The One With Appearance
“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure” (Berger, Ways of Seeing).
I'm horrible at looking at art in museums. I'm much more touch-and-go oriented where I can feel the object I'm looking at, get a sense of where it might have been from and why it was made. One of my favorite museums of all time happens to be the Eastern State Penitentiary. Yeah, it's an actual museum. I reccomend going there to learn a little chunk of history -- but I digress. This is about the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the two and a half hours I spent there getting lost in modern art. I went with my best friend who is an art major and can navigate the place like the back of his hand. I'm definitely glad he went with me, otherwise I would have been less inclined to stop and smell the metaphorical paint roses.
I may not be cut out for art museums, but boy, am I a fan of looking at feminism.
I may not be cut out for art museums, but boy, am I a fan of looking at feminism.
That right there is the Portrait of Lady Eden by John Singer Sargent. Easily one of my favorite paintings to catch my eye because of how stunning she was -- but then something hit me. My absolute favorite chapter dealt with a line that men act in art while women appear (Berger, Ways of Seeing). This quote stuck out to me like a sore thumb, drawing out my initial mission in said museum. I wanted to see if this were true. Considering I never looked at art in that kind of light, my best friend and I circled around the place, picking out certain paintings that caught our eye among the dozens framed in various rooms. Lady Eden was one I saw immediately only because of the fact that she was a woman and, lo and behold, she was acting. Arguable people could say she was appearing, but I was floored to find that while her face appears passive, she's playing cards. To me, I'd say that she was acting, perhaps not as strongly as these guys in the painting, Interior of a Tavern, but acting nonetheless.
“To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women is developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself" (Berger, Ways of Seeing).
But it isn't actual movement, not really. She is by herself in a small room, whereas these men are together, packed in a tavern. There are no beautiful lights to fixate us on their appearances; they are simply men doing things at a bar. They smoke, they play cards like Lady Eden, they converse -- they are human. Women are never just human. Supernatural beings set on display to be looked at, and it has been like that for centuries. Men are always painted in order to look larger than life for their accomplishments (look at Napoleon) and they have a purpose to their being painted; women have a purpose to be seen, and to always be seen. Berger wrote, "From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman" (Berger, Ways of Seeing).
Here you can see the nudity on the females and the clothing just on the males. Nudity, I noticed, is very common for the female form, but you rarely see a man naked in paintings that aren't children or cupids or supernatural beings like angels. Otherwise, male humans are very much covered up and very much treated differently than the opposite gender. These two paintings were called The Thorny Path and The Large Bathers.
Here you can see the nudity on the females and the clothing just on the males. Nudity, I noticed, is very common for the female form, but you rarely see a man naked in paintings that aren't children or cupids or supernatural beings like angels. Otherwise, male humans are very much covered up and very much treated differently than the opposite gender. These two paintings were called The Thorny Path and The Large Bathers.
While I was walking, my best friend pointed out two paintings back to back. (Apparently my phone didn't save what they were called, but if I can update and figure out what paintings they were, I'll throw it up here.) It exemplified what I was searching for exactly, and I found it interesting that they were sitting side by side. Here a man is playing an instrument. He is acting. A woman right near him is simply gazing ahead with her shoulders exposed. She, obviously, is appearing. John Berger makes a point to overexert the notion that women appear because the world is run by men and therefore (while not his actual opinion) men like to look and women and women are meant to be looked upon as objects in media outlets. "She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight" (Berger, Ways of Seeing).
Here are some other paintings I totally adored. In Order: Woman With a Guitar and At the Moulin Rouge.
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Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1973.
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Works Cited
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1973.
Click to comment.