Carol Greene Duncan is a Marxist-feminist scholar known as a pioneer of ‘new art history’, a social-political approach to art, who is recognized for her work in the field of Museum Studies, particularly her inquiries into the role that museums play in defining cultural identity.
[4] Duncan's work examines the critical role that museums play in defining cultural identity.
[7] Her 1973 essay “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting" proposed a study of modernist male painters and the women they painted: Duncan questions the freedom of the models portrayed, examining closely their body language and insertion in the artist’s world (frequently, his studio).
By providing examples of paintings of women’s’ bodies brutally depicted she is able to justify her criticism of the supposed “originality” of the modernist nude.
[9] Duncan's well known 1989 essay "The MoMA's Hot Mamas" explores the social implications of representations of women in paintings[10] arguing that two renowned paintings of women by men in the Museum of Modern Art, de Kooning's Woman I and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, emphasize the 'monstrosity' of the female, creating a gender based cultural division that parallels the division of pornography, in which the woman is made into a vision/object by the male creator.