"Men's Life Drawing class, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is 1905, the year when so much of modernism got started in Paris. Meanwhile, in America (as in much of the world) art instruction kept to the ideas of the French Academy. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts had only recently allowed women into life drawing classes, and the issue of equality of the sexes--not to mention the problems of sexism--was not yet on the horizon. These students would all have been happy to produce "academies"--academic-style nude studies--which were preparatory exercises for large oil paintings. They wouldn't have even noticed the oddity of posing a female model surrounded by male students. Notice the pompously posed instructor with his thick moustache, and the very earnest young student at the lower left."