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TheFemaleNudeinWesternEuropeanPaintingBergersWaysofSeeingexcerpts1.pdf

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The Depiction of the Female Nude in Western European Painting (1400s-1900s):

Excerpts from Ways of Seeing by John Berger1

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been

overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is

dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible, his

presence is striking. If it is small or [not credible], he is found to have little presence. The promised

power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, or sexual—but its object is always

exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His

presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretense

is always towards a power which he exercises on others.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot

be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen

surroundings, taste—indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. . . .

From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. To be born a

woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social

presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a

limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must

continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. 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

others, and ultimately how she

appears to men, is of crucial

importance for what is normally

thought of as the success of her

life. Her own sense of being in

herself is supplanted by a sense of

being appreciated as herself by

another.

^ Reclining Bacchante by Trutat (19th century)

(Bacchante: in classical mythology, a female follower of the Roman deity Bacchus,

the god of wine, fertility, and agriculture)

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch

themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also

the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed [is]

female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

[. . .]

In one category of European oil painting women were the principal, ever-recurring subject. That category

is the nude. In the nudes of European painting we can discover some of the criteria and conventions by

which women have been seen and judged as sights.

1 BBC/Penguin books, 1972. pp. 46-57 and 62-63.

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The first nudes in the tradition depicted Adam and Eve. It is worth referring to the story as told in

Genesis:

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 thy 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 sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou

shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’

What is striking about this story? They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the

apple, each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder. The second

striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. In

relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God.

In the medieval tradition the story was often illustrated, scene following scene, as in a strip cartoon (see

the left image below. During the Renaissance the narrative sequence disappeared, and the single

moment depicted became the moment of shame. The couple wear fig leaves or make a modest gesture

with their hands. But now their shame is not so much in relation to one another as to the spectator (see

the right image below).

Adam and Eve by Mabuse (early 16th c.)

Fall and Expulsion from Paradise by Pol de Limbourg (early 15thc.)

Later the shame becomes a kind of display (see images, next page):

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The Couple by Max Slevogt (1868-1932) advertisement for underwear, early 1970s

When the tradition of painting became more secular, other themes also offered the opportunity of painting

nudes. But in them all, there remains the implication that 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. Often—as with the

favorite subject of Susannah and the Elders2—this

is the actual theme of the picture. We join the Elders

to spy on Susannah taking her bath. She looks back at

us looking at her.

>Susannah and the Elders by Tintoretto (16thc)

In another version of the subject by the same

artist (below), Susannah is looking at herself in a

mirror. Thus she joins the spectators of herself.

2Susannah and the Elders: a story from the Old

Testament Apocrypha which tells how Susanna, the

wife of a prosperous Jew, was secretly desired by two

elders of the community and how they plotted together

to seduce her. She was accustomed to go into her

garden to bathe, so one day the elders hid themselves

there to wait for her. The moment her maids had

gone, leaving Susanna alone, the two old men sprang

out on the naked, unsuspecting girl. They threatened

that unless she gave herself to them both they would

swear publicly that they had seen her in the act of

adultery with a young man, a crime for which the

penalty was death. But Susanna spurned them and

cried for help. The old men, thwarted, carried out their threat; Susanna was hauled before a court on the false

charge, found guilty and condemned to die. At the eleventh hour the young Daniel came forward and cross-

examined the elders. By the device of separating them from each other, he elicited conflicting evidence, thus

proving Susanna’s innocence. In Hebrew the name Susanna means a lily, the symbol of purity. Medieval artists

usually represented the story by depicting Daniel executing justice. However, from the Renaissance onwards, artists

chose Susanna bathing, which offered an opportunity for the portrayal of female nudity. (Hall, James. Dictionary of

Subjects and Symbols in Art. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.)

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The mirror was often used [in European oil paintings] as a symbol of the

vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. > Vanity by Memling (15thc)

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a

mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally

condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own

pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the

woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.

The “Judgement of Paris” [a story from Greek mythology, shown in a

17thc version by the artist Rubens below] was another theme with the

same idea of a man or men looking at naked women. But a further element

is now added. Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful.

Thus Beauty becomes competitive. (Today the Judgement of Paris has

become the beauty contest.) Those who are not judged beautiful are not

beautiful. Those who are, are given the prize. The prize is to be owned by a judge—that is to say, to be

available to him.

[The 17thc English king] Charles the Second

commissioned a secret painting from Lely. It is a

highly typical image of the tradition. Nominally it

has been given the title of Venus and Cupid. In fact

it is a portrait of one of the King’s mistresses, Nell

Gwynne (below). It shows her passively looking at

the spectator staring at her naked. This nakedness is

not, however, an expression of her own feelings; it

is a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or

demands. (The owner of both woman and painting.)

The painting, when the King showed it to others,

demonstrated this submission and his guests envied

him.

It is worth noticing that in other non-European

traditions—in Indian art, Persian art, African art,

Pre-Columbian art—nakedness is never supine [supine: 1) lying on the back with the face upward. 2)

indisposed to act; passive] in this way. And if, in these traditions, the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it

is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of

each absorbing the other (see non-European images, next page):

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Mochica pottery (Peru)

c. 150-800 C.E.

