Sarah Bratton Bryan Wheeler ARTS1301 – Art Appreciation 23 September 2012 A Females Beauty in “Grande Odalisque” The artwork of French Artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres titled “Grande Odalisque” was painted on an oil canvas in 1814. On close examination it is easy to see many elements and principles of art and feminist mode of analysis, which helps present the beauty of a female body. Ingres’ portrays several elements and principles of art in his painting of a nude female to display his desire towards a female’s beauty. When examining his artwork, the viewer is directly drawn to the woman’s long back. This is the focal point of the artwork, since it is a lighter shade than the rest of the image, and it is the biggest proportion to the piece.
It classifies a different approach to painting. Neoclassicism pertains mainly to the Greek and Roman era. Neoclassicism is the preceding Rococo style because the women are no longer seen cavorting like mermaids or even luxuriously dressed, similar to the Duchess of Polignac. In many of the Neoclassicism paintings women are posing in the nude rather than being seen for their luxurious living styles. In the painting by Jacques Louis David, The Emperor Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, 1812 is a formal looking painting with dark colors and the painting is in focus unlike the Impressionism painting technique.
John writes about how woman were painted as objects and how that changed in time. He also talks about the difference between a woman being naked and nude. After reading chapter three I believe that being nude was a form of art where woman were painted as objects and only for the pleasure of the spectator, while women painted naked was a form of art where women were seen as lovers, and not just as an object. When we think of naked we think of lust and being vulnerable. In a painting of a women the man sees her and imagines what he is capable of doing to her even if is not.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The first article is titled “ Nudity in the Twentieth Century.” In this article Linda Swanson shows that the “nude” has become an enduring genre of representational art, especially in painting, sculpture, and photography. The second article is “The Art of Being Naked” by Marc Angler. In this article he explores the various forms of nudity in art ranging from painting to film. The last article is “The Social Context of Art” by Jean Creedy.
Being naked means being without any clothes that you put on, but being nude means that you become your own clothes. Berger points out that nude women were the main subject in one category of oil painting. The nude reveals how women have been seen and judged. The first nude painting was the story of Adam and Eve. For Berger, there are two important elements to this story.
In both Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) and Vasily Kandinsky’s Sketch I for “Composition VII” the artists use similar techniques/styles in color, but use different techniques when it comes to brushstroke, line, and spacing. Both are outstanding works of art that reflect not only modernism but also the artistic movements that encompass them. They are also more different than alike. Matisse and Kandinsky both use a vibrant color pallet in their paintings, with rich primary colors, and some hints of other rich secondary (and a few tertiary) colors. The colors are used to show different forms and they draw the eye around the paintings.
This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object. The male gaze[4] occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance. [5] The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film, as well as the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy The Female Gaze is a Gaze trope about the way a work is presented as from a female perspective or reflects female attitudes, either because of the creator's gender or because it is aimed at a female audience.
The first time we see Dil in the film, her make-up, costume and behaviors conform to the female stereotypes. Her performance of femininity, way of singing and dancing shows that she is simply a woman, while she even gives Fergus and the male audience a visual pleasure. Jude acts like a man and she clearly has more masculine character. The act when she changes her clothes and hair in order to change her identity shows that femininity can be
Eve's embarrassment is retained in late secular art with the woman's awareness for the fact that she in being gazed at. And as Berger puts it: she is not naked for herself; she is naked as the viewer sees her. Berger also notes the hypocrisy of using the mirror to represent women's vanity – first we paint a naked woman for our own pleasure of watching her, and then we place a mirror in her hand and criticize her for enjoying her own figure. In the representations of Greek Mythology Paris the young man has to decide which of the gods is the prettier, and thus their appearance becomes a contest (the ancestor of the beauty pageant). Winning the contest means surrendering to the viewer's gaze.
Often, they are “perceived to represent universal concepts, emotions, and meanings.” (36) From the reading, we notice how pictures, paintings, sculptures, and photographs are relevant but modified from Madonna, Virgