Emancipated Bodies

The female nude as painted by modern women artists has been a topic of interest for feminist scholars of art history since the 1980s. This chapter analyzes how Klindt Sorensen uses painting as a medium to evoke the sense of touch in the viewer, rather than to visually describe the body as beautiful when observed from a distance. Klindt Sarensen belongs to a group of young women artists who in the 1920s fled the notorious Kunstakademiets Kunstskole for Kvinder in Copenhagen and travelled to Paris. In 1945, Klindt Sorensen painted a monumental picture of her colleague, the painter Holger J. Jensen. Klindt Sorensen is more interested in provoking the sense of touch in the viewer, and thereby leading the way for affects and sensations, than she is in describing the body.