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The Blue Room | |
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Artist | Suzanne Valadon |
Year | 1923 |
Medium | oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 90 cm× 116 cm(35 in× 46 in) |
Location | Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris |
The Blue Room (La chambre bleue) is a 1923 painting by French artist Suzanne Valadon. One of her most recognizable works, it has been called a radical subversion of representation of women in art. [1] Like many of Valadon's later works, it uses strong colors and emphasizes decorative backgrounds and patterned materials. [2] Valadon depicts a modern 20th-century woman, clothed and smoking a cigarette, in a pose traditional to female nudes, particularly 19th-century images of odalisques and prostitutes, such as Edouard Manet's Olympia. [3]
The painting is in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
The stylistic decisions can be seen as a display of Valadon's view of society's changing social norms. The piece was created in a revolutionary time when gender roles and female independence came to the forefront of social discussion in Paris and elsewhere. After WWI, women's placement in society as objects to be escorted by men, fashioned by men, and overall constricted by men began to be replaced with a new kind of woman. [4] Women began to make various strides in regards to fashion and social norms: wearing shorter, loose-fitting dresses, shorter bobbed hair, taking up traditionally male smoking habits, and purposefully pursuing education. [4] Through Valadon's artistic decisions, she exemplifies the 20th-century woman as having more character unrelated to the previous male gaze. While her figure is the subject, the intimacies of her body are replaced by the intimacies of her unedited or unpolished living experience.[ citation needed ]
In contrast to Valadon's depiction of the female form, artists such as Titian, Ingres, and Manet depicted female nudes with idealized womanly features. For example, the Grande Odalisque , Olympia , and Venus of Urbino underscore a gendered role of women with full female exposures atop beds—as something separate from the model—creating an imbalanced power dynamic between the artists and subject. [5] The Blue Room is a response to these paintings as well as others, such as Matisse's Blue Nude and Félix Vallotton's The White and the Black. [ citation needed ] Substituting a cigarette for Ingres's hookah and taking Matisse's bold outlines, among other traits from the aforementioned works, Valadon creates a "startlingly contemporary" lounger, capturing a depiction of everyday life which is entirely her own. [1] Valadon's subversion and appropriation of her predecessor's techniques ultimately instigate a new trajectory for future depictions of the female form.[ citation needed ]
With the pioneering and groundbreaking depiction of the female form by Valadon through the subversion of her predecessor's techniques, The Blue Room can be seen as the starting point for a long lasting legacy for female artists.[ citation needed ] As Janet Burns notes in Looking as Women: The Paintings of Suzanne Valadon, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Frida Kahlo , “given the bias of western culture to fetishizing the female body, the nude is a difficult genre for women artists. It is enshrined as an icon of culture that epitomizes and objectifies female sexuality.” [6] After Valadon, many younger, female artists were inspired by her realistic depiction of the female form through stylistic decisions and embraced the autonomy promoted by the revolutionary art style. [6]
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.
Suzanne Valadon was a French painter who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe – originally titled Le Bain – is a large oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet created in 1862 and 1863.
Olympia is a 1863 oil painting by Édouard Manet, depicting a nude white woman ("Olympia") lying on a bed being attended to by a black maid. The French government acquired the painting in 1890 after a public subscription organized by Claude Monet. The painting is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
The Rokeby Venus is a painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Completed between 1647 and 1651, and probably painted during the artist's visit to Italy, the work depicts the goddess Venus in a sensual pose, laying on a bed with her back facing the viewer, and looking into a mirror held by the Roman god of physical love, her son Cupid. The painting is in the National Gallery, London.
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Odalisque With Raised Arms is a painting by Henri Matisse, completed in 1923. The oil on canvas measuring 23 by 26 inches is held in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington D.C.. Matisse's style changed and evolved drastically throughout his career, including his wide and varying collection of paintings depicting female nudes. His odalisque paintings were inspired by his trip to Morocco. Many of the female subjects in the Odalisque paintings were modeled after Matisse's main model at the time, Henriette Darricarrère.
Émilie Charmy was an artist in France's early avant-garde. She worked closely with Fauve artists like Henri Matisse, and was active in exhibiting her artworks in Paris, particularly with Berthe Weill.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres' contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres' break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.
The Blue Room may refer to:
La Nymphe surprise, or Surprised Nymph, is a painting by the French impressionist painter Édouard Manet, created in 1861. The model was Suzanne Leenhoff, a pianist whom he married two years later. The painting is a key work in Manet's production, marking the beginning of a new period in his artistic career and generally in the history of modernism in French painting. It is in National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and it is considered one of the collection's highlights. La Nymphe surprise remained in the artist's possession his entire life, and there is evidence that, apart from the emotional significance it represented for the artist, Manet considered this painting as one of his most important works.
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