Figuring sexual difference: Paul C\\u27ezanne\u27s bathers (1870--1906) and Pablo Picasso\u27s nudes (1906--1907)

Art historians have often linked Cezanne and Picasso on the basis of formal affinities in their painting. This dissertation brings them together because of their innovative approach to the representation of the nude--Cezanne in his more than 230 images of male and female bathers, and Picasso in the pictures he painted in 1906 and 1907, two crucial years between the end of his so-called Rose Period and Cubism. In creating these images, the artists generally worked without live models, isolated their figures from any social or historical context, and often inscribed their own identities in their pictures, not as voyeurs but as disguised presences displaced onto the representation of an other, whether male or female.^ A surprising number of these artists\u27 nudes are ambiguously sexed or gendered. Cezanne painted male bathers who both looked like and posed like females; Picasso mingled his own features with those of his demoiselles. I argue that the resulting ambiguities were not a side effect of stylistic considerations but a deliberate strategy that allowed the artists to dissemble their own identities, to remove their figures from any simple, direct relationship to external reality, and to represent desire as an internal, mutable force that both shapes and exceeds what is inscribed upon the visible body. In other words, it allowed them to figure sexual difference and identity--a question of male and female and of self and other--as a struggle that takes place within the psyche.^ Cezanne and Picasso belonged to an era that had not only turned sexuality into an object of medical scrutiny but created a culture focused on desire. like their contemporary Freud, they chose to make desire the object of their investigation and they isolated and shaped that object according to emerging ideologies that divorced sexuality from anatomical considerations. I use visual analyses, the history of sexuality, and recent theories of gender and subjectivity to reveal how their ambiguous figures participated in the ideological, turn-of-the-century shift that transformed how we understand ourselves as sexed subjects--one that subordinated physiological and neurological understandings of sex to psychoanalytic conceptualizations of sexuality.