Tracing Euro-American modernism, post-modernism and post-colonial image making in South East Asian art 1930s to 1990s:

The Image of Women in The Shanghai Posters

Bram Dijkstra in, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil In Fin-De-Siecle Culture (1986), cogently argues how the above became imbedded into late 19th century visual art.  He states:

          the "brainless" existence of woman as a creature of simple         instincts, the soil of humanity, the ripe fruit of nature, whose         instincts should be cultivated to feed the primal needs of the     developing male, came to be seen by many turn of the century      males as a scientifically proven fact.3

Woman's retarded development, infantilism, proximity to nature and animals can be seen in visual examples such as: John Charles Dollman's, The Unknown (ca.1912)(fig. 6), Charles Lenoir's, The Flower Girl (1900)(fig. 7), Angelo Graf von Courten's, Love and Strength (ca.1894)(fig. 8), Fredrick Church's, The Enchantress (1907)(fig. 9), Franz von Lenbach's, Miss Peck (ca.1890)(fig. 10), Franz von Stuck's, Sensuality (1897)(fig. 11) and The Sphinx's Kiss (1895)(fig. 12) and Arthur Hacker's, Circe (1893)(fig. 13). Such images reinforce the late 19th century concept that although women could demonstrate a passive acculturated femininity, their true nature was imbued with a primal, aggressive sexuality, a seductive licentiousness driven by animal desire and animal instincts.

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century we see added to the West's arsenal of sexist cultural imagery, the female as ambiguously gendered machine. Marcel Duchamp's "Bride" of his Large Glass (fig.  14), for example, although conforming to many of the above late 19th century descriptors is depicted as little more than a mechanistic vagina. Whereas, the headless, virtually limbless, one of Entant Donne (fig. 15), appears to reinstate pre-modernism's writhing females seemingly in desperate need of sexual fulfilment.

Francis Picabia (1879- 1953), another artist who depicted the femme nouvelle , entitled images of spark plugs and light bulbs, Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'etat de nudité/Portrait of a young American girl in the state of nudity (1915)(fig. 16) and Américaine (1917)(fig. 17) respectively. Man Ray's, Coat-Stand (1920)(fig.18) conjures woman into a 2 dimensional cutout from the shoulders and arms up, while his Indestructible Object (1923/58) (figs. 19-20), also known as Object to be Destroyed , which is a photograph of Lee Miller's eye attached to a metronome, fixes the female's gaze into an interagative vibratory mechanism. The new Eve of Fritz Lang's Metropolis  (1931) is an evil robot in woman's skin(figs. 21-22). It appears the fin-de-siècle  turn against the hommesse  evolved into the larger obsession with the femme fatale, the evil seductress and epitome of independent modernity displaying fearful phallic qualities.
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