The Hatted Nude in the Parisian avant-garde and beyond

This exhibition explores the genre of the nude in modern art in the context of both art and fashion developments at the turn of the twentieth century. In the melting pot of Paris where haute couture had recently become a reality, Parisians indulged in the explosion of what the world of fashion had to offer to the image of a woman. The rest of the world quickly followed the trends, becoming more focussed on fashion. We will see the effects of this rise of fashion on the avant-garde art and its genres. As artists tirelessly searched for a new artistic vision, fashion inevitably infiltrated art. This exhibition takes a look at one special fashion accessory – the hat – and its unexpected appearance in the genre of the female nude, both in Parisian art and its European contemporaries.

1900: Fashion at a glance

“[The hat] is the compliment and the crowning glory of the dress, its paramount flare"  
--Arsene Alexandre (art critic, fashion writer)

At the turn of the twentieth century Paris embodied the heart of the art world. It experienced an influx of artists from all over Europe looking for artistic freedom and opportunity the City of Lights promised. Partially fueled by the developments in photography and its ability to replicate likeness with minimal effort, the search for new artistic forms produced the ‘golden age’ of modern art with artists striving to find something unique, unseen, and radical. And so were born Post-impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, and other art movements.

At the same time, the steady rise of the fashion designer to the status of an artist throughout the second half of the 19^th century meant that fashion designers themselves were à la mode, their creations were sought after by the rich and famous, as much for their label as for their functionality. By 1900, Paris boasted fashion houses of Madame Paquin, Jacques Doucet, Charles Worth, Jeanne Lanvin, and Paul Poiret. (Poiret openly referred to himself as an artist, much to the dislike of some avant-gardists, like Pablo Picasso.) Indeed, each influential designer contributed something ground-breaking to the world of fashion, much like artists did for the world of visual arts. Worth was first to design sample gowns to show to perspective clients; Lanvin pioneered the use of black and white, as well as the fauvist colours in her designs; Poiret abolished the restrictive corset and introduced the long flowy female silhouette before shackling the legs in a pencil skirt.

As a result, the hat became a quintessential accessory that embodied a truly unique object. Hats were encouraged – and even required – by social conventions of various establishments. As an object that requires minimal fitting, the hat presented a unique opportunity to become the chez d’oeuvre, or the masterpiece of fashion designers, which inevitably made its way on to the artists’ canvases.

The Nude in the avant-garde art

"To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies 
some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. 
The word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, 
no uncomfortable overtone." 
--Kenneth Clark in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

The genre had long been a rite of passage for training artists: until the 1960s the female nude served as a measure for determining drawing ability, even when artists did not intend for figures to feature in their work. As every genre of art underwent transformations under the modernist brush, the Female Nude did not escape the deconstruction of its form. Modernism was associated with a new aesthetic that yearned to liberate the new expression hidden underneath what we perceive as reality. Pablo Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Amedeo Modigliani’s elongated shapes resembling tragic masks, or Henri Matisse’s methodically calculated lazy-looking curvy women all demonstrate the spectrum of what had become the genre of the Nude at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The amalgamation of fashion and art added a new element in the genre of the female nude – the nudes are portrayed wearing hats. As an object easily removed from the rest of the fashion costume, the hat was both a piece of clothing and an accessory, able to be easily put on or removed. The paradoxic image of a hatted nude bound the woman to her hat as an essential part of her body while highlighting the theatricality of the dress up. Among Parisian artists, it is impossible to overlook Kees van Dongen’s many portraits of hatted women – including hatted nudes. The artist settled in Paris at the end of 1899 with his wife Augusta (Guus) Preitinger and became a leading Fauve, and later a popular portraitist among the women of society. His fauvist works feature a number of nudes sheltered (or with their faces hidden) by fashionable hats.

Kees van Dongen 
Femme au grand chapeau (Woman in a large hat), 1906. 
(Image source: Wikipedia Commons, 
Galerie Daniel Malingue, 
35ème anniversaire, catalogue scan.)

