Our Lower Sixth Academic Enrichment Programme kicked off last week, with a two-part lecture from Head of Art, Ms Beales, on The Male Gaze.
Queen Anne’s School’s Lower Sixth Academic Enrichment Programme comprises of a series of lectures on a wide variety of topics given by a host of speakers. The aim is to broaden horizons; enrich the girls in a cultural, moral, social and academic sense and to provide the opportunity to listen to an eclectic range of professionals.
Our colourful Head of Art, Ms Beales, who studied History of Art at university, loves to understand how and why art was made as well as concentrating on the context of the time in which it was made.
One art history topic that she has always been particularly interested in is the depiction of the female nude, and that the most famous paintings and sculptures of women were created by men. As a forward-thinking girls’ school, we think that this topic is particularly important for our girls to be critically aware.
Ms Beales showed a painting by Zoffany at the beginning of her talk which showed aristocratic men ogling at paintings in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In the 18th century, it was very popular for wealthy men to go on a Grand Tour to Europe to study mainly Italian Renaissance paintings first-hand. It was here that they saw many different depictions of the female nude including those featuring Venus.
Depicting the female nude is not a new theme, however. Ms Beales showed our students examples of Venus Figurines dating from as far back as 45,000 BC. These figurines were often used in rituals and were believed to help increase fertility. They were almost always faceless and mainly focussed on a woman’s body and could be held in one hand.
The Ancient Greeks were particularly well known for their sculptures, almost always depicting the ‘heroic male’ or the Venus – not a real woman, but the ideal woman who was often depicted as a goddess. These sculptures showed the ‘perfect’ body with ideal proportions and in a way, these ideas of perfection can be seen today in social media sites.
Another way in which the female nude was depicted was in religious art, often as the “disgraced Eve.” Through the examples that Ms Beales showed the students, it was clear that these were the very few ways in which the female nude was presented in Art History: “From very early on, the idea of the naked woman was about either beauty or shame.”
In paintings and sculpture, the pose of the nude was often very similar. Bodies were long and perfectly proportioned and often the ‘Venus’ did not engage with the viewer, turning her face to one side or keeping her eyes closed. “These women were ready to be looked at” explained Ms Beales. “She is allowing us to look at her but is never making eye contact.”
During the Renaissance, male artists started taking a slightly more realistic approach to painting the female nude. Many paintings of Venus were based on real people, often mistresses of rich men. Titian’s famous painting ‘Venus of Urbino’ was also one of the first instances in which ‘Venus’ looks at the viewer. In the nineteenth century, this interaction was modernised in the painting ‘Olympia’ by Edouard Manet in which he almost copies the pose of Titian’s work by makes Olympia gaze at us directly without any shame or embarrassment.
In part two of The Male Gaze lecture, Ms Beales showed the students the painting ‘The Rokeby Venus’ by Diego Velázquez. This painting was one of the first instances of the female nude painted with her back to the viewer. However, this painting also had significance, as in 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery in London, where the painting was displayed, and slashed it with a knife. Richardson revealed that it wasn't just the picture's value of £45,000 that made it a target, it was "the way men visitors gaped at it all day long".
It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that the female nude painted by female artists started to become more common. Ms Beales introduced our students to artists such as Paula Modersohn-Becker, Suzanne Valadon, and of course Frida Kahlo, all of whom painted real women in a non-objectified way. Women were beginning to back ownership of their bodies, depicting them in a less-sexualised manner.
Although the past 100 years have seen female artists granted much more respect and recognition, the inequality between male and female artists is still very apparent today, and Ms Beales provided some eye-opening examples of this. The American artist Judy Chicago, whose work aimed to appreciate all the women who had been forgotten in history, could rarely get her work recognised because she was a woman. Performance artist Marina Abramović decided to use her own body as art and was cut and beaten by her audience. And the second highest selling painting ever sold at auction, was of a female nude painted by Willem de Kooning, an artist who feared women.
“Still in our society, the female nude is the most looked at, gazed upon and revered area of art history. When you are reading about history, be careful of who the ‘voice’ it is coming from” Ms Beales said to the girls. “It’s called ‘his-tory’ for a reason.”
