Are women in art pandering to the male gaze?

What is the impression you gather when you look at art? That 90% women are fair-skinned? That they rarely take decisions on their own, especially in face of crisis? That most of choose romantic, caring, nurturing roles while leaving their often older and stronger male partners to take on leadership and combatting evil roles? Or that their motherhood seems the most and often even only celebratory aspect about them?

True there are exceptions, but it is the elephant in the room that has to be addressed says Jayashree Patankar an artist who has revived the almost extinct Chitra kathi style of painting'.“Even a cursory look look at the representation of women and specifically the female body in art gives us perspective on the status of women and their status in society, on how the male gaze fashions our ideas of them and most importantly why society over the ages continues to box them into twin boxes of deification and reification,” she underlines and adds, “This has as much to do with patriarchal society as it is to do with a larger number of male artists compared to women.”

Differing from Patankar, Ahmedabad based Asha Mandapa who heads the Institute of Design Expression Art and Learning (IDEAL) says using too broad a brush stroke for all of the art world would be wrong. “The Renaissance artists and old masters certainly didn't do that,” she avers and adds, “Qualities of beauty, grace, sorrow etc, do lend themselves more naturally to feminine characteristics and form.” Not one for censorship even on gender lines she adds, “Artistic expression is a licence the artist must be allowed to enjoy.” According to her real art does not objectify. “Contrived Art which seeks to shock or attract reaction does so.”

She cites examples that stand out as an exception to stereotypical depictions of women and feminity. “A wonderful painting by Delacroix which shows the woman raising the flag of liberty in a war-ravaged landscape comes to mind. The female form is fluid, graceful and to me, lends itself naturally to all the attributes of compassion, beauty etc. Look at the Pieta, for example. It has sorrow, resignation exquisitely portrayed. The helplessness, expressed in that upturned hand.. the body of the dead Christ, across her lap has a beautifully sculpted, masculine body... strong and yet broken.” She also cites Amruta Shergill (“Look at the helplessness of the young girl, in the Red Charpoy”) and Vrindavan Solanki s work (Here men and women are equals. Look at his Silent Conversations series which shows equally strong, courageous and graceful men and women.”) She observes: “Whether gender stereotypes manifest in someone's work depends on the artist and what they set out to portray. One shouldn't discount the role of the interpretation of the viewer that also stereotypes art in its own way. The artist will tell his story as s/he sees it. That's her/his prerogative.”

Patankar also feels that the 'progressive liberal left' should not get caught in the same traps and boxes it accuses the right of. “Not all women who choose to live within the traditional paradigm are looking to be saved. And not all that is traditional is necessarily bad.,” she says and gives her own example. “My husband and in-laws have been very supportive of my work all through. Whenever I was engrossed in work, my husband gladly took on the reins of the house and let me be.” According to her, “Taking extreme stands is wrong for the Right yes, but it is so for the Left too.”

Mandapa brings up Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653). “One of the greatest women in art during her lifetime, she focussed on progressive ideas about women that were far ahead of her times,” she says and adds, “Events in her life, were expressed starkly in her work and forever changed her work. her rape, the court’s decision, the lack of help from women in her life, and the experience of the trial itself. Her work then focused on imagery of solidarity between women, powerful women, and graphic depictions that served as a catharsis for her. Like Marian North says, many of her paintings of strong women are thought to resemble Artemisia herself.”

In a research paper from the catalogue of her exhibition, "Orazio e Artemisia Gentileschi" in Rome 18 years ago, Judith W Mann critiques feminist opinion of Artemisia, finding that old stereotypes of Artemisia as sexually immoral have been replaced by newer ones established in feminist readings of Artemisia's paintings. “Without denying that sex and gender can offer valid interpretive strategies for the investigation of Artemisia's art, we may wonder whether the application of gendered readings has created too narrow an expectation,” she says and adds, “Underpinning Garrard's monograph, and reiterated in a limited way by R. Ward Bissell in his catalogue raisonné, are certain presumptions: that Artemisia's full creative power emerged only in the depiction of strong, assertive women, that she would not engage in conventional religious imagery such as the Madonna and Child or a Virgin who responds with submission to the Annunciation, and that she refused to yield her personal interpretation to suit the tastes of her presumable male clientele. This stereotype has had the doubly restricting effect of causing scholars to question the attribution of pictures that do not conform to the model, and to value less highly those that do not fit the mold.”

While speaking about the portrayal of women in art, especially by male artists which often panders to the male gaze, poet, art critic, cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote admits: “There is a strong current within Western and Western-style figurative art that has, historically, objectified the female body, and much of that art is certainly by male artists. Rubens’ voluptuous, fleshy women, Ingres’ women bathers with their expanses of exposed flesh, Klimt’s women as erotic, decorative, dangerous presences.”

But he adds, “At the same time, there are very complex moments even within that tradition when the woman as subject of art resists the male gaze. I think of Bonnard’s many portraits of his wife in the bathtub, in which the female body refuses to be simply an object of erotic delectation. Or there are Egon Schiele’s women, rendered in sharp, spiky, electric lines, emphatic in themselves. There are Käthe Kollwitz’s robust, elegiac figures of mourning women. And there is, of course, the entire tradition of Indian sculpture, in which the voluptuary and erotic are not simply subordinated to the male gaze, and where the figures of goddesses, apsaras, river spirits and yakshis inspire sublime awe rather than being pawns of the male gaze.”

On objectification being passed off as artistic expression, he draws a sharp line between the two. “Artistic expression, as it relates to the representation of the female body and the relations between the genders, would benefit from being attentive to the history of the art, and how it has negotiated between objectifying women and acknowledging their autonomy. A naïve objectification of the female body is not acceptable today,” he says and cites an example of his own favourite painting/sculpture depicting women: “The Love Letter’, by the great 17th-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. It is one of my favourite paintings and shows two women, a young woman with a lute, and her maid, who has brought her a letter. The painting has a raised stage curtain painted into it, and the entire scene is dramatic, not only because of the romantic resonance of the moment, but also because of the complex relationship between the women, which leavens their power asymmetry with complicity, mischief, and pleasure. But it is not a performance for anyone. It is a performance that deliberately ignores the audience. The two women are more sakhis than employer and employee, and they are looking at one another, not out at a viewer. Their gazes intersect with one another, and are not staged for the benefit of the male gaze, really.”

But doesn't a depiction of women (and to that extent men too) in art take its cue from social gender stereotypes? Like women are made to look beautiful, nurturing and compassionate as opposed to men who are often assigned attributes like valour, strength & leadership. Like Mandapa Hoskote too strongly feels this is not something that can be associated with serious art. “Such stereotypes are integral, however, to romanticised popular art in certain periods, and certainly to propaganda art – especially the racist and gender-typed art of the Nazi State, which presented women as baby-making machines and men as war machines, all rendered in deceptively appealing, monumentalized, faux-heroic manner. Any visual representation that deals in stereotypes is not art,” says Hoskote, “It is either advertising or propaganda, and in some periods and places, it is difficult to tell the two apart!”

Ahem!