Gender differences
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.
Men and women did not receive equal opportunities in artistic training from at least the Renaissance until the middle of the nineteenth century. Women artists were not allowed access to nude models and could not participate in this part of the arts education. During this period, study of the nude figure was something all male artists were expected to go through to become an artist of worth and to be able to depict historical subjects.
Academic art history tends to ignore the sexuality of the male nude, speaking instead of form and composition.
For much of history, nude men represented martyrs and warriors, emphasizing an active role rather than the passive one assigned to women in art. Alice Neel and Lucian Freud painted the modern male nude in the classic reclining pose, with the genitals prominently displayed. Sylvia Sleigh painted versions of classic works with the genders reversed.
Until the 1960s, art history and criticism rarely reflected anything other than the male point of view. The feminist art movement began to change this, but one of the first widely known statements of the political messages in nudity was made in 1972 by the art critic John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, he argued that female nudes reflected and reinforced the prevailing power relationship between females portrayed in art and the predominantly male audience. A year later Laura Mulvey wrote Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in which she applied to film theory the concept of the male gaze, asserting that all nudes are inherently voyeuristic.
The feminist art movement was aimed at giving women the opportunity to have their art reach the same level of notoriety and respect that men's art received. The idea that women are intellectually inferior to men came from Aristotelian ideology and was heavily depended on during the Renaissance. It was believed by Aristotle that during the process of procreation, men were the driving force. They held all creative power while women were the receivers. Women's only role in reproduction was to provide the material and act as a vessel. This idea carried over into the image of the artist and the nude in art. The artist was seen specifically as a white male, and he was the only one who held the innate talent and creativity to be a successful professional artist. This belief system was prevalent in nude art. Women were depicted as passive, and they did not possess any control over their image. The female nude during the Renaissance was an image created by the male gaze.
In Jill Fields' article "Frontiers in Feminist Art History", Fields examines the feminist art movement and its assessment of female nude imagery. She considers how the image of the female nude was created and how the feminist art history movement attempted to change the way the image of the female nude was represented. Derived from the Renaissance ideal of feminine beauty, the image of the female body was created by men and for a male audience. In paintings like Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World and François Boucher's Reclining Girl, women are depicted with open legs, implying that they are to be passive and an object to be used. In A. W. Eaton's essay "What's Wrong with the (Female) Nude? A Feminist Perspective on Art and Pornography", she discusses multiple ways in which the art of the female nude objectifies women. She considers how male nudes are both less common and represented as active and heroic, whereas female nudes are significantly more prevalent and represent women as passive, vulnerable, sexual objects. Eaton argues that the depiction of the female nude eroticizes the traditional gender hierarchy and contributes to systemic sex/gender inequality socially and psychologically. The feminist art history movement has aimed to change the way this image is perceived. The female nude has become less of an icon in Western art since the 1990s, but this decline in importance did not stop members of the feminist art movement from incorporating things like the "central core" image. This way of representing the nude female figure in art was focused on the fact that women were in control of their own image. The central image was focused on vulva-related symbols. By incorporating new images and symbols into the female nude image in Western art, the feminist art history movement continues to try and dismantle the male-dominated art world.
More recent discussion of the appropriateness of certain artworks has emerged in the context of the Me Too movement.
Female nudes have long been informed by the male gaze, and men's desires of the nudity of women. Feminist criticism has targeted female nudes, informed by the male gaze, for nearly a century. However, there are some artists who have turned this concept on its head, and have, as a result, distilled the criticisms embodied within the male gaze nude depictions of women. Artists have instilled the female gaze in the nudes they create. Rather than women being the object of men's desires, some artists have challenged traditional narratives of women, depicting them contrastingly as being non-sexualised.
Additionally, artists have implemented the queer gaze into art, and specifically nude art, which also challenges the traditional male gaze nude artwork.
Helen Beard creates colourful and bright artwork in different mediums, from paintings, to needlepoint, to sculptures, depicting close ups of women in explicit, pornographic sexual positions. Her pieces embody women feeling pleasured by their bodies, which contradicts the traditional male gaze nudes of women previously.
Lucy Liu has created a collection, entitled 'SHUNGA,' a Japanese term meaning erotic art. Liu's subject matter involves close up images of lesbian women, entwined within each other and bed sheets.
Maggi Hambling recently commemorated the British feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, by creating A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, which uses a nude female figure to represent the spirit of Wollstonecraft's feminism. This has caused great deals of controversy, with people questioning why Hambling chose to depict Wollstonecraft in nude form. However, Hambling has argued that her reasoning is to depict Wollstonecraft as a spirit and a representation of every woman.
Louis Fratino has redefined the male gaze and how queer men and women are represented in nude art. His pieces explore queer sexuality in both everyday and erotic formats.
Lisa Yuskavage's artwork has been included in The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women exhibition in 2009. Her work includes nude depictions of women, which illustrates the women as being incapable of caring what others think of them because of their own bodily discomfort, which does not make them subjected to the male gaze.
Suzanne Valadon painted non-sexualised, not overly-erotic nude depictions of women. The art work does not depict women from the traditional male gaze standpoint, and Valadon was one of the only women artists to paint such subject matter, in such a way, in the first half of the 20th century.
The nude image in art has affected women of color in a different way than it has white women, according to Charmaine Nelson. The different depictions of the nude in art has not only instituted a system of controlling the image of women but it has put women of color in a place of other. The intersection of their identities, as Nelson asserts, creates a "doubly fetishized black female body". Women of color are not represented to the degree that white women are in nude art from the Renaissance to the 1990s, and when they are represented it is in a different way than white women. The Renaissance ideal of female beauty did not include black women. White women were represented as a sexual image, and they were the ideal sexual image for men during the Renaissance. White women, in most major works before the 20th century, did not have pubic hair. Black women normally did, and this created their image in an animalistic sexual way. While the white women's image became one of innocence and the idealized, black women were continually overtly sexualized, she adds.
