Artists Celebrate the Power of the Female Form

T hroughout art history, the beauty of the female form has been a source of tremendous inspiration. But at the start of the 20th century, artists began considering their most revered muse from new, varying perspectives, creating works that invite viewers to explore the contradictions that the female form can embody: at once soft and strong, loving and lonely, exquisite and simple. In effect, artists began creating works that show women as they had not been shown before.

Below, discover artists whose works sparked a new celebration of the female form. These and other master works feature in Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, taking place on 12 November at 7:00 PM EDT, and Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale, taking place 13 November at 10:00 AM EDT in New York.

D egas obsessively depicted the female figure throughout his career. As in his portrayals of ballet dancers, Degas preferred to capture his models in a private moment, when they appear fully absorbed in their activity, completely unaware of being observed. The sense of privacy is amplified by the artist's preferred viewpoint, depicting his subject from the back, her face cast in shadow.

Femme prenant un tub presents Degas's artfully balanced and proportioned treatment of the woman’s body, making the work among the most accomplished examples of the artist’s celebrated series of bathers. While, for practical reasons, Degas likely staged the bather in this work, Femme prenant un tub recreates the spontaneity of the act and the voyeuristic experience of watching a woman at her toilette.

Appearing for the first time in the open market, this iteration of Position de quatrième devant sur la jambe gauche superbly encapsulates Degas's fascination with the female form in motion. The sculpture captures a dancer in the fourth position, her leg raised en l'air and her arm extended overhead. Though this key ballet position is difficult to perform, Degas found it even more challenging to sketch; the artist must have seen the fourth position performed countless times, but his drawings only include studies of dancers in preparation for the pose, rather than holding it. Sculpture offered a solution to this unique problem; by molding his model in three dimensions, Degas could adequately display the power and poise she possesses.

I n February of 1894, collector Berthe Dumon wrote a letter to Auguste Rodin expressing her excitement and eager anticipation to receive a sculpture she'd commissioned from the artist. Entitled Cariatide tombée portant sa pierre, agrandissement d'un tiers, the sculpture depicts a seated woman, arms intertwined, head resting on her shoulders; from above and below, stone presses against the woman's form, locking her in an eternal struggle. In her letter, Mme Dumon tells Rodin why she so admires the figure:

Cariatide tombée portant sa pierre was viewed by Rodin and his circle as one of his most accomplished and important sculptures. The artist's interpretation of caryatids – an ancient symbol of a young pious woman historically paired with a male counterpart, Atlas – was wholly novel. Together, the caryatid and Atlas represent the balance of strength and struggle; but seen alone, the fallen caryatid's pain and resilience come to the fore, confronting the viewer with the singular strength of the female form.

In Eve, petite modèle (modèle à la base carrée et aux pieds plats), Rodin presents the biblical Eve in the moments after she first becomes aware of her own nakedness. The female figure's fullness and beautifully modeled curves reflect her strength, as well as the vulnerability of this realization. Examples of this model are included in the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation in Los Angeles.

B eyond her fastidious attention to line and composition, Tamera de Lempicka possessed a talent for portraying women in a sexualized yet empowering way. A dazzling example of Lempicka’s “clear” yet multifaceted work, La Tunique rose presents a rich tableau balanced by piercing lines and sumptuous curves, the model's figure highlighted by dramatic chiaroscuro and the pop of silky color against exposed skin. The artist’s appreciation of the female form and its power also recalls the once-scandalous nudes of Modgliani, whose works presented women in full possession of their sexuality, often with knowing and solicitous gazes which shocked audiences and authorities at the time.

The luxuriant model in the present work is Rafaëla, one of Lempicka’s most famed muses and lovers; Rafaëla features heavily in the artist’s oeuvre, including in a pendant to the present work entitled La Belle Rafaëla, which is currently held in a private collection.

