Tracing the history

1. Representing Women
Tradition of the Nude

2. Ways of Seeing
by John Berger, 1972
Chapter 1
- Relationship between words and pictures
- How do what we know and what we believe affect the way we see art?
- How do our assumptions about art affect the way we see it?
- How does art become “mystified”?
- Who are the legitimate purveyors of the meaning of art?
- How is the value of art determined?
- How has reproduction affected the value of art?
Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Look at what we consider to be “great works of art”
(specifically Renaissance paintings)

3. Ways of Seeing
Chapter 3 The Naked and The Nude
Based on The Nude by Kenneth Clark

4. Genesis Tradition
 Read page 47 (Geneisis 3:16)
Berger points out that our western traditions of representing the
female body unclothed actually comes from the Genesis
tradition.
 But when we are born, we are not naked. We are just born.
Natural state + God’s eyes = nakedness
―Naked‖ can only be named in comparison to a clothed state—
the culturally constructed state in reaction to cultural ideas
about shame and the body.
 Belief that labor pains (and other female biology such as
menstruation) are punishment of women for original sin

5. Genesis 3:16
 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that
it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to
make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat; and she
gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they
were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made
themselves aprons. . . . And the Lord God called unto the man and
said unto him, ―Where are thou?‖ and he said, ―I heard they voice in
the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid
myself. . . .
Unto the woman God said, ―I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy
conception. In pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire
shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.‖

6. The first European nude
paintings were of
Adam and Eve (p. 48-
49), usually in story form.
Left: Fall and Expulsion from
Paradise by Paul de
Limbourg, Early 15th Century

7.  Then, just the moment of
shame is shown in relationship
to the spectator.
The spectator becomes god-
like, looking at the pair in
judgment.
 It is the god-like spectator that
causes shame in the western
tradition of looking.
 Nakedness objectified in
representation = nude
Adam and Eve by Mabuse, Early 16th Century (Flemish)

8.  In the western tradition of
shamefulness and sin,
the nude woman is associated
with sexual promiscuity
and is an object to be
controlled/judged by the god-
like spectator
 Also, through religious culture,
the unclothed state becomes
tantalizing, automatically
sexualized.

9.  Painters begin to depict
women alone on display,
subservient to the viewer
(who is male) as Adam
and Eve were subservient
to God.
 Tradition of mirrors also
used to show vanity.
 Hypocritical because the
woman has been created
for the male spectator’s
pleasure.
Vanity by Memling 1435-1494
Memling Vanity

10. Not all cultures see the body as
shameful.
Muwaji and daughter Iganani, of
the Amazon Suruwaha tribe

11. Suruwaha tribe

12. Nudists: Vacation Photos

13. Body Coverings in societies with
belief in body shame.

14. Other societies have traditions of shame and
modesty in relationship to the body as well,
and practice clothing/veiling

15. Soon shame becomes a kind of display, and women are depicted looking at viewer,
aware that they are being seen. This acknowledgment of shame to the viewer
Rubens
Is as a sign of submission. Above: Nell Gwynne, Mistress of Charles II (1618-1680)

16. Ingres 1780-1867 La Grande Odalisque

17.  Bathsheba
Taking a Bath
Another
subservient
woman
He shows her
in a critical moment
Rembrandt 1654

18. Such displays are distinctly western Christian traditions.
Other Cultures Have Shown Sex Act Between People
Rather Than Putting Women on Display
Erotic Sculptures of Nad-Kalse (16th Century Rural India)

19. Kama Sutra - Hindu
 A culture of categorization

20. Japanese erotic art from the Edo
period (1603–1867)

21. Europe: 17th & 18th Centuries
The Original Age of Materialism?

22. Panini 1764 Picture Gallery of Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga

23. Gainsborough Mr. And Mrs. Andrews approx.1750

25. Stubbs Lincolnshire Ox 1790

26. Heem Dessert 1640

27. Jan Davidsz de Heem Still Life with Oysters and a Peeled Lemon late 1660s or early 1670’s

28. Holbein The Ambassadors (1533)

29. The tradition of female shame and submission extending from Genesis
merges with the tradition of representing ownership in an age of materialism.
Rubens
Above: Nell Gwynne, Mistress of Charles II (1618-1680)

30. Rubens

31. Tintoretto 1518-1594 Susannah and the Elders

32. Titian Venus with Mirror 1555

33. Rubens Angelica and the Hermit 1630

34. Rembrant 1606-1669 Danae

35. Titian Venus of Urbino 1538

36. Manet Olympia 1863

37. Naked vs. Nude
Olympia's Boyz, 2001, digital C print, 134 x 168 inches, © Renée Cox,
Courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery, New York

38. Guerrilla Girls

39. Brainstorm:
 Nude  Naked

40. Naked vs. Nude
 Nude  Naked
 On display  To be one’s self
 Awareness of being  To be in a process of
viewed as an act of becoming
subservience in the  Perhaps only 100
Christian tradition
 To not be seen as one’s
self but as an object
 Hundreds of thousands

41. Rubens Helene of Fourment

42. ―Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at.‖
 Read page 46:
 ―A woman must constantly watch herself. She is
She is almost continually accompanied by her
own image of herself. Whilst she is walking
across a room or whilst she is weeping at the
death of her father, she can scarcely avoid
envisaging herself walking or weeping. From
earliest childhood she has been taught and
persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and
the surveyed within her as the two constituent
yet always distinct elements of her identity as a
woman. She has to survey everything she is and
everything she does because how she appears
to men, is of crucial importance for what is
normally thought of as the success of her life.

43. Is it true?
 Dressing room example
 Do men do this too?
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?
 Have you ever seen women
who have given up the
surveillance on themselves?
How do they act?
 So, to what extent is ―feminine
behavior‖ a performance to
fulfill what we believe are the
expectations we must meet in
order to be perceived as
attractive?

44. Berger’s Conclusions
 What we see and how we see depend on our socialization.
 What we are socialized to see depends on who is in power.
 Berger’s Conclusion in Chapter 3 about ―The Male Gaze‖:
―But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which
their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a
quite different way from men—not because the feminine is different
from the masculine--because the idea spectator is always assumed
to be male. . . .‖ (actually, the specatator is assumed to be white
heterosexual male in traditional images of women)
 But now there are not only theories about this male gaze, but also a
female gaze, lesbian gaze, homosexual male gaze, etc., within
specific subcultures.