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Confusing art and women
Nudity in art essay
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In "Ways of Seeing" John Berger analyzes nude portrayals of females in the European artistic tradition. The first example of this is the passage of text on pages forty-seven through forty-eight, that of Eve from the story of the Garden of Eden as told in Genesis.
Here, Berger is trying to provide an example of how women supposedly became subservient to men.
The story is told that Eve gave Adam an apple that they weren’t supposed to eat. After then eating the apple they were made to become conscious and insecure of the fact they were both naked, so they made clothes for themselves to cover up. Eve subsequently was punished for eating the apple and giving to Adam by being made subservient to the man. This relates to art because, in Berger’s
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The gaze is associated with a desire to fix, arrest and take possession of. Adam and eve story is like the subjects of painting such as the nudes portrayed became ‘objects’ of desire rather than ‘innocent’ representations. They were subjected to the gaze of another. So now, the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator. She is not naked as she is; she is naked as the spectator sees her. The woman has been objectified into an object of desire by an observing eye that seeks to possess her.
Berger has played a role in modern female thinking by exploring depictions of women in classical painting and in advertising. He takes on the subject so straightforwardly, taking into question the entire of the women's classical images. Berger's conclusion and that of his interviewees is that the nude women's paintings' hanging in the best European museums is nothing more than pornography. The women in those paintings are nothing but objects that can be consumed or violated, and nothing more. He so forcefully speaks against this part of the western
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,
What is sense perception? Everything we perceive in our senses can be misleading and an illusion. In the article “Perception and Reality” by Keith Wilson (see Article 1), the author goes over some of the aspects of how our perception deceives us to believe in things that aren’t there to begin with. For example are colors real? Well that is relevantly dependent on what is considered real, because real again is a perception of a single individual collecting information and making “sense” out of it. A color being real or not is dependent on how we see it through our eyes, we can 't say that my blue is the same as your blue. We can 't know for sure if what we are seeing for ourselves, is the same as what the person that views that same thing sees
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
According to the book entitled Ways of Seeing written by John Berger, the power of an image is extraordinary given that it can speak a thousand words. This has also been enhanced by the rapidly evolving technology that elicits more subconscious views about an image by anyone who sees them online or in real life. Some professional writers like Susan Bordo have emphasized that pictures of men often receive a wide range of negative tones or opinions due to the physiological effects that are fashionable to society or any other individual who approves or disapproves the beauty in a portrait of two men or women (Berger 38). This essay offers my opinion concerning the pictures of the Doloce and Gabbana, the gay Italian designers, as well as that of
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.
In the essay “Ways of Seeing” written by John Berger, Mr. Berger makes his attempt to inform an audience with an academic background that there is a subjective way that we see things all around us every day and based on our previous experiences, knowledge, and other things that occur in our lives, no two people may see or interpret something in the same way. In the essay Mr. Berger uses art as his platform to discuss that we should be careful about how people look at things. Mr. Berger uses rhetorical strategies such as ethos, pathos, and logos. These rhetorical strategies can really help an author of any novel, essay, or any literature to truly get the information they desire across to the audience in a clear and concise manner.
Through the exploration of this diverse range portraiture, the contrasting ideals of masculine and feminine beauty in the Renaissance have been explored. Yet overall, no matter what the gender orientation of the subject, it the discovery of such passionate and artistic talent presented which is essentially ‘beautiful’. Consequently, the grand appeal of such glorious images is still appreciated today, and will continue to delight viewers for generations to come.
Feminist issues have played an important role in creating ideas for female artists to use in their work. Putting out controversial themes such as this promotes individual thought on the topic of feminism. Kruger and Höch both took it upon themselves to put out these ideas through many of their key artworks. In 1920, Höch came out with her photomontage, Das Schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl) (Fig. 1), which at the time was one of very few photomontages that Dada artists had included female figures in. (Hemus, 104). In this particular work she puts together many different images that create a certain meaning that the viewer is left to interpret. She uses a fema...
The aim of this essay is analyse women´s images in The Yellow Wallpaper and in The Awakening, since the two readings have become the focus of feminist controversy.
