The Gaze, Sexuality and the
Nude
4 May 2023
• Why have there been no women artists?
• Debating the Canon
• Questions of Representation: the Female / Male Nude
• The Gaze, Fetishism, Castration
• Festishism
First published in ArtNews 1971
Source: James Elkins,
‘Canon and Globalization
in Art History’ in A Brzyski,
ed., Partisan Canons
(Durham, Duke University
Press, 2007) p. 66
Laurits Tuxen
Male Nude in the Studio of Bonnat (1876-1877)
Jacques Louis David
‘Patroclus’ (1780)
Rosa Bonheur – The Horse Fair (1853)
Johann Zoffany, The Royal Academicians (1771-1772)
L: Angelika Kaufmann
Self-Portrait (1770-1775)
R: George Romney
Portrait of Mary Moser (1770)
Debating the Canon
Judith Leyster, Self-Portrait (1630)
Mary Cassatt, Tea (1880)
Helen Chadwick
From Ego Geometria Sum (1983-86)
Katy Hessel, The Story of Art
without Men (London, 2022)
‘counter-discourses …. Recuperate the
feminist project back into a mainstream
(white, Western, male) humanist or critical
theory project …. A recent exhibition
catalogue is entitled Making their Mark ..
Even aside from the phallic connotations of
“making a mark” … what does the term
“mainstream” imply … ? … the show relied
on the premise that women artists desire to
enter a “mainstream” … ‘
Amelia Jones, ‘Post-feminism: A
Remasculinization of Culture?’ in Hilary
Robinson, ed., Feminism Art Theory (Oxford,
2001) p. 499.
Cincinnati Art Museum, 1989
Pollock, Differencing the Canon (London, 1999) p. 9
L: Baltimore Museum and Art Gallery website
R: Mark Godfrey, ed, Making their Mark (Los Angeles, 2023)
The Naked and the Nude
Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
(London, 1956) pp. 5 -7
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, BBC, 1972)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1974) p. 46
Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538)
Sir Peter Lely, Nell Gwyn (before 1680)
Rubens, The Judgement of Paris (1636)
The Nude
Rembrandt, Danae (between 1636 and 1643)
Berger, Ways of Seeing p. 57
The Naked
‘The maid's simple washing stand allows a space in
which women outside the bourgeoisie can be
represented both intimately and as working women
without forcing them into the sexualized category of
the fallen woman. The body of woman can be
pictured as classed but not subject to sexual
commodification’
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (London,
1988) pp. 88-89.
‘The artistic output of the Brücke abounded in images of powerless women. In Heckel’s Nude on a Sofa, 1909, and his Crystal
Day, 1913, women exist only in reference to—or rather as witnesses to—the artist’s frank sexual interests. In one, the
woman is sprawled in a disheveled setting, in the other, she is knee-deep in water—in the passive, arms-up, exhibitionist
pose that occurs so frequently in the art of this period. The nude in Crystal Day is literally without features (although her
nipples are meticulously detailed), while the figure in the other work covers her face, a combination of bodily self-offering
and spiritual self-defacement that characterizes these male assertions of sexual power.’
Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early 20th Century Vanguard Painting,’ Artforum (1973)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
L: Fränzi with Doll (1910)
R: Self-Portrait with Model (1907)
L: Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill (1913)
R: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, The Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (1914)
Manet, Olympia (1863)
William-Adophe Bouguereau,
Bather (1864)
Here a partially draped female model lies on a table opposite the draughtsman. They are separated by a framed screen
which is divided into square sections. The artist gazes through the screen at the female body and then transposes the
view on to his squared paper. Geometry and perspective impose a controlling order on the female body. The opposition
between male culture and female nature is starkly drawn in this image; the two confront each other.
Linda Nead, The Female Nude (London, 2002) p. 11
The woman lies in a prone position; the pose is difficult to determine, but her hand is clearly poised in a masturbatory
manner over the genitals. In contrast to the curves and undulating lines of the female section, the male compartment is
scattered with sharp, vertical forms; the draughtsman himself sits up and is alert and absorbed. Woman offers herself to
the controlling discipline of illusionistic art.
‘ … meaning is organized and regulated at the edges
or boundaries of categories. These borderlines are
important, they are powerful, for, as [Mary] Douglas
writes, “all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled
this way or that the shape of fundamental
experience is altered.” This notion raises possibilities
for a feminist critique of patriarchal representations
of the female body and may suggest some directions
for alternative ways of representing – through art
practice and criticism – the female body. The
classical, high-art tradition of the female nude plays
on the ideal of wholeness and contained form. Its
formal integrity then offers to the discerning
connoisseur the attractions of an uncompromised
aesthetic experience. It may well be, then, that
these values can be questioned … ‘
Nead, The Female Nude p. 33
William Etty (1787 – 1849)
Male Nude Studies
L: Georges Rouault, The Girls or Prostitutes (1905)
R: Georges Rouault, The Girls or Prostitutes (1906)
L: Linda Benglis, For Carl Andre (1970)
R: Carl Andres, 144 Magnesium Square (1969)
The Gaze, Fetishism, Castration
Scopophilia and the Gaze
‘Visual impressions remain the most frequent pathway
along which libidinal excitation is aroused; indeed,
natural selection counts upon the accessibility of this
pathway … when it encourages the development of
beauty in the sexual object. The progressive
concealment of the body which goes along with
civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity
seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its
hidden parts. It can, however, be diverted
(‘sublimated’) in the direction of art, if its interest can
be shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of
the body as a whole.’
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, in Complete Works of Freud Vol. VII (London,
1949) p. 156
Diego Vélazquez, The Toilet of Venus (1647-51)
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The
Grande Odalisque (1814)
Jules Lefebvre, Odalisque (1874)
Fetishism
‘There are some cases which are quite specially
remarkable—those in which the normal sexual object is
replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is
entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim … What is
substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body
(such as the foot or hair) which is in general very
inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate
object which bears an assignable relation to the person
whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality
(e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen).’
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in
Complete Works of Freud Vol. VII (London, 1949) p. 153
Alonso Sánchez Coello, Woman in a fur
wrap (1577-79)
Meret Oppenheim, Fur Cup (1936)
Helmut Newton, Shoe (2004)
Castration , Violence and the Monstrous Feminine
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization of the
Libido,’ in Freud, Collected Papers II (London, 1924) p. 247-
8
R: Rubens, Medusa (first quarter of the 17th century)
L: Edvard Munch, Love and Pain (1895)
R: Francis Bacon, Right panel from Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)
Judith and Holofernes, by:
Orazio Gentileschi (1608-12),
Artemisia Gentileschi (1639)
Gustav Klimt (1901)
Trophime Bigot (1640)
L: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market (1866)
R: Victor Giraud, The Slave Merchant (1867)