Vishnu and Laakshmi (Indian, 11thc)

Indian painting, 18thc

We can now begin to see the difference between nakedness and nudity in the European tradition. In his

book on The Nude, Kenneth Clark maintains that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the

nude is a form of art. According to him, a nude is not the starting point of a painting, but a way of seeing

which the painting achieves. To some degree, this is true—although [I want to modify Clark’s definition

by noting that] the way of seeing ‘a nude’ is not necessarily confined to art: there are also nude

photographs, nude poses, nude gestures. What is true is that the nude is always conventionalized*—and

the authority for its conventions derives from a certain tradition of art.

[*conventionalized: to make conventional; characterized by or dependent on established practice or

accepted standards]

What do these conventions mean? What does a nude signify? It is not sufficient to answer these

questions merely in terms of the art-form, for it is quite clear that the nude also relates to lived sexuality.

[Therefore, I propose the following distinction between the terms “naked” and “nude,” one that differs

from the way that Kenneth Clark defines the terms above.] To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is

to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an

object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.)

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

continued > > > >

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In the average European oil painting of the nude, the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the

spectator in front of the picture. And he is presumed to be a

man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear

to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures

have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger—

with his clothes still on. Consider The Allegory of Time and

Love by [the 16thc artist] Bronzino (right). The complicated

symbolism which lies behind this painting need not concern us

now because it does not affect its sexual appeal—at the first

degree. Before it is anything else, this is a painting of sexual

provocation. The painting was sent as a present from the Grand

Duke of Florence to the King of France. The boy kneeling on

the cushion and kissing the woman is Cupid. She is Venus. But

the way her body is arranged has nothing to do with their

kissing. Her body is arranged the way it is, to display it to the

man looking at the picture. This picture is made to appeal to his

sexuality. It has nothing to do with her sexuality. (Here and in

the European tradition generally, the convention of not painting the hair on a woman’s body helps toward

the same end. Hair is associated with sexual power, with passion. The woman’s sexual passion needs to

be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly of such passion.) Women are there

to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own. Compare the expressions of these two women (left):

one is the model for a famous painting by [a

19thc French artist] and the other is a model for a

photograph in a girlie magazine. Is not the

expression remarkably similar in each case?

It is the expression of a woman responding

with calculated charm to the man whom she

imagines looking at her—although she doesn’t

know him. She is offering up her femininity as

the “surveyed.”

It is true that

sometimes a painting includes a male lover, as in the 16thc example

Bacchus, Ceres, and Cupid (right). But the woman’s attention is

very rarely directed towards him. Often she looks away from him or

she looks out of the picture towards the one who considers himself

her true lover—the spectator-owner. There was a special category

of private pornographic paintings (especially in the 18th century) in

which couples making love make an appearance. But even in front

of these it is clear that the spectator-owner will in fantasy oust the

other man, or else identify with him. By contrast the image of the

couple in non-European traditions provokes the notions of many

couples making love. Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual

imagery is frontal—either literally or metaphorically—because the

sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it. The

absurdity of this male flattery reaching its peak in the public academic art of the 19th century like the

painting Les Oreades (see image, next page):

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[in Greek mythology, an Oreade was a nymph associated with the

mountains; a nymph was a spirit of nature represented as a beautiful

young female; nymphs were depicted as inhabiting natural sites

such as woods, mountains, and rivers)

Men of state, of business, discussed under paintings like this. When

one of them felt he had been outwitted, he looked up for

consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man.

[. . .]

There are a few exceptional nudes in the European tradition of oil

painting to which very little of what has been said above applies.

Indeed they are no longer nudes—they break the norms of the art-

form; they are paintings of loved women, more or less naked.

Among the hundreds of thousands of nudes which make up the

tradition there are perhaps a hundred of these exceptions. [We will

look at some examples of this kind of nude in class.] In each case the painter’s personal vision of the

particular women he is painting is so strong that it makes no allowance for the spectator.

[. . .]

The nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an admirable expression of the European

humanist spirit. This spirit was inseparable from individualism. And without the development of a

highly conscious individualism the exceptions to the tradition (the extremely personal images of the

naked) [referenced above], would never have been painted. Yet the tradition contained a contradiction

which it could not itself

resolve. A few

individual artists

intuitively recognized

this and resolved the

contradiction in their

own terms, but their

solutions could never

enter the tradition’s

cultural terms.

The contradiction can be stated simply. On the one hand, the individualism of the artist, the thinker, the

patron, the owner: on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities—the woman—treated

as a thing or an abstraction.

The artist who made this woodcut (above) believed that the ideal nude ought to be constructed by taking

the face of one body, the breasts of another, the legs of a third, the shoulders of a fourth, the hands of a

fifth—and so on. The result would glorify Man. But the exercise presumed a remarkable indifference to

who any one person really was.

In the art form of the European nude, the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons

treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it

still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They

survey, like men, their own femininity.

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In modern art, the category of the nude has become less important. Artists themselves began to question

it. If one compares the painting Venus of Urbino (below, left) by a 16thc Italian Renaissance artist with

the painting Olympia (by a 19thc French artist) (right), in the 19thc painting, one sees a woman, cast in

the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewhat defiantly:

The ideal was broken. But there was little to replace it except the “realism” of the prostitute—who

became the quintessential woman of early avant-garde 20thc painting. In [traditional, conservative]

“academic” painting of the 20thc, the [depictions of the traditional nude] continued.

Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through other more widely

diffused media—advertising, journalism, television. But the essential way of seeing women, the essential

use to which their images are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in quite a different way from

men—not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but because the “ideal” spectator is

always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt

that this is so, make the following experiment: choose from this [reading] an image of a traditional nude.

Transform the woman into a man [in your mind’s eye]. Then notice the violence which that

transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.