Right at the meeting point between fine art and porn lays Suzanne Valadon’s Reclining Nude.

It seems as if Suzanne had one of two goals for her work. She either a) wanted to get fine, sophisticated art-lovers to giggle with embarrassment upon viewing her audacious and provocative nudes or b) wanted people to be completely outraged at the precedent of a woman painting nude figures in the early 1900s. Either way her work was sure to make a lasting impression on anyone who viewed it. Free the Nipple, am I right?! 

The woman in the painting does not look super stoked to have people staring at her naked body and as a result she just watches us watching her in a weird and awkward watching circle. In a way, the woman sticks-it-to-the-man by not passively sprawling and letting him run his eyes wherever he wants as pretty much every other reclining female nude has allowed in the past. What a nude awakening!

It has been said of Valadon that, “she developed her own aesthetic outside the bounds of male models of creativity.” This may be because she had a less than normal childhood and was forced to be creative or she just had a knack for naked ladies and destroying the artistic patriarchy, but Valadon’s Reclining Nude was revolutionary for its time. The woman depicted isn’t begging for a man to come hither and confronts the stares she receives with wide, blue eyes that say, “What are you lookin’ at, perv?”