While the other Fauves used bright colours and thick contours to create provocative landscapes, Van Dongen indulged in the city life and the pleasures it offered. Van Dongen employs a modernist aesthetic, with patches of paint conveying patches of light on the woman’s skin, the buckle provocatively directing the scarf between her breasts, and the taxidermy bird on her giant hat as a testimony of luxury, expense and status. This daring portrait, combines raw sexual magnetism with the luxurious refinement of fashion, creating a duality that keeps our attention.

**Kees van Dongen**, *Nu au chapeau noir (Nude in a black hat)*, 1906, oil on canvas, 66 x 51 cm, private collection. (Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.)

La Parisienne

Traditionally the nude was an idealization of the female form – a goddess, and over the centuries some artists challenged that association. Rembrandt sketched especially unidealized female figures, Eduard Manet challenged the viewer with the directness and the company of his nudes (such as in Luncheon on the grass), and contemporary art is full of examples of the reality of both human and female figure. So how idealized is Van Dongen’s hatted nude? Is she the traditional “passive object” onto which we, as viewers, impose a specific meaning? With her bright red and parted lips, her jewelled necklace and her large, elegant hat, she echoes the traditional decorative nature of the woman – to entice. Yet the irregularities in her outlines, the patchy brushwork and the green shadows on her body are asking us to look at this nude from a new perspective: as a fragile and imperfect human, whose enormous hat embodies the façade she wears in public.

Van Dongen’s Nu au chapeau noir reflects the elegance associated with a Parisian woman. The “Parisienne” was a concept specifically distinguishing the urban, fashionable, and especially Parisian woman. Nineteenth century French journalist Taxile Delord in his Physiology of the Parisienne defined her as “a myth, a fiction, a symbol” that can be found in places where women show themselves with grace and elegance. The symbolic statuesque hatted woman even echoes the symbol of Paris itself – La Tour Eiffel!

Kees van Dongen 
Nu à la chaise (Seated nude), 
ca. 1905. 
Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm, 
private collection. 
(Image courtesy of Sotheby's.)

Living in the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre provided Van Dongen with the opportunity to observe the performative aspect of the Parisian woman and her hat. At this time, Van Dongen introduced some of his great models: Fernande Olivier, ‘La Belle Fatima’, ‘Nini des Folies-Bergères’, and ‘Anita la Bohémienne’. The buzz of the Parisian nightlife and the bohemian freedom associated with the hill of Montmartre is conveyed in Nu à la chaise in the ‘fireworks’ of scattered clothing around the seated nude, in the bright colours of her hair and make up, and her coquettish pose.

Montmartre welcomed nighttime visitors of various social standings; femmes fatales and courtesans mixed with upper classes looking for a risque atmosphere from a night of entertainment. Hats, however, remain a constant in the paintings associated with the famous hill. The hat had simply become an extension of the woman: superimposing, hiding or even overshadowing her identity.

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The role-play through fetishism of headgear allowed a woman to assume a new identity, while to a modernist painter it served as a tool for creating a new, modernist aesthetic, reflecting on the duality offered by the hype of fashion.

**Kees van Dongen**, *La Jarretière*, n.d. (Image source: *Van Dongen & le Bateau-Lavoir*, p.23)

**Amedeo Modigliani**, *Nu au chapeau*, c.1907 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

If the artists of Montmartre relied on the somewhat darker side of the hatted dress-ups, Jacqueline Marval celebrates the feminine in portrayals that, according to Guillaume Apollinaire, embodied “grace – the true French quality.” Marval’s La danseuse de Notre Dame (painted in 1921, and her personal favourite) delights in the performative aspects of fashion. The dancer holds two ribbons, which in her movement form the bouncy ‘skirt’ covering her lower body. The animatedly floral ensemble is complemented by the large floppy pink hat – not unlike a large flower itself, capturing the exhuberant celebration of the feminine.

An image from the 1906 issue of Mes Modèles echoes Marval’s painting in its posed and theatrical hatted ‘nudeness’. The chic setting of decorated tapestry and animal skins emphasise the luxuriousness of the interior, while the model’s semi-reclined pose attempts to evoke the natural in this unnatural staging of a fantasy. The hat here is treated as a necessary ornamentation in the creation of the fantasy and the subsequent removing the viewer from reality.

