Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

At best, the maiden archetype has enshrined female suffering as something noble and beautiful, at worst it has contributed to the normalisation of violence against women, by turning it into poetry, religious devotion or beauty, or even just a historically condoned inevitability.

society tolerates sexually explicit images of women as long as they conform to an ideal that doesn’t relate to women’s autonomous erotic pleasure. Encouraged to be hyper-sexualised and available spectacles from a young age, when women focus on their own erotic desires and satisfaction, they are seen as monsters, and even more so when they get rich doing it.

When we change the way we see, the things we see also change.

Sex tends to be taken as an automatically liberating theme in art, but we might ask ourselves how liberating the sex was for the women in these pictures.

The femme fatale seems to have it all - she is independent and enjoys sexual fulfillment, but this comes at a price: rejected by society, she is the focus of male aggression and is ultimately always destroyed. As such she is a cautionary tale warning women not to want too much.

The problem is not that erotically charged images can’t also be seen as culturally valuable expressions (they can), but that woman’s highest cultural expression has been as a passive sex object, and not as an artist or creator of culture herself. This has limited what women have been able to achieve in a patriarchal society that cannot separate women’s value and worth from a very fixed idea of their sexuality.

Guided groups are brought before her to revere the extraordinary achievements of the master artist, or to be teased by the play of gazes in the image - that Venus sees us seeing her - and, most of all, to be educated, enlightened and inspired by a picture of a woman with no clothes on.

Women are socialised from an early age to comply with hyper-sexual stereotypes found in both fast-moving media and ‘high art’ and cultural representations, which consequently become the default norm. And seeing women as sexually available in images found everywhere from the art gallery to the workplace to the top deck of the bus on the way to school, creates a totalising environment of erotic privilege for straight men.

Seeing these images in their heavy gilded frames, tenderly lit and guarded by tasselled ropes and attentive guards, somehow made male desire and violence both precious and part of the unquestionable natural order of things.

Picasso and Modigliani’s ‘Venuses’ represent a sort of iconoclasm in their self-conscious rejection of the cold, perfectly-finished, stuffy beauty of the Western tradition of art. For the contemporary viewer they have become a reassuring confirmation of left-of-centre politics, of anti-establishment positions and of an intellectual kudos that doesn’t need art to look classical to be meaningful. And the frankness of the male artist’s unflinchingly libidinal vision is taken as evidence of the separation from restrictive bourgeois respectability and taste.

[We are]expected to be wooed and seduced by the male artist’s libidinous vision, a vision that has dominated and come to define our perception of genius, beauty and value from the perspective of the white heterosexual male artist.