Critical studies

  Feminism talk  

We were asked to find two separate pieces of art and discus, one piece created from the male gaze dealing with the female body and one piece contrasting by a female artist. This post is about art dealing with the female body from the male gaze.

When looking at artists using the female from the male gaze it is more difficult to find a modern piece by a male artist, this is because of the societal changes brought around by thee feminist movement through years of protests and such. Even if such art is still being produced as a society we've made a kind of unanimous decision that we don't allow space for in our lives or viewing, there's an overshadowing idea that I believe for the most part would make it particularly uncomfortable for anybody trying to make such art. There are obviously female artists exploring this idea through art, but that's a completely different idea of taking back that space and power. 

Although when looking at pieces from the past that explore the female form from the male gaze its a little more complex. Its important to remember the context of the time period a piece comes from and not shove todays ideas onto it to quickly, yes, its good to look at a piece from a modern viewpoint but you must first have this understanding of the societal norms and influences behind a piece. When looking at certain topics like the female and the male gaze in past times I find it more difficult to write a small piece exploring one work because of this huge context and all this so instead I've decided to briefly look at an artists process; Pablo Picasso and his models. 

When looking at Picassos work in an overview its clear to see that the female was his main point of focus throughout his artistic career with a large portion of his female sitters becoming girlfriends, wife's or mistresses. When looking at Picasso and society's views on females at the time we should remember that Pablo Picasso lived 1881- 1973, the first wave feminist movement with the suffragettes wasn't until 1903, and the second wave movement on equality wasn't until 1960, so he would have been brought up in a society un like ours, that was more constricting  and outwardly discriminative towards women. From my brief over view into him and his models, I was able to find at least 8 of the sitters from his pieces that were in some kind of relationship with him.

Fernade Oliver, Germaine Pichot, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Eve Gouel, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque.  

I haven't done extensive research into his relationships with all these women but from the general information I've read he had a pattern with his models, one that for the time was probably seen as pretty normal and ok but we can see clearly now that it was pretty cruel and exploitive on the women. A woman would catch his eye, he'd get her to become his model, start a romantic relationship of some kind with them, use them to create wonderfully successful pieces, then a different woman would catch his eye. A few other things to note on his relationships with his models, most of the time one relationship wouldn't have ended before the next started,  he had children he refused to see from past models and even scouted one 17 year old model from a shop whilst himself being 45 that he then proceeded to have a relationship with. I guess the way he treated these women was not out of the blue for his era but the way he scouted and used for his own artistic gain is something we'd definitely consider exploitive by todays standards.