Duchamp’s Nudes: A Vision for Female Liberation
It almost seems fateful for women to hold secondary positions to men in the greater power scheme of human society. In as early as recordings from the Book of Genesis, God used the clay from the earth to create the first man, Adam, and placed him in the heavenly Garden of Eden. Seeing Adam’s need for help, God took a rib out of the man and made a woman called Eve for him. Even in such early episodes of religious texts, man is portrayed as a direct creation from god, whereas woman, on the other hand, is a mere derivative of a man’s physical body and desire. She is inherently inferior to the godly image of a man. This dynamic has held for as long as Western civilization itself.
Fasting forward …show more content…
2 was created. The painting symbolized the dramatic re-assessment of the female nude aesthetics, marking the great sexual liberation at the time. In the painting, a vaguely discernible figure composed of seemingly cursory lines, arcs, and white dots is captured descending a black staircase in a series of abstract motions created with two-dimensional planes. As the nude moves down in a leftward direction, the figure graduates from a mature brown to an almost translucent amber color to mark the growing presence of “tangible” shadows resulted from the figure’s continuous movement. The motion of the nude strips away any details that would reveal the age, background, or sexuality of the figure. The nude is dehumanized by its own motion; in truth, it had become a form marked by total rationality and objectivity rather than erotic elements as seen from the perspectives of heterosexual …show more content…
2 is “deeroticised” by the disoriented blocks that expunge all the provocative features. This picture is iconoclastic to the classical figure, because both visually and conceptually, the fineness and perfection of the body is eradicated that one cannot perceive the nude as a desirable instrument at all. There are no pretexts for the viewers to evaluate and sexualize Duchamp’s figure. The “posture” of the Nude also shatters the tradition in that it captures a neither static nor singular, but rather a motion of descending nudes. At the suggestion of the fractured body and the merging lines, the nude is no longer forced to remain silent in a seemingly natural pose against the backdrop. As its own mechanics, the nude knocks off the pedestal and travels on its own feet. Violently and disruptively, it is liberated. Duchamp’s depiction of the female nude in Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 is made objective rather than objectified. These themes of liberation in Duchamp’s painting inadvertently advocates for the first wave of feminism, the suffrage movement that began in the 1920s for the right to vote. Through brave artistic experimentation, Duchamp has taken the nude outside of the perspective of a heterosexual male and towards a rational exploration of the human body’s capacity to interact with its surrounding
It almost seems fateful for women to hold secondary positions to men in the greater power scheme of human society. In as early as recordings from the Book of Genesis, God used the clay from the earth to create the first man, Adam, and placed him in the heavenly Garden of Eden. Seeing Adam’s need for help, God took a rib out of the man and made a woman called Eve for him. Even in such early episodes of religious texts, man is portrayed as a direct creation from god, whereas woman, on the other hand, is a mere derivative of a man’s physical body and desire. She is inherently inferior to the godly image of a man. This dynamic has held for as long as Western civilization itself.
Fasting forward …show more content…
2 was created. The painting symbolized the dramatic re-assessment of the female nude aesthetics, marking the great sexual liberation at the time. In the painting, a vaguely discernible figure composed of seemingly cursory lines, arcs, and white dots is captured descending a black staircase in a series of abstract motions created with two-dimensional planes. As the nude moves down in a leftward direction, the figure graduates from a mature brown to an almost translucent amber color to mark the growing presence of “tangible” shadows resulted from the figure’s continuous movement. The motion of the nude strips away any details that would reveal the age, background, or sexuality of the figure. The nude is dehumanized by its own motion; in truth, it had become a form marked by total rationality and objectivity rather than erotic elements as seen from the perspectives of heterosexual …show more content…
2 is “deeroticised” by the disoriented blocks that expunge all the provocative features. This picture is iconoclastic to the classical figure, because both visually and conceptually, the fineness and perfection of the body is eradicated that one cannot perceive the nude as a desirable instrument at all. There are no pretexts for the viewers to evaluate and sexualize Duchamp’s figure. The “posture” of the Nude also shatters the tradition in that it captures a neither static nor singular, but rather a motion of descending nudes. At the suggestion of the fractured body and the merging lines, the nude is no longer forced to remain silent in a seemingly natural pose against the backdrop. As its own mechanics, the nude knocks off the pedestal and travels on its own feet. Violently and disruptively, it is liberated. Duchamp’s depiction of the female nude in Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 is made objective rather than objectified. These themes of liberation in Duchamp’s painting inadvertently advocates for the first wave of feminism, the suffrage movement that began in the 1920s for the right to vote. Through brave artistic experimentation, Duchamp has taken the nude outside of the perspective of a heterosexual male and towards a rational exploration of the human body’s capacity to interact with its surrounding