The Mother, the Duchess, and the Nude

In his 1921 piece titled Mother and Child Pablo Picasso echoes writer Radclyffe Hall in calling for women to return to the home.  The piece is part of the "Return to Order" movement wherein Picasso depicts several mother and child pairs.  His pieces within this movement all tend reject the avant-garde in favor of more "traditional" approaches.  The art he creates during this period are very different from his abstract and cubists for which he is famous.  The more traditional style of painting in conjunction with the mother and child reflect Picasso's desire for normality after the war.

"Among a hundred paintings, you could recognize mine,  my goal was:  Do not copy. Create a new style, ...  colors light and bright,  return to elegance in my models"

                                    - Tamara De Lempicka

 Although creating art in the same time period, Tamara de Lempicka does not partake in the "Return to Order" movement.  Instead, she is part of the Art Deco movement which is associated with playfulness, color, and angular and geometric shapes.  At first glance, De Lempicka's 1928 Nude with a Dove does not blatantly make any statements about gender.  She depicts a reclining nude with averted eyes, inviting the male gaze in traditional fashion.  However, there is something confrontational about the image that troubles the gaze.  The woman is oddly muscular and angular in comparison to the mothers that Picasso depicts.  The nude in conjunction with de Lempicka's 1925 Duchess of La Salle of, presumably, a duchess in masculine clothing marks a clear tension between the societal norms for women and how women can choose to present. 

Through troubling the male gaze in both images, de Lempicka is making a comment on how she perceives social standards for women and how women want to be portrayed.   Picasso, on the other hand, is also making a comment about gender, but not his own.  He is implying that women need to be mothers so that order can be restored.  He is putting the responsibility of rebuilding after the war on women and displacing it from the men who started the war in the first place.  Since Picasso is make a statement about women using his prominence as an artist to carry forth the message.