Jacqueline Marval, La Danseuse de Notre Dame (1921), 100 x 81 cm, private collection, Paris. (Image source: Comité Jacqueline Marval, https://www.jacqueline-marval.com/expositions)
Mes Modèles, no.36, 20 April 1906, p.432, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (Source: Gallica, BnF)

While artistic photographs of nudes are common at this time, they are rarely portrayed wearing a hat. It seems the hatted nude remained the domain of painters, challenging the genre of the female nude and communicating the new image of the woman merged into a new whole with her essential part of the wardrobe.

Images from top left clockwise (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nude in a straw hat;
Félix Vallotton, Portrait de femme en chapeau noir;
Vladimir Buranov-Rossine, Nude with a hat;
F. Malyavin, A model in a hat;
Philip Wilson Steer, Seated nude: the black hat.

The hatted nude in Expressionism

The Expressionist movement distorted the subject and the perspective around it to present the viewer with the artist’s inner emotions. Intensity of colour and free brushwork associated with the movement provided opportunities for confronting and sometimes uncomfortable and unbalancing imagery. In Germany, ‘Die Brücke’ was founded in 1905 aiming for emotional tension achieved by non-naturalistic colours, while ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ constituted another avant-garde association originating in Munich in 1909.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Standing Nude with Hat (1910). 
Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 195.5 cm, 
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. 
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

This nude by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in a natural setting designed purposely in a geometrically artificial manner is a portrait of the artist’s lover, Doris Große. Kirchner met her in 1906 – the same year that Kirchner’s first group exhibition was shown. In the same year, writing in the group manifesto of ‘Die Brücke,’ Kirchner stated that “everyone who reproduces, directly and without illusion, whatever he senses the urge to create, belongs to us.” The composition of this nude in a hat is not unlike that of Van Dongen’s Nu au chapeau noir, although a harder and flatter depiction. As the sitter peers at us from underneath her hat, her carefully painted face and jewellery, echoed by the red shoes in an odd turnout, sharply accentuate her nakedness. The aggressive painting style is only made all the more provocative by the elegant upward curving of her fashionable black hat. The nude accusingly peers at the viewer, her hands are clasped together as if she is holding something back, while the colourful backdrop of what looks like hanging tapestries only increases the sense of the unnatural.

Is one of her feet placed on a stool? This is an image of imbalance, while the life-like size of the painting would make this a confronting experience for the viewer, with the figure appearing as a manifesto of a real woman. The uncomfortable imbalance that characterizes Kirchner’s work is made all the more possible for the elegance of the hat the sitter wears.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Half-length nude with a hat, 1911. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Two nudes in a room, n.d. (Image: UseumArt)

The ‘french-ness’ of Kirchner’s Half-length nude with a hat comes from its resemblance to the portraits of cabaret dancers, with the see-through brim of the hat mystifying the sitter despite her bareness. Yet the nonchalant nakedness of Two nudes in a room is disorientating: the genre of the nude infiltrates this social scene, with the hat serving as the connection between the two artistic styles.

The final two works are by Egon Schiele, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, known for his sexually charged figurative art. While not known for particular affiliations with fashion, the use of hats in his nudes convey its prevalence in modern art and its modern function as an extension of the woman herself.

Egon Schiele, Standing nude with a large hat (Gertrude Schiele) and Reclining semi nude in red hat (Images: WikiGallery.org)

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To sum up…

The hatted nude can be seen as an expression of the struggle between public and private. Logically the hat is the last item of clothing that we put on and the first to be removed. So the hatted nude represents an unnatural state, conveyed in an intimate expression through the public means of a painting. So perhaps the question is, does the hat increase a nude’s femininity? Does her unusual state of change between ‘dress’ and ‘undress’ appeal to the female viewer as much as it does to the male for its association with fashion? Or is this simply the evolution of the female nude in the context of the social circumstances of the time? Perhaps it is all of the above.

Thank you for reading. Please send us your comments or questions.

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