Women Artists and the Deflection of Male Gaze Throughout the Years
Women artists have fought for centuries against patriarchal oppression and sexist stigmas to have their artwork hang right alongside men in museums and have their own individual shows. Studying the various women artists in this course has brought me to identify the theme in their artwork of exposing the male gaze through changing how the female body is portrayed as a subject. Their focus is on averting the male gaze, drawing attention to more things than just a woman’s body and giving women a voice through depicting them in ways that defied their society’s standards at that time. Women artists work towards no longer allowing the female body to be the object for the prospector to gaze at, but instead to be looked at as independent, confident, motherly and other strong feministic aspects. By taking this stand against being an object in male artists’ works, women are progressively making strides through their art to end how they are viewed.
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Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders,
1610
Susanna is depicted as uncomfortable and
awkward with a twist to her body. |
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Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders,
1555
This painting shows Susanna as the
object with the male as the viewer. |
Beginning in the 1600s, Artemisia Gentileschi was a teenage prodigy that had created several paintings, including one of her well known “Susanna and the Elders” (Guerilla Girls, 35). Her painting was a rembrandt from a male artist, Tintoretto, in which she chose to depict the woman subject, Susanna, through a different viewing lense. In Tintoretto’s painting, Susanna is the object of the male gaze and the story behind the image is that she is being stalked by a man and afterwards is raped. Gentileschi took the woman as the subject of male gaze, and instead depicted the rape scene in a realistic light. Through this, she was able to take the topic of rape culture and address it through her own image, where she makes Susanna a woman who is being sexually harrassed by the older gentleman, and there is nothing glamorous about these actions. Through another one of her paintings, Gentileschi shows the strength that women have in order to commit actions that were not considered “lady-like” or “feminine.” In the piece, Judith Slaying Holofernes, where many artists showed Judith looking away as she cuts off the head of Holofernes, Gentilsechi shows Judith “intent on accomplishing her mission, and unafraid to face carnage and death” (Guerilla Girls, 37). Women were thought of not being able to accomplish such a task and look at the person while they were committing the actions, but Gentileschi defies these stigmas and instead shows women who are strong, unafraid and able to do what men claim they cannot.
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Mary Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera, 1879
In this painting, Cassatt is placing a woman in a
public setting with a focused concentration that is
not paying attention to the male gaze. |
Continuing into the Impressionist time period, another artist, by the name of Mary Stevenson Cassatt, created paintings that reflected a different portrayal of women and were self-conscious of the male gaze. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and came from a wealthy social class, therefore, getting the opportunity to study lessons in drawing and music abroad in Europe. She used this to her advantage in a time where men were the only sex being recognized for their paintings. As a woman, she was restricted to certain aspects of the world that her male contemporaries could freely explore. However, in the second half of the 19th century, women began to participate in the “consumer culture” and emerged as “a social reality within spaces like those of crowds department stores and mass-market advertising” (Chadwick, 242). One of Cassatt’s paintings, Woman in Black at the Opera, showed women breaking the boundaries of social norms and emerging into the same society that men were dominant in. Though she does this, Cassatt is also not showing the gazing woman as the subject of her painting; instead the woman is represented as completely covered up and “unavailable” to the male viewer. She is also strictly focused on looking at the show and does not look for any attention because she simply wants to be left alone. Cassatt also takes a play on the male gaze and paints a man who is leaning over the balcony and intently staring at the woman, who is paying no attention to him. Mary Cassatt was a major influence on American collection, which initiated an era of modern art collecting in this country, and there would be no large collections of Impressionism in American museums if it wasn’t for her!
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| Suzanne Valadon, The Blue Room, 1923
There is a confidence and independence in
this woman that Valadon paints. |
Moving forward into the 1900s, artist Suzanne Valadon created artwork that challenged how women were represented as a form of “viewing pleasure” for men. During her time, the beginning moments of investigating “the issue of female subjectivity, and the identification of the female body with nature, generation and the instinctual life” took root in her generation (Chadwick, 282). Valadon painted female nudes that were an “observation with a knowledge of the female body...rejecting the static and timeless presentation of the monumental nude that dominates Western art” (Chadwick, 285). In her painting, The Blue Room, Valadon paints a woman who is completely clothed and is exposing very little skin, in which she is in her own world not giving a care to who is viewing her. She has short hair, is smoking a cigarette and has books by her feet. This all signifies the “modern woman” who is independent, intellectual and confident. Valadon emphasizes on this as well as “the awkward gestures of figures apparently in control of their own movements” (Chadwick, 286). In another painting, Grandmother and Young Girl Stepping into the Bath, Valadon again shows the woman engaged in their own activities and even though they are naked, there is no exact emphasis on any point of their bodies. Through this, the images of “seductive and devouring femininity” that are gazed upon by men is changed with a focus on the biological nature and independent actions.
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Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944
Kahlo depicts herself with a broken column,
pins in her body and an empty vast background. |
During the 1900s, artist Frida Kahlo painted as well, in which she created artwork that displayed her body and was in a sense an exposure to her vulnerability. She got very little support from Diego Riveira and his friends who did not take her seriously and even when she did find a group fo white male surrealists who did, she claimed that “I am in my own world not yours” (Guerilla Girls, 79). In her artwork, she depicted women with “nature, and imaging femininity in its instinctive, enigmatic, sexual and destructive aspects” (Chadwick, 279). Kahlo painted herself in The Broken Column, in which she “reinforces the woman artist’s use of the mirror to assert the duality of being, the self as observer and observed.” (Chadwick, 314). She is very vulnerable in her actions when she paints her own body, and she does this in order to explore the reality of her own body. The movement of Surrealism was a time period of art where women like Kahlo were able to use it for “a dialogue between the constructed social being and the power forces of the instinctual life...that would overthrow the control exerted by the conscious mind” (Chadwick, 314). They painted these images of themselves for their own purposes to explore their own existence and not displaying themselves as an object for the entertainment and purpose of the male gaze.
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Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, 1977
This is Sherman in the photo where
she mocks how women in Hollywood
were portrayed sexually.
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Finishing off within the period of Postmodernism, artist Cindy Sherman was a photographer who used herself as subject in her pictures. Her work focuses on exposing the images that “Western cultures constructs for our consumption in film and advertising media.” (Chadwick, 383). Women are always depicted in a sexual way and are seen in films always naked or in their underwear. Sherman, in 1978, began taking pictures of herself in ways that challenged the way women were represented. In her one photo, Untitled, where she is lying down in her underwear, there is a sense of contemplation and yet repulsion. Sherman is not trying to be sexual or an object of desire by the male gaze, but instead she is focused on “positioning herself within an art historical tradition that has for centuries objectified and fetishized the female body” (Chadwick, 383). Through this she is mocking and exposing the way women are viewed by the media during the late 70s early 80s time period. She is no longer allowing the female body to be gazed upon in a sexual manner and instead is getting people to contemplate on the way women have been and still are being treated in society.
Works Cited
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, And Society. Fifth ed., Thames & Hudson, 2012.
Guerilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. Penguin Books, 1998.
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