Female Nudes and The Male Gaze

The artistic convention of the nude has been around since ancient times, and its sexist undertones have always accompanied it. The naked female body has long been a source of pleasure to the male eye. It is commodified and assigned value through its sexual attractiveness to the male eye. The conventions of nudes have shifted to please male audiences throughout history, but a few overarching characteristics come to mind: passive disposers, hairless, perfect bodies, and intimate “feminine” settings like nature, bedrooms, and bathrooms. Knowing that this is a vague topic with dozens of examples, I aim to provide a brief summary of the history of the female nude through this post, and to highlight the underlying misogyny in these depictions of women. I’ll explain how the nude reflected beauty standards in society, women’s roles and gender norms, and female and male sexuality as seen through this artistic tradition. 

Nudes in Antiquity

The nude in academic art as we know it originated in Ancient Greece. Male nudes were very common, usually representing deities or athletes, depicted as strong, powerful, idealized bodies, rendered with mathematic proportions. To the Ancient Greeks, and later Romans, nudity was triumphant and celebratory, an exaltation of male beauty, strength, and power. However, female nudes developed differently in antiquity. Early forms of female nudity occurred in the form of fertility goddesses, following older Near Eastern traditions. But in the archaic period, female nudity had negative connotations. Humiliation, vulnerability, prostitution, and violence were themes associated with female nudity. Furthermore, Greek noblewomen were hardly seen in society, and therefore in art, much less nude. Only hetairai, courtesans, or porne, sex workers, were depicted naked in Greek art until later periods. 

Then, in the late Classical period, the sculptor Praxiteles created the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first devotional statue of a goddess in the nude. At first, the work was met with shock, and was even rejected by its original patron, but it would soon hail a long-lasting tradition. These naturalistic, idealized statues of nude goddesses would be common throughout the history of western art. As well, so would the harmful ideals of beauty and sexuality that accompanied them. 

Middle Ages and Renaissance 

With the rise of Christianity, nudity was mostly abandoned from art in the Middle Ages. Nakedness was immoral and immodest; public bathing and nude exercise was approached with much suspicion; and Greco-Roman nude statues were symbols of sin. Around this time, the infamous fig-leaf censorship began. This was a reference to the book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve covered themselves with a loincloth or an apron made of fig leaves.

Then, in the Renaissance, newfound interests in classical antiquity called for more acceptance of nudity in art. Classical and Hellenistic statues were celebrated and imitated in their beauty and realism. Female nudes, especially images of Venus, goddess of love, were also very popular. The distinctions between genders in nudes was similar to antiquity: male nudes emphasized their heroism and ideal bodily composition. Conversely, female nudes were seductive and warm, erotic and voyeuristic, like the painting by Titian above. They revealed the strict values of beauty of this society, which believed beauty was revealing of virtue and divinity, all qualifying the woman’s worth. 

Early Modern Nudes

After the renaissance, the nude was fully established as a focal point of western art. It had specific conventions, being a part of the academic canon of art, and more distinctions based on gender. Male nudes heightened the drama of a scene, or the heroism of a figure, and female nudes embodied concepts such as truth or beauty. But 18th and 19th century society was still not fully comfortable with the concepts of nudity, and artists had to use specific settings for nude figures in their works so as not to offend their audience. Greek and Roman mythological scenes were very common, left over from the renaissance and made popular again during the Neoclassicist period.

New settings also emerged, such as the mystical land known as “the Orient”, essentially everywhere east of the western world. This began the movement known as Orientalism, where whitewashed figures in “exotic” dress and mystical imaginary locations fascinated European audiences. Odalisque paintings became popular: exoticized, stereotypical, and over-sexualized depictions of oriental nude women were a highly celebrated art form. 

Impressionism

Avant-garde movements began to challenge many academic artistic traditions, and the nude was absolutely one of them. Artists developed new conventions, styles, and settings for nudes, some very shocking to mid-19th century audiences. One of these, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, was incredibly offensive to French society of this time. The image depicts two noblemen, fully dressed, enjoying a picnic with two naked prostitutes. One of these women is in the background of the image, but the other is one of the main figures, and looks straight out into the canvas. To add further insult, the scandalous painting was huge in scale, akin to a history painting, and in a style that follows many traditional works. 

Bather paintings were also a common use of the nude during the Impressionist period. Artists like Degas and Renoir painted women in everyday scenes during their toilette, looking in on intimate personal rituals. These works bring to mind a sort of spectatorship or voyeurism, being paintings depicting private moments in a woman’s everyday life, but painted by a man for a largely male audience. 