Sontag introduces her essay to the audience by establishing a focal point around the fact that women viewed today are derivative from the religious perspective of how women were viewed in history. During the ancient times, Greeks and Christians practiced their own methods of analyzing and critiquing women and their beauty. The Greeks believed that the lack of ‘inner” beauty could be compensated with “outer” beauty. They distinguished the two beauties in a way that suggested that both were interconnected to one another within an individual. The preference and priority was given to the ‘outer’ beauty, while the ‘inner’ beauty would be kept at bay. Christianity, on the other hand, gave moral significance to beauty; in defining beauty, or words of physical character to be associated with woman and feminine. Gradually, Sontag introduces the distinguishable beauty between men and women. She does this by recapitulating how in a Christian religion, a woman’s body was parted into many sections to be judged and scrutinized, while men are visua...
"Whilst some feminists have argued to be included in 'male stream' ideologies, many have also long argued that women are in important respects both different from and superior to men, and that the problem they face is not discrimination or capitalism but male power." (Bryson, 2003, p. 3). The feminist art movement is unclear in its description because some describe this movement as art that was simply created by women and others describe it as art with anti-male statements in mind. For the focal point of this paper, the goal will be to analyze several female artists and their works of art who influenced, and who are said to have made powerful influence both in the feminist art movement from a political and societal perspective, then and today. With that being said, we will start with the female artist Judy Chicago and a quote from her that calcifies her position as an artist. "I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized
This paper explains the history and development of the nude art in the Renaissance and Medieval period. In the Renaissance age the patrons and artist readopted the antiquity of the classical Greek into representation of nude. This is an epoch when drastic changes occurred in which Christian authorities no longer viewed the nude art as something conflicting or shameful. In contrary they believed that nude being reformed in ancient in classical antiquity portrays divine characteristics and emancipates the light that is pure and heroic (Long, 2008; Bonfante, 1989; Tinagli, 1997). To establish a further understanding why during the Renaissance age nude art brilliantly portrayed human anatomy, the work of some most remarkable artists such as Michelangelo, Botticelli, Masaccio and Durer are described (Long, 2008) These minds welcomed the classical antiquity into their paintings and sculpturing and often the Greek athletic figures and mythological Venus figure were used as ideal models in depicting nude art (Bonfante, 1989). The classical renewal of nude art had specific roles attached to both male and female nude, in the world of art. The religious figures were depicted in antique forms as to convey their theological status and importance. In contrast to the Renaissance period, the Medieval representation of nude art was rare and Religious authorities oppose its development as they believed it may lead to sin and degradation (Long, 2008; Steinberg, 1983). In short this paper will present a historical overview of the nude art and how the diverse cultural attitude towards depiction of nude existed in each period.
In the book “Ways of Seeing,” John Berger explains several essential aspects of art through influence of the Marxism and art history that relates to social history and the sense of sight. Berger examines the dominance of ideologies in the history of traditional art and reflects on the history, class, and ideology as a field of cultural discourse, cultural consumption and cultural practice. Berger argues, “Realism is a powerful link to ownership and money through the dominance of power.”(p.90)[1] The aesthetics of art and present historical methodology lack focus in comparison to the pictorial essay. In chapter six of the book, the pictorial imagery demonstrates a variety of art forms connoting its realism and diversity of the power of connecting to wealth in contradiction to the deprived in the western culture. The images used in this chapter relate to one another and state in the analogy the connection of realism that is depicted in social statues, landscapes, and portraiture, also present in the state of medium that was used to create this work of art.
In Enrique Simonet’s reproduction, the three goddesses stand slightly off center and are taking turns showing their naked bodies to a man watching them in the foreground. This scene has been recreated hundreds of times, specifically because it fulfills the fantasy of the viewer, the arousing idea of three beautiful and naked women trying to win the affection of the viewer. Thus, forcing the women to become submissive to the man in order to win his affections. The sexual passion from that painting is not found in the women painted, but in viewer: “Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.” (Ways of Seeing 55).
The piece, “From Ways of Seeing” by John Berger, describes how a man’s actions are perceived and always focused on showing power. However a woman’s presence is opposite and that everything she does determines how people see her. Her choices and actions are what we go by to determine who the woman is. Whereas men want to be seen but women just want to be accepted (4). Aaron H. Devor in, “Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meanings of Gender” argues that men and women both strive to obtain power (112). Devor shows how the means of how they obtain said power are vastly different and mirror the statements that Berger claims (114). Devor helps further our understanding of how we come to act the specific ways that are customary by divulging the ongoing thought process toward gender of children (109). Berger as well as Devor seem to agree on the topic of how the members of a gender act in society, the motive behind these actions are where differences between the writers