Professor Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe
Professor Tracy Hamilton
Professor Kimberly Morse-Jones
Spring 2008
Images of Women and Men in Western Art
The following is an edited excerpt of Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, "Seeing Through Art: A Course on Images of Women and Men in Western Art," Transformations 6 (1995): 16-24
In recent years the history of the human body has been the focus of study across a wide range of disciplinary areas.
One of the objectives has been to dismantle the prevailing notion of the body as fact of 'nature' and subject only to physical drives and needs which lie beyond the realms of the social and the cultural.
It has been argued instead that the male and female body have been perceived and represented differently in different historical periods and has been subjected to varying forms of regulation and management.
Central to this research is the representation of the body.
Perceptions of the body - whether individual or social - are shaped through historical representations, and visual representations ranging in form from works of art to advertising arguably have been a particularly powerful influence in defining historical norms, ideals, or forms of deviancy.
The art historian, who comes equipped with a vast catalogue of images and a broad understanding of the history of visual culture, would appear to be uniquely situated to make significant contributions to the writing of a history of the male and female body.
Moreover, the body has been central to the history of art since its inception as an academic discipline.
Only recently have some art historians, notably feminists, begun to turn the enormous critical potential of their discipline to the task of analysing the meanings and significance of images of female and male bodies in history.
My approach is to bring a new set of questions to familiar images and to 'deconstruct' the conventional assumptions and unquestioned ideas regarding these images.
The most interesting questions have been formulated primarily by contemporary feminist writing and theory.
Initially feminist art historians saw their task as recovering the names and works of neglected women artists in history and to reintegrate them into traditional art history [see Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, "The Feminist Critique of Art History," Art Bulletin 69 (1987): 326-328.
It was soon recognized, however, that traditional art history itself is an institutionalized ideological practice that contributes to the reproduction of the patriarchal social system through both its selection of images and in the way it chooses to discuss, to not to discuss, those images.
Lynda Nead writes:
Feminist theorists argued that the predominant visual and verbal representations of women in circulation in our male-dominated society do not reflect, re-present, a biologically given 'feminine nature,' ... what women have to adapt to as their femininity, particularly in the process of growing up, is itself a product of representations.
The question to be asked, therefore, in looking at an image of a woman is not 'Is this a true representation of a woman?' but rather 'What are the effects of this image likely to be?
I use works of art as documentary evidence in the construction of a tentative social history of women and men. When viewed in this light they often reveal unexpected and illuminating features of the society in which they were produced.
The question that arises, however, is whether art can be considered a trustworthy source for the construction of a social history.
To be sure, as Mary Sheriff points out ["Fragonard's Erotic Mothers and the Politics of Reproduction," in Eroticism and the Body Politic edited by Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 14], the correspondence between images in art and the social conventions or political ideals they appear to represent is not direct.
One must be aware of the possibility that what seems to be stated in the subject matter of the image may be partly the result of artistic imperative, of formal and aesthetic choices made by the artist in the process of producing the work, that distort or subvert the perceived verisimilitude of the subject. The image may thereby resist any straightforward reading.
But although images of women and men may provide perhaps only suspect evidence of actual social conditions, they must, of their very nature, nonetheless make manifest the attitudes, practices, and fantasies of the culture that produced them.
Images of women and men may not tell us how women and men actually lived, but they do reveal much about the relationship between the sexes, the perceptions of gender, and systems of value and morality.
It may also be questioned that any interpretation of social practices and attitudes through an examination of works of art is prone to serious misreadings of the image in its historical context.
Certainly, an approach that looks for the effect of the images both on the historical and the modern viewer may be considered problematic. However, what can be revealed through this approach is the degree to which male-constructed images of women and men are embedded in western culture, to the extent that they appear quite 'natural'.
My approach is to unmask these constructions to reveal the underpinnings of the male-dominated social system. Put another way, the aim is to uncover the social unconscious and to illuminate social relationships that may help us to recognize more readily the constructed social reality in which we live.
The making and display of images is never an innocent occupation.
Every image 'signifies' and every choice is culturally determined.
There is always a reason, or rather several reasons (not all of them conscious), why a particular form of representation has been chosen, and why that particular image has been selected for display (in a museum or gallery, in an art history book, in a magazine, in a movie, on television, on the World Wide Web).