In pioneering her own distinct style, Lempicka absorbed a variety of elements from the avant-garde movements of her time – the geometric aesthetic and fragmented perspective of Cubism, the vibrant color palette of the Fauves, the proportionality of Neo-Classicism, the dynamic lines of the Futurists, the dream-like spatial logic of Surrealism and the razor-sharp draftsmanship and hyper-realism of the Neue Sachlichkeits in central Europe – blending these styles and influences with her love of the Italian Old Masters to extraordinary effect. Les Deux amies V showcases Lempicka's signature approach and appreciation for the female form. As art historian Magdeleine Dayot notes:

A crowning achievement of motion, energy and manipulation of the human form, Pablo Picasso’s Nus succinctly synthesizes the artist’s groundbreaking achievements of the late 1920s and early 1930 into one colorful, dynamic canvas. Here, in the seclusion of his new country home of Boisgeloup, three nudes leap, dance, jump and intertwine in a semi-abstracted landscape, their biomorphic figures imbued with fertility, sexuality and grace. While the figures are related to Marie-Thérèse, Picasso's lover and muse, they also embody acrobats and myths, two recurring themes in the artist's oeuvre.

The treatment of the human forms in Nus results from a period in Picasso's artistic progression that found him breaking down the body to its barest essentials, a jumble of shapes that echo the curves of breasts and the angles of bones. In Nus, these interweaving forms became neither male nor female, transforming into wholly new beings. When this work was exhibited in 1978 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the curators described this evocative effect:

An amalgam of mythological allusion and personal metaphor, the rhapsodic Homme enlevant une femme comes from a distinctive and momentous period in Picasso’s career. His mistress, Marie-Thérèse had recently recovered from a water-borne illness which had plagued her for months; the incident seemingly intensified Picasso's passions, inspiring him to create many works depicting Marie-Thérèse as a nymph and bather in the throes of swimming, drowning or being saved.

The protagonist in Homme enlevant une femme is often identified as Picasso's preferred alter-ego, the part-man, part-bull Minotaur, while the female figure is likely inspired by Marie-Thérèse. The scene replaces the violence of the Minotaur myth with heroism, recasting true events with Picasso as the indulgent yet godlike savior of one of his most beloved companions.

W ith an athletic build and petite facial features, the bronze Île-de-France is Maillol's celebrated personification of his country's capital city. As the embodiment of the strength and vigor for which this important region is known, Île-de-France is perfectly proportioned, and her pose beautifully captures the force of her movement as she rises out of Seine. In this version, the female figure is portrayed with one toe broaching the boundary of her base, as if to suggest her limitless potential.

D uring the 1930s and early 1940s, a number of maison closes operated legally in Paris, including an elegant establishment called The Sphinx. At The Sphinx, artists and intellectuals of the time including Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Alberto Giacometti gathered to discuss their work and enjoy each other's company. When in 1946, the Loi Marthe Richard closed the nearly 180 maison closes operating in Paris, Giacometti was particularly perturbed, as he notes in his seminal text The Dream, the Sphinx and the Death of T….

To assuage his grief over the closure of The Sphinx, the artist turned to his work, creating paintings, drawings and sculptures inspired by his recollections of the establishment. In a series of works, Giacometti took inspiration from one memorable scene at The Sphinx:

The following three sculptures are interpretations of this singular memory; in each, four women stand on pedestals, separated from the artist over a short, but seemingly impassable distance.

The female form fascinated Giacometti over the course of his career, but it is in the works of the 1950s that the dramatic potential of this motif is most ambitiously interpreted. No longer interested in re-creating physical likeness in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture the identity of his model beyond the physical reality of the human form. In these works, the haunting isolation of the women is explored ensemble and without compromising the striking, visual impact of each figure.

In Quatre figurines sur piédestal (figurines de londres, version A), the tall pedestal the sculpture is set on conveys the distance between the artist and the women, while the sloped trapezoid beneath their feet represents the vertiginous “polished floor” which further emphasized this dislocation of space and remoteness of the subjects.

In plaster form, the stark nakedness of the Quatre figurines is made clear; the present work, along with the previous bronze and the following ink subject, offer incredible insight into Giacometti's obsessive artistic process. But in plaster, the lithe nature of Giacometti's figures comes to the fore, offering a new angle of interpretation.

Rue de l'Échaudé (Quatre figurines sur piédestal) is a masterful drawing of the standing female figure. In swirls of ink, the four nude women exert an ethereal power and loneliness; along with the walking man, the standing female figure represented the absolute distillation of Giacometti’s existentialist perspective. Discussing the importance of these forms, Christian Klemm notes: