Ways Of Seeing

This chapter begins with a reproduction of Felix Trutat’s (1824-1848) “Reclining Bacchante.” In it, a naked woman, her body well-lit, reclines. Her vagina is covered by a draped piece of cloth, and her face is turned to meet the spectator’s gaze. In the upper right-hand corner, a man sticks his face, which is veiled in shadow, through a window to gaze upon her.

Berger asserts that, according to long-held conventions that are only now being questioned, although still not surpassed, “the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man” (45). A man’s presence depends upon the promise of power that he embodies. If a man is perceived to possess a great amount of credible power, his presence is striking. If a man is perceived to lack credibility and power, he is said to have a weak presence. Berger continues: “The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual—but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you” (45). He concedes that the presence a man exerts may be fabricated: he may feign competences that he does not actually possess. However, his presence is always predicated upon the power that he exercises over others.

Berger then argues that, in contrast, “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her” (46). He contends that a woman’s presence asserts itself in everything that she does: “her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste. Indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence” (46). A woman’s presence is intrinsic to her being.

Berger then proclaims that “to be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men” (46). He asserts that the social presence of women has developed as a consequence of their ingenuity within the confines that men have placed on them. However, this presence has also come at “the cost of a woman’s self being split in two” (46). Due to the fact that she is always watched by men, a woman instinctually watches herself. In everything that she does, she not only acts, but also always simultaneously conjures an image of herself acting. Her consciousness is consequently split between being a self and being the object of a male gaze. Within her mind’s eye she carries both herself as a surveyed object, and the notion of the surveyor himself. Her identity as a woman always carries these dual elements. Women are acutely aware that their appearances to men are crucially important barometers for their success in life. Consequently, her own sense of self is always “supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another” (46).

Conversely, the conclusions of a man’s surveillance of a woman determines how he will treat that woman. As a consequence, the way that a woman appears before man will determine how men treat her. Berger maintains that, in order for women to gain some control over this process, they must contain and internalize this social structure. The part of a woman’s consciousness which is the surveyor treats the part which is surveyed in the same manner that she wishes to be treated by others. For Berger, the way a woman treats herself, in order to provide an example to others of how she would like to be treated, constitutes her presence. Consequentially, a woman can never act from a place of whole, undisturbed, and autonomous subjectivity. All of her actions are filtered through a gaze which interprets those actions as an indicator of both how she feels about herself, and how men should treat her. Only men can act from a place of autonomous subjectivity, without their actions being filtered through a gaze which is corollary to the one by which women feel ceaselessly impinged upon.

In other words, “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47). This fundamental gender economy determines not only how men and women interact, but how women relate to themselves. The surveyor that a woman carries around in her dual consciousness is a man, while she herself remains a woman. Here, Berger directly relates this discussion of gender to the larger concerns of his book, stating that the ultimate consequence of a woman’s split consciousness is that she “turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (47).

He tells us that women are the ever-recurring subject of one particular European oil-painting category: the nude. Through the nudes of European paintings, we can discover some of the criteria and conventions used both to see women, and to judge them as sights. He then quotes the story of Adam and Eve, as told in the book of Genesis, and remarks on two of the stories most striking elements. For one, Adam and Eve only conceived of their nudity as illicit nakedness after eating the apple. Nakedness as sin was thus a construction, invented by the eye of the beholder. Secondly, Eve—the woman—is blamed and punished by being made subordinate to Adam, the man: “In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God” (48).

Medieval conventions often illustrated the story of Adam and Eve in successive panels, as in a strip cartoon. During the Renaissance, this narrative convention disappeared, in favor of depictions of the singular moment of shame. Berger notes that, in many of these Renaissance paintings, the couple wears fig leaves to mitigate their nakedness, and their expressions of shame are not for the benefit of one another, but for the spectator. He cites an early sixteenth-century painting of the couple in order to exemplify this notion. He notes that, later, depictions of Adam and Eve morph into depictions of their shame as a kind of display. To exemplify this, he provides a reproduction of “The Couple” by Max Slevogt (1868-1932), as well as an underwear advertisement that was contemporary to his time.

He remarks that the advent of secular painting opened up the nude as a more widespread phenomenon. However, in all of them, the subject (a woman) is always depicted as someone who is conscious that they are under a gaze: “She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her” (50). As an example, he offers two different paintings of Susannah and the Elders. In one, the explicit theme of the painting is a naked woman being surveilled: the viewers join the Elders in spying on her. In the second, Susannah looks at herself in a mirror, joining the spectators in gazing at herself.

Berger then illuminates the fact that the mirror was often used within paintings to symbolize the vanity of the nude woman. He points out that this moralizing was hypocritical: A woman is painted nude for the pleasure of the spectator, but a mirror is put in her hand and the painting is titled “Vanity” in order to condemn her. She cannot partake in any of the pleasure that her likeness generates without being lambasted as vain. However, in his opinion, the ultimate function of the mirror was to convince women to treat themselves as sights.

In another example of female sexual objectification, paintings of The Judgment of Paris, (which in contemporary parlance is now known as a beauty contest), are presented to the viewer, and women are pitted against each other in the process of their shared sexual objectification. (Two examples of this kind of painting are re-printed in the book.)

Charles the Second’s commissioned painting of his mistress Nell Gwynne, which is also re-printed in the book, could easily be conventionally construed as a portrait of Venus and Cupid—with the naked woman passively looking at the spectator—but in actuality her nakedness is a sign of her submission to the king. Both the painting and the woman are objects that belong to him, and the painting, displayed before his guests, instantiates the woman as an owned object to be coveted by his guests.

Here, Berger contrasts these Western conventions regarding the depictions of naked women against the non-European traditions of Indian art, Persian art, African art, and pre-Columbian art. In those traditions, the nakedness of women is never so plainly submissive, and more likely to be depicted as a part of an active and reciprocal expression of sexual love between two people.

Berger then arrives at an important distinction by citing Kenneth Clark’s book The Nude. In it, Clark remarks that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art. The nude is a genre unconfined to fine art, with its own specific conventions that nonetheless derive from a certain tradition of Western art.

He then states that, in order to fully investigate the conventions of the nude, we must not only look at it in terms of art, but in terms of lived sexuality. He then explicates the distinction between nakedness and the nude even further. In his estimation, to be naked is to be oneself, while to be nude is “to be seen as naked by others and not recognized for oneself” (54). A naked body must be objectified in order to transform into a nude, and the sight of that body stimulates its use as an object. Nakedness reveals itself while “nudity is placed on display” (54). To be naked is to remove artifice, but to be exhibited as a nude is to have one’s body transformed into artifice. Therefore, “nudity is a form of dress” (54).

According to the European conventions of the nude, the spectator is presumed and assumed to be a fully-clothed male. He is the actual protagonist of the painting, who is also curiously never actually painted. Everything within the painting addresses him and exists for him.

In order to exemplify the above concept, Berger offers a case study of the painting called Venus, Cupid, Time, and Love, by Bronzino (1503-1572). He calls it, first and foremost, a painting of sexual provocation. The painting was sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the King of France. The pretense of the painting is a depiction of Cupid kissing Venus, but the way the woman’s body is arranged in the picture plane has nothing to do with their kiss. Instead, with her body explicitly on display, it becomes a visual delight designed to appeal to the king’s sexuality while simultaneously negating hers. Berger furthermore notes that the presence of hair on the body conventionally signifies sexual power and passion. The consequent absence of bodily hair in conventional female nudes contravenes feminine sexual agency and grants the clothed male spectator a monopoly on sexual passion.

He then compares the female nude figure depicted in La Grande Odalisque by Ingres (1780-1867) to a woman depicted in a contemporary “girlie magazine,” noting the striking similarities in the two women’s expressions. In each, the woman gazes at the spectator, presumed to be male, with contrived charm—offering herself up as a sight to be surveyed.

Berger then concedes that, sometimes, a painting does include a male lover. However, he quickly notes that the depicted woman’s attention is very rarely on that male lover. Instead, she often looks away from him or out of the painting “towards the one who considers himself her true lover—the spectator-owner” (56). He reveals that there was a special category of pornographic paintings, especially prolific in the eighteenth century, which featured couples in the act of making love. However, these paintings made it clear that the spectator-owner would in fantasy expel the other man, or, alternately, identify with him. He contrasts this convention against non-European tradition, which “provokes the notion of many couples making love” (56).

He remarks that almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is either literally or metaphorically frontal, and frames the sexual protagonist as the un-painted spectator and/or owner looking at and consuming the prostrate naked female form(s). For Berger, the absurdity of this male flattery reached its apotheosis in the public art of the nineteenth century. He provides a re-printing of Les Oréades by Bouguereau (1825-1905), to exemplify this convention. In it, a veritable cloud of dozens of naked, supine women floats in the air as three men, with backs turned to the spectator, watch them. He asserts that, while men of state and of business conducted their affairs under such paintings, they might look to the paintings if they ever found themselves bested. The images and ideology contained within such paintings would reaffirm their power and identity as men as a form of consolation.

In order to further develop his distinction between nakedness and the nude, Berger here introduces the fact that there are a few notable exceptions to the European tradition of the nude: “paintings of loved women, more or less naked” (57). He notes that, in these exceptions, “the painter’s personal vision of the particular women he is painting is so strong that it makes no allowance for the spectator” (57). The spectator can witness the relationship between the painter and the painted, but can do no more than that, as a consummate outsider. Due to the manner in which the painter includes his subject’s sexual agency within the very structure of the image, and the very expressions upon the woman’s face, the spectator cannot imagine himself as the person for whom she is naked. He therefore cannot transform her into a nude.

