Carol Duncan’s article "Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth Century Vanguard Painting" focuses on female nudity and the artist’s motive behind this. She believes the female nudes were used in the decade before World War I by a number of European artists with a similar style and content which reflected the sexual appetite of the artist. - Examples Kess Van Dongen, Reclining Nude (1904-05); Munch, Reclining Nude (1905); Kirchner, Girl Under a Japanese Umbrella (…showed first 75 words of 730 total…

…showed last 75 words of 730 total…they represented a middle class based movement of style and form and a breakaway from the traditional forms. As Janson puts it "Matisse (the leader) was never stirred by the same agonized discontent with the decadence of our civilization". In parallel Duncan explains that"the artist wants to but cannot escape the real world of rationalized bourgeois society .He is tied to it economicly as he is bound within it’s cultural and psychological constructs."