In discussions of nudity in art, the relationship between ‘the painter’, who controls the appearance of ‘the painted’, and what that subject is supposed to represent, can often be broken down into a power imbalance between creator and subject.
A famous quote from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, explains this well:
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, 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.”
Essentially, there is no substance to this naked woman; she has been created purely to fulfill the erotic fantasies of her creator, who, unable to acknowledge his own lust, excuses his depiction as a moral criticism. Even this added layer of “vanity” is superficial. Though intended to reflect the woman’s vain immorality, the mirror still continues to reflect her nudity as well. This quote is clearly critiquing established artistic models regarding nudity, but why is this specific to female bodies? Large quantities of art from varying eras and artistic styles utilise male nakedness as much as female nakedness, and yet the two are not comparable.
This power imbalance between ‘the painter’ and ‘the painted’ emphasises the lack of agency the subject has at the hands of their creator. As the subject comes to reflect the painter’s own internal biases, the subject cannot be viewed as an objective, disconnected piece of work. In Renaissance art work, male nakedness, painted by male painters, has been used to explore the “natural state” of man, with their own sense of individuality and agency. For example, in The Creation of Adam, he is depicted naked in order to show the natural form of a human body, and demonstrates his own agency to reach towards the hand of God.
By contrast, another famous Renaissance artwork, The Birth of Venus, shows a demure and innocent Venus emerging from the water, hiding her “erotic” body parts only partially to tease the viewer with her naivety. Was it Venus who decided that her nudity should be erotic, when Adam’s was not? From the gaze of a male painter, all agency or individuality of those with female-presenting bodies are removed, and instead, they depict the “ideal woman”, a person who is quite literally two-dimensional and serves only as an aesthetic function.
The use of art to portray female nakedness, not as truthful depictions of fellow humans, but as an idealised archetype, has continued to the modern day. Not only in paintings but in the form of magazines, where celebrities with the “ideal body” are photographed in scenes of superficial choreography, with the pleasure of the viewers taking priority over everything else. Even those who wish to breastfeed their children in public cannot escape the scrutiny of the “erotic” label; as something that should be natural and normal, yet viewed as something sexual and tantalisingly immoral.
However, that is not to say that there have been no efforts to deconstruct the sexualisation of female nudity. Feminist artists such as Judy Chicago have made substantial efforts to divert the attention of female bodies away from the sexual fantasies of “innocent virgin” or “tempestuous prostitute”, and instead show the female body as a natural, human physicality. By deconstructing the archetypes that women had so long been forced into, Chicago reinvigorates a sense of feminine agency, with subjects that focus on personal expression, rather than artistic expression with the intent to satisfy the male gaze.
It is also important to recognise the importance of those within the LGBTQ+ community on the deconstruction of the erotic gaze on women’s bodies, specifically through the artistic exploration outside of a gender binary. The artist Claude Cahun, who was born at the end of the nineteenth century, used a series of self-portraits to explore their own identity and place within society. By questioning what it means to have either a female or male body, and how each of these are represented within society, we begin a process of de-sexualisation, one which allows all bodies to receive their own agency and liberation.
