“Nakedness reveals itself, Nudity is placed on display, the nude is condemned to never being naked, Nudity is a form of dress” (Berger, 1973, p.54).
What is the ‘Male Gaze’? All throughout history the general viewer of the arts were men. The term ‘male gaze’ is a term according to Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ 1975” when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a man”. Nearly all paintings done through history feature either nude or naked women and have been painted by men for men’s pleasure. All throughout history, women have been surveyed by men and most women have been aware of this, for example John Berger comments on this in his book Ways of seeing:
“She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as success in her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another…”
This essay forwards as its thesis the concept of the male gaze and the ‘surveyed female’, and how this is illustrated through historical artworks and how they have been challenged by contemporary artists.
In the next section of this paper will conduct an in-depth look at Edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’
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The most notable works of his are The luncheon on the grass (1863) and Olympia (1863) both caused uproar in that period of history in France. The first painting that the essay will look at is perhaps the most famous nude painting of the nineteenth century, Olympia. The painting features a nude woman that is posed like Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), a maid and a black cat that gazes out at the viewer. The audience were outraged due to the realism of the subject rather than the fact of the model being
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654?) was one of the most important women artists before the modern period and certainly one of the most famous female painters from the seventeenth century. Gentileschi’s paintings regularly featured women as the protagonists acting in a manner equal to men. In fact, forty nine of her paintings fall into this category. She was raped at the age of 18 and the subsequent events lent her a certain amount of notoriety. These factors have led many to interpret her artwork as an expression of her role as a female victim looking for revenge through her art. Instead, a closer examination of Gentileschi’s life and her artwork exposes the artist as an individual with personal strength and incredible talent who painted subjects similar to or the same as those of her male counterparts, instead of staying within the guiding principles of what was acceptable “feminine” art.
In the great tradition of classical art, nudity and death have been two main themes of the masters. Sally Mann’s photographs twist this tradition when the nudes are her prepubescent children and the corpses are real people. The issue is that her photographs are a lens into unfiltered actuality, and consumers question the morality of the images based on the fact that children and corpses are unable to give legal consent. Her work feels too personal and too private. Mainly, people question whether or not Mann meant to cause an uproar with her work or if the results were completely unintentional. After looking through what Sally Mann herself has said, it can be determined that both options have a grain of truth. She wanted to provoke thought,
In the past few years, advertisement has changed significantly, and with it bringing many changes to our current society. Susan Bordo, a modern feminist philosopher, discussed in her article “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body” how current society has changed starting with Calvin Klein’s advertising campaign that showed men wearing nothing but underwear. Bordo argues how men are becoming the subject of the gaze, just as women were for centuries. This argument of the gaze is especially pronounced in John McTiernan’s film The Thomas Crown Affair, which focuses on two main characters, a man named Thomas Crown, who is a billionaire Manhattan financier, and a woman named Catherine Banning, and insurance investigator who is investigating Crown’s robbery of the 100-million-dollar painting, the “San Giorgio Maggiore Soleil Couchant”. The film addresses Bordo’s modern feminine and masculine gaze to target a wide range of adult audience.
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
Alice Neel's most talked about painting, a Self-Portrait of herself, shocked the world when she painted herself in the nude at the age of 80-years-old. Neel, a 20th Century American Portrait Artist, painted models for over 50 years before turning the attention to herself (Tamara Garb). Neel wasn't a pinup girl and had depicted herself as the complete opposite (Jeremy Lewison). Unlike Neel, women avoided self-portraits of themselves, and nude self-portraits barely made it to canvas (Tamara Garb). Because of these reasons alone, Neel's Self-Portrait attracted scrutiny (Jeremy Lewison). Though Neel declared the painting to be frightful and indecent (Ibid), it still directed its focus on femininity, and the challenges women had to endure in our
“In spite of their economic status, Morisot and Cassatt had many obstacles to overcome in establishing themselves as artists, and they experienced more discouragement than anyone would be likely to guess from looking at their works. Not surprisingly, they concentrated on familiar, domestic, themes. ” (Francis E. Hyslop) Interestingly enough, at a quick glance their paintings can look the same, but their representation of women and the message they try to convey is remarkably contrasting. Mary Cassatt focused on the “real” definition of woman. She wanted her audience to view women as strong and independent human beings who are completely capable of pursuing anything they set their mind too. Mary Cassatt made her audience think, she wanted to make a quiet scandal, she wanted to speak through her figures. In Mary Cassatt’s The loge (1882), she illustrates two elegantly dressed women enjoying a night at the theatre. Usually, men are the ones that would go out without their wives and enjoy a casual or elegant social scene while women socialize in their houses drinking tea and watching their kids play. “Cassatt’s new images include representations of women as independent public people; women pursuing interests which are not directed toward the needs of others; and women who enjoy the company of other women.” (Yeh) This painting illustrates how women are more than capable to socialize in a public
In this essay I’ll be exploring various concepts of women and will deeply criticise the way women are seen and portrayed through advertising. My primary resource I’ll be referring to throughout this essay is a book called ‘Ways of seeing’ by John Berger, which highlights the role women during the early renaissance and onwards. In addition to this I will explore the various beliefs of women from a wide range of secondary resources, and will include references from books, websites, and various images to help clarify my statements.
