1928 Hannah Hoch, a modernist, dadaist artist, also opposed the male gaze by dressing like a man. She also painted appropriated images such as her painting Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them”(Wikipedia).The significance of this painting is that the focus is the woman's legs which is a metaphor for showing that women's body parts are put on a pedestal, and that is all women are good for. “By combining the base of a column and a pair of bare legs, Höch creates a sexual obelisk, at which the men in the lower right corner stare and catcall under the sun of a smiling woman's face. This juxtaposition of men ogling a pair of legs without a body or a face to accompany allows Höch to reveal the imbalance of male and female representation in the media”(Thomas Baldwin).The body parts represent the sexuality of the woman, leaving them as sexual objects. Hannah Hoch, Marlene, 1930

Suzanne Valadon painted Grandmother and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath 1908. This painting is significant because it reveals a woman naked(typical) but in a different context. Usually, the women is looking at the camera, posed, and gazing back at the male gazer. But here, Valadon modernizes this ideology into showing a woman casually and naturally going into the bathtub, not facing the spectator. This opposes the idea of the male gaze but in a different way than Claude Cahun did. Valadon paints a woman not giving into the male gaze, which is the ultimate opposition to the old broken expectations in art. Suzanne Valadon Grandmother and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath 1908

Ultimately, Modernism is the era where women modernize themselves as a whole, politically, sexually, and artistically. These women artists in Europe influenced techniques in modernism through the use of abstraction, simultanism, appropriation art, and through self portraits. Without these women putting light to illogical perceptions like the male gaze, there would be no modernism. All these women wanted to create some change in different ways. And that is essentially what the 20th century revealed. "Appropriation (art)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 04 Apr. 2017. Web. 04 Apr. 2017. "Depictions of and Challenges to the New Woman in Hannah Höch's Photomontage." TCBP. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2017 "MoMA Learning." MoMA | Dada. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2017. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.