New encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: gender, race, ...

In Two Nudes of that year, the figures face one another, replicate one another, so that almost the entirety of a nude female form is made available to the gaze. The figures' groins are discreetly angled out of view, however, and as with most of Picasso's painted female nudes up to this point, their legs are close together, sealing off their crotches.

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At the same time, the women peel apart a curtain behind them, opening a space in the pinkish brown field that might be said to function abstractly as a displaced vagina or transposed female sexual space

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the conventional identity of the body of a woman with the body of the paper or canvas--that space pliantly available to the probing of the painter's phallic pen or brush

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