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Building on the momentum of recent bestsellers like Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, Painting her pleasure spotlights three extraordinary women who defied convention in the male-dominated world of early 20th-century Paris. Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy, and Marie Vassilieff boldly claimed the nude— one of art’s most enduring and contested subjects—as their own.
These trailblazing artists shattered taboos with their depictions of the male nude, the Black female nude, the pregnant nude, and even the rare nude self-portrait. Their work not only challenged the boundaries of modernism but also paved the way for later feminist artists and thinkers.
Lauren Jimerson’s meticulously researched and beautifully written account places these women at the heart of the avant-garde, revealing the cultural stereotypes and gender regimes they worked against. Complete with numerous previously unpublished images, including 16 pages of colour illustrations, the book offers a fresh and intersectional feminist perspective on class, privilege, and race alongside gender.
Whether you’re an art historian, a feminist scholar, or simply someone inspired by stories of creative defiance, Painting her pleasure is an essential addition to your collection.
'Cleanly dismantles one of the enduring myths of twentieth-century modernism: that ground zero in advancing the avant-garde was the female nude — as painted in Paris by two men.'
Bridget Quinn, Hyperallergic
'Painting Her Pleasure is a rare treat... the book as a whole adds considerably to current thinking on representations of female pleasure.' - French Studies Journal
Introduction
1 'Ni homme, ni femme': Marie Vassilieff’s androgynous bodies
2 Painting pleasure: Émilie Charmy and an aesthetics of female jouissance
3 Suzanne Valadon and the embodied female subject
Conclusion
Index