Early 1900s

After the Impressionist period, artists began further experimenting with the tradition of the nude. The French Fauvist movement and its German contemporary, Die Brücke, used the well-known academic tradition to further the shock factor of their unconventional works. Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenirs de Biskra) received a great deal of negative feedback from critics and the public, with its ugly and menacing female figure. I’ve spoken about the racist connotations of this work and these movements in another post as well.

Unfortunately, these works did not change the sexist associations of the nude, simply the manner in which artists depicted them. In fact, these works were just as harmful to women as their predecessors. Many of the Die Brücke artists shared the same muse, a very young girl named Fränzi, and often depicted her in the nude. In the image below, she was twelve years old when she modeled for Heckel. This means these adult men were looking at this child naked, so this is obviously extremely problematic. Just like artists before them, models were reduced to an image, or an object, with no identity or authority; to these artists, they were nothing but a sexual commodity or a source of erotic inspiration.

Primitivism also began around this time, another harmful Eurocentric, racist movement. Matisse’s Blue Nude and the later Cubist work it inspired, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, contained stolen styles and imagery from Africa and other countries outside of the western world, and often reinforced oversimplified and harmful stereotypes about the people from these cultures. This style painted them as violent, primitive, oversexualized and dehumanized beings that appealed to Western opinion. I won’t go into too much detail about it here, as I have already written this post on the subject.

During this time, Suzanne Valadon rebelled against artistic tradition by disrupting gender norms in positive, empowering renditions of the nude. Her nudes are stylistically similar to those by male contemporaries, but they have noteworthy differences: unidealized forms, individuality, and agency. Her nudes did not titillate the male eye, but depict real women, elevated not by sexual value but individual identity. She even painted male nudes with some of the characteristics associated with traditional female nudes. Placing male nudes in nature and bathing setting, from vulnerable and erotic perspectives, made her work very progressive for its time. 

Surreal Nudes

Although I could continue with contemporary art, I’ll end with Surrealism, a movement with very questionable ideas about female bodies. Surrealism was very concerned with sexuality, and was as phallocentric as any art history movement, if not more explicitly so. Its references to Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis, especially its sexual aspects, like men’s supposed innate fear of castration. This was supposedly a traumatic event that occurred early in a boy’s life, when he learns women do not have penises, leading to believe theirs were cut off, and that his could be as well.

This trauma manifests in fetishes and also a discomfort in female sexuality, which we see in surrealist art. Freud’s psychology centred largely on male sexuality and thus so did surrealism. Female artists were hindered from participating in surrealist journals and exhibition, only valued as a source of artistic inspiration to men, not as artists themselves. But this was no different from any other movement in Art History. Male artists reduced women to archetypes, such as the femme-enfant, muse, or seductress.

Le Viol by Magritte is a particularly disturbing work; it is a reference to his mother’s death, but it also reveals male surrealist perspectives on women’s bodies: it portrays an androgynous head with a naked torso where its face should be, possibly referencing men’s focus when seeing women. Another reading of this suggests the phallic shape of the head and neck, and the hair’s resemblance to pubic hair, suggesting it might portray the act of rape in progress. This is one important example of violent attitudes toward women in this movement. 

On a more positive note, look at the difference between Magritte’s work and this one by Frida Kahlo, who rejected the title of Surrealist, but associated herself with the movement:

This work was originally a gift to Kahlo to her lover Dolores del Rio. The painting celebrates Kahlo’s sexuality, both as a woman and as a queer person, and also might symbolize her dual identities, the two women representing European and Mestiza identities. Kahlo was open about her sexuality and her personal life through her work, and this is an example of one of her empowering and intimate nude paintings.

The last “nude” we’ll look at is a poster from this study by the group Guerrilla Girls, who aim to expose racial and sexual injustice in the art world. The study responded to The International Survey of Painting and Sculpture at the MoMA in 1984, highlighting the lack of acknowledgement of female artists by galleries and museums despite their contributions.

To conclude, this is a fairly lengthy, disenchanted overview of this artistic tradition of the nude. Sexist themes are present in most forms of art, in most contexts and subjects, but the female nude is perhaps the most obvious and unveiled of them all. I tried to include some female examples from later periods, to show some positive change, and also to celebrate these artists’ take on the tradition. I hope that this opens your eye to the deeper meanings of this subject, and when you see more female nudes, you will have a better understanding of the sexism and male-centric views behind them!