(Post)modernism and Feminist Art HistoryThe Reception of the Male Nude in Twentieth‐century Greek Painting

Abstract

This article, based on the author's PhD (Reading University, UK, 2000), examines the processes and discourses leading to a hegemonic framework of meaning in art history and criticism in 20th-century Greece. The ideological construct of the periphery (versus an assumed centre), the quest for a national subject in art and the inconclusive debates on modernism and postmodernism constitute key issues in this enquiry, which takes as its case study the interplay of present (dominant) and absent (suppressed) meanings in readings of the male nude, with specific reference to the work of Greek artists Yannis Tsarouchis and Aspa Stassinopoulou. The article, the first study of the subject in a materialist-feminist context, uses the reception of the male nude by the 20th-century Greek art scene to raise more general issues concerning the reasons that often lead to the marginalisation of feminist politics in the art discourse of the self-identified 'margins' of modernism.