Margaret Miles [Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 167] has argued that one of the primary reasons for producing one type rather than another, and for selecting for display one type of representation over another, is the need in a male-dominated culture to preserve male control in a form that tends to be thought of simply as 'order'.
A central component of maintaining and reproducing social order is through the management of women, and a powerful strategy for controlling women is their public presentation (in art, in the media).
The images of women and men in art may be understood as serving a social function in that they contribute to assumptions and expectations relating to the role of each in society.
These images carry within them codes of behaviour that have been determined largely by men.
Art has always played (and continues to play) an important role in the service of what has been called 'gender ideology,' communicating ideas about social order through the representation of female and male sexuality.
The themes and styles of works of art often function as a prescription for relationships between women and men. Images of women and men can effectively incite both sexes to adopt certain self-images, attitudes, and behaviour.
Art has been used to demonstrate the moral and physical superiority of the male over the female.
For the most part in the patriarchal tradition of art in the West, men and their values have been privileged, while women have been muted and their values disparaged.
It needs to be understood that images should not be seen as merely 'reflecting' social practices and attitudes, so that analysis of them is simply the revelation of the prejudices or stereotypes of a society.
Rather, these images need to be understood as also re-presenting, reinforcing, perpetuating, producing, and reproducing these same prejudices and stereotypes.
It is a complex, interactive process. There is no simple causal relationship between society and representation in either direction; social practices do not determine representations, nor do representations specify particular social arrangements; rather, each acts on the other in many tiny ways to nuance or reinforce, to correct or reiterate the role, behaviour, and attitude of women and men in relation to the status quo.
The precise nature of the interdependence of representation and society cannot be theoretically specified.
However, the politics of representation are relatively easy to identify in historical societies. The following questions are usually easily answered:
The other basic question to be asked of every image is: Why has the woman, or the man, been represented in this way?
The relevance of this approach lies in what it teaches us about image-making, how images can be manipulated, and the ways in which images might effect or influence those who gaze upon them with an innocent eye.
It should be stressed that images remain effective no matter what their age; just because a painting is 500 years old and sits in a museum does not mean that that image is dead. Indeed, not only does it (and its reproductions in art history books) remain influential, it also functions to confirm claims of historical continuity in gender identities and relationships, moral attitudes, and sexual behaviour.
Viewing artworks chronologically through history, various 'themes' in the treatment of women and men begin to emerge.
Within these themes can be identified a 'vocabulary' of forms and symbols which can be used in deciphering meaning in different types of representation at different times in history.
One of the aims of my approach is to teach how to 'see through art', to recognize attitudes and agendas that may underlay an image, and to be able to discern how that image may have been manipulated and how it might affect the viewer's own self-image, attitude, and behaviour.
Despite the prevalence of images that surround and bombard us everyday, there has been little effort to educate ourselves in how to look at and comprehend what we see.
ART HISTORY SENIOR SEMINAR 2008
Feminism has identified art history as a form of patriarchal culture, and has begun to challenge the values and ideas constructed within art history as part of its programme of cultural politics.
The focus of the feminist concern with art is the representation (that is, to re-present, not as women are, but according to culturally dictated conventions that contribute to the production of a stereotype ) of women, which they see as having been problematized by traditional art history's discussion of the subject. Victor Burgin identifies the central issue:
[Lynda Nead, "Feminism, Art History, and Cultural Politics," in The New Art History edited by A. L. Rees and F. Borzello (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 121].
One of the most influential achievements of the woman's movement, in the field of cultural theory, has been its insistence on the extent to which the collusion of women in their own oppression has been exacted through representation.
Feminists believe that traditional art history has not addressed these issues at all, and its failure to do so has served to reinforce sexual difference and to perpetuate thereby the gender relations of dominance and subordination. It should be noted that, although we may refer to a "feminist critique of art history," feminists are quick to point out that "Feminism is a politics, not a methodology" [Lisa Tickner, "Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference," Genders 3 (1988), 92]. Quite simply, feminists do not want feminism to become merely another approach to art history.
[Victor Burgin, "Something About Photography Theory", in The New Art History edited by A. L. Rees and F. Borzello (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 48]
For many of the images we shall be asking the following basic questions:
Whenever possible, images are considered in conjunction with information from other pertinent historical sources. Images may be grouped together in order to discern patterns that may provide further insights into prevailing attitudes towards women and men.