The contrasts between depth and surface, figure and landscape, promiscuity and modesty, beauty and vulgarity all present themselves in de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle. Although the figure is a seemingly normal woman out for an afternoon with her bike, she becomes so much more through the artist’s use of color, contrast, and composition. The exotic nature of woman presents itself in her direct stare and slick buxom breasts in spite of a nearly indiscernible figure. It is understood that, on the whole, de Kooning did not paint with a purpose in mind, but rather as an opportunity to create an experience, however, that does not go to say that there isn’t some meaning that can come of this work. Even Willem de Kooning once said that art is not everything that is in it, but what you can take out of it (Hess p.144).
In Women in Black at the Opera (1880) by Cassatt, the woman character has an active and aggressive looking. This is a major point of the painting because, during the ninetieth century, women were not normally portrayed with the “power of the gaze.” In this particular painting, the woman is holding the opera-glasses, the stereotypical instrument of male specular power. In the other hand, The Loge (1874) by Renoir portrays a lovely woman at the opera and positions her clearly as the object of the masculine viewer’s gaze, both inside and outside the paintings. Even though she is the focal point of the painting, it is the male companion who has the privilege of holding the opera glasses, hence, the power of the gaze. This clearly shows how women and men artists could represent different points of view, even in the same context. Consequently, how the meaning of same space or location can change depending on the role, power, and activity of the character that is being
In “The Undefinable,” by the end of the young woman’s first visit, the narrator is appraising her body for its worth in a portrait. The woman views this appraisal with disdain, mocking the “rounded form, healthy flesh, and lively glances” that appeal to the painter, common tropes of upper class portraits (Grand 285). Over the course of her next two visits, the narrator begins to worship and “glorify” her being (Grand 285). In the midst of her glorification, the man is able to paint in “love and reverence” a woman as she is, so that he “may feel her divinity and worship that!” (Grand 282, 284). The goddess-like terms of exaltation that the narrator describes the women with come with a frenzy to paint the ‘soul’ of the young woman, who was “a source of inspiration the like of which no man hitherto has even imagined in art or literature” (Grand 287). The inspiration, which solidifies the woman’s role as the muse, comes from a desire for her soul, not her
From the Venus de Milo to Manet’s Olympia, the female nude is a subject that fascinates many artists. The portrayal of the female body has always been just that, a depiction of a nude female; and it was not until the second wave of feminism in the 1970s that challenged the way females had always been portrayed as an object to look at instead of artists. From Commodities to Artists is an exhibition that displays the rising significance of female artists within the study of art history during the 1960s and the 1970s. The artists and pieces included in the exhibition are Richard Hamilton’s $he (1958), Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962), Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May (1977), and Judy Chicago’s
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
Although this painting was made in the early nineteenth century, Sonia de Klamery’s painting possesses many of the same confrontational qualities as La Maja Desnuda. A reclining frontal position, red lips, fearless and bold eyes, and most importantly, a brazen gaze of utter eroticism. An important note that John Berger makes in his novel, Ways of Seeing is that although women are portrayed in paintings as being they often appear as ‘a compliant object of the painting-method’s seduction’ which is precisely what we see in Sonia de Klamery; a woman whose body is defined by the meticulous and decorative shawl that wraps her snakelike body, yet her upper body somehow loses definition through liquefaction. An interesting example of this is William Blake’s 1795 painting Pity, where woman appears as a liquid structure, who ‘makes is figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other… to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects’ (pg. 93). The technique of
Images that eroticism is implied tend to represent the availability of the women’s bodies, in the implication that they are objects of eroticism (Sturken and Cartwright 2009: 116), consequently affecting the way society views women such as illustrated in Figure
Their intellectual horizons which were previously limited to light poetry or novels, have grown to include the vast fields of painting and music…I refer not here to those who, mistaking the vocation of their sex, are filled with the desire to be painters in the same manner as men. Even if the noisy, over familiar atmosphere of the studio itself were not essentially antipathetic to the codes of decency imposed on women, their physical weakness, and their shy and tender imagination would be confused in the presence of the large canvases, and of subjects either too free or too restricting, such as those which normally for...