Berger here resists the urge to pit these exceptional paintings against traditional nudes in a simple nude/nakedness dichotomy. In order to do so, he expounds upon the sexual function of nakedness in lived reality. He remarks that the process of looking upon a naked lover is a consummately ordinary and marvelously simple one, which, crucially, provokes a very strong sense of relief. He posits that, due to the urgency and complexity of our feelings, we are prone to imagine a lover as mysterious and unique. The removal of clothes, however, relieves us, because it confirms that our lover is more like the rest of their sex than they are different. This kind of nakedness is therefore perceived as warm and friendly.

He also notes that the sight of a naked lover introduces a sense of banality that contravenes the sense of mystery that attends sexual desire. Our gaze shifts from the bits of the body left revealed by clothing to those anatomical parts normally covered by clothes. In so doing, our gaze confirms the manner in which the lover’s body conforms to the expected anatomy of their sex. They therefore become more of an ordinary body than an anxiety-producing mystery. He remarks that this highly ordinary process, “by promising the familiar, proverbial mechanism of sex, offers, at the same time, the possibility of the shared subjectivity of sex” (59). The loss of the mystery of the singular lover produces the possibility for shared mystery through the shared subjectivity of the sexual act.

From these propositions, Berger derives the conclusion that it is extremely difficult to produce a static image of sexual nakedness (as opposed to nudity). For him, nakedness is a process, rather than a singular state. A single image, therefore, cannot serve as a bridge between two subjective, imaginative states that is any way close to the process of sexual congress. If this image isolates a single moment within the sexual encounter, it will produce a chilling effect.

However, Berger then offers up to us an example of a painting that, exceptionally, successfully depicts the nakedness of which he speaks: Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat, by Rubens (1517-1640). Berger observes that, in this painting, we see Helene in the act of turning, with her fur coat about to fall from her shoulders. She will not remain as she is for more than a second. The painting thus contains time and the experience of the process of nakedness: It is easy to imagine the moments prior to the painted moment, in which she was totally naked. She can belong to several different moments simultaneously.

He asserts that Helene’s body confronts the viewer not as an objectified sight but as an experience. He believes this for several reasons. For starters, her tousled hair, the expression of her eyes, and the tenderness with which her skin is painted point toward Rubens’ experience. However, the more profound reason is a formal one. The way that her body is painted is anatomically impossible, which permits her body to become inconceivably dynamic: “Its coherence is no longer within itself but within the experience of the painter” (61). More specifically, this visual element, whose intentionality or lack thereof is immaterial to Berger, allows the upper and lower halves of the woman to rotate separately, and in opposite directions. Simultaneously, her sexual center is hidden by the dark fur coat and ensconced within the dark background of the picture plane. She thereby turns both around and within “the dark which has been made a metaphor for her sex” (61).

Berger then reveals a second condition that must be met in order for a painting to qualify as a depiction of nakedness, rather than a nude: an “element of banality which must be undisguised but not chilling” (61). For Berger, this quality distinguishes the lover from the voyeur. In the Rubens painting, Berger finds this quality in the “compulsive” mode in which Rubens paints the fat softness of Helene’s flesh: a mode which persistently breaks every convention dictating the idealized depiction of flesh and thereby presents the woman’s extraordinary specificity.

Berger then posits that the nude in European oil painting is usually understood as an admirable expression of the European humanist spirit. He notes that this spirit was inexorably linked to the development of individualism as an explicit philosophical tradition. However, he notes that the tradition itself contained an inherent contradiction which it itself could not resolve: “on the one hand the individualism of the artist, the thinker, the patron, the owner: on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities—the woman—treated as a thing or an abstraction” (62). For example, Durer believed that the ideal nude should be constructed by compositing discrete body parts from different bodies. He believed that this ideal would glorify Man. However, his proposed process displayed total indifference to who any one person actually was.

Berger then arrives at a key point of the chapter. This inherent contradiction within the tradition of European oil painting reveals that, while the nude purports to exult the individual, its entrenched conventions systematically objectified and therefore contravened the individuality and subjectivity of women. Furthermore, he asserts that this inequality is so deeply lodged within our culture that it continues to shape the consciousness of many women, who watch and surveil themselves and their own femininity as an extension of the male gaze which they feel is upon them at all times.

In modern art, the status of the nude is not as prominent as it once was. Too, artists such as Manet, whose famously subversive “Olympia” challenged the popular conventions, questioned the vaunted principles of the nude. He remarks that, due to this challenge, the nude was replaced by the “realism” of depictions of the prostitute, who became the hallmark woman of early avant-garde twentieth-century painting, while the tradition of the nude persisted in academic painting.

Berger observes that the ideology that formed the basis of the tradition of the nude are today expressed through more widely circulated media: advertising, journalism, and television. Through these mediums, certain aspects fundamental to the viewing of women persist. Images of women, designed to be viewed by men, still serve the same objectifying and dehumanizing purpose. In order to prove himself correct, Berger then invites the reader to select a traditional nude that depicts a woman, and then to mentally change that woman into a man through either imagination or drawing. He invites the reader to note the acute disturbance within assumptions of a likely viewer that such a transformation would produce.