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Book Chapter

“We are all Demoiselles d’Avignon” or the Breaching of the Dominant Gaze

  • Maite Méndez Baiges

In his thesis on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Steinberg postulated the fundamental role of the spectator (object of the appealing gazes of the five young nudes in the painting) as the catalyst of the meanings in the painting. From then on new critical perspectives would speculate about this subject, targeted by the personages in the painting, who bears so much responsibility in articulating the interpretation of the scene. Doubts were raised about the universal character of the gaze, the universal character of the receptor of the work of art and of Modern Art. From the end of the 20th century and activated by the most recent methodological approaches such as feminism and post-colonialism, new critical voices provoked the breaching of the dominating gaze. This chapter broaches the interpretations of this paradigmatic work of Modern Art made by feminist and post-colonial and subaltern theories, questioning the very proposals of Modernism. Feminism shows how gender conditioning affects the reception of a work of art. And allied with this, post-colonialism and subaltern theory begin to seriously question the way historiography has considered, or not, the relevance of Art négre in the avant-guard eclosion.

  • Keywords:
  • Modernism,
  • Demoiselles d'Avignon,
  • Postcolonialism,
  • Feminism,
  • Global History of Art,
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Maite Méndez Baiges

University of Malaga, Spain - ORCID: 0000-0002-0762-7004

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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

“We are all Demoiselles d’Avignon” or the Breaching of the Dominant Gaze

Authors

Maite Méndez Baiges

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-656-8.07

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Modernism

Authors

Maite Méndez Baiges

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

148

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-656-8

ISBN Print

978-88-5518-655-1

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-656-8

eISBN (epub)

978-88-5518-657-5

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

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