Short answers - Book Report/Review Example

600-601) Picasso’s painting was initially less suited for public display because he employed disparate visual idioms to render different physiognomic types and this way he left the work in a disjunctive state such that for sometimes historians debated whether it was finished. On matters class and race the author continues to argue that both Picasso’s and Manet’s prostitutes were seen as working class women owing to their masculinity as well as perceived coarseness of heir features. Manet’s prostitute is a black maid establishing existence of an underclass.

A distinction between the white woman and that of color is also evident in Picasso’s picture e.g. the Africanesque masks worn by two. According to Chave the element of horror might best be understood in relation to deep-seated and pervasive fears of the feminine body or in Freud’s formulation of the “dark continent.” It corresponds to a masculinity crisis in the West following women’s and colored peoples’ increasing presence and revolution against inferioritization and subjugation.

On the basis that there was a lot of fear for the loss of stability and centrality of the self. Moral decadence was on the rise, prostitution becoming more common in the society. Women are associated with the vertiginous terrors of the abyss. Prototypical male response is described as centering on the awfulness and fearsomeness of the depicted prostitutes. The male viewer quails before the spectacle of women who embody “his worst fears of their atavistic primitivism, animalistic, destructiveness, and cold impersonal eroticism.

The psychological basis is that of contempt for women is integral to normal male psychology as suggested by Freud who noted the prevalence of men’s ‘desire to depreciate’ women and observed that ‘the curb put upon love by civilization involves a universal (read: