Graduation Year
Spring 2013
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Art
Reader 1
Susan Rankaitis
Reader 2
Adam Davis
Reader 3
Elana Mann
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2013 Sophia R. Forman
Abstract
At the nexus of the seemingly disparate art-theoretical topics of color and the female nude is a critical consideration of phenomenology in both one of its most basic senses—as the first-person experience of perceived phenomena—and as a larger philosophical position which, through its abstraction of perception to subject-object relationships, implicates the painted figure. Specifically, this paper conflates the phenomenology of color with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in investigating empathy. Structured as a dialectic, it establishes the most prominent views of both color and the female nude—the nude as a symbolic figure, color as perceptual experience—before delving into their various points of theoretical and art-historical intersection within these categories. This analysis ultimately forms the argument that color can be a powerful tool in reclaiming the female nude figure, stimulating emotive bodies that inspire empathetic viewers and intersubjective rather than objectifying, or abjectifying, dialogues.
Recommended Citation
Forman, Sophia R., "Bringing Back Color, Bringing Back Emotion: Exploring Phenomenological Empathy in the Reclamation of the Female Nude in Painting" (2013). Scripps Senior Theses. 187.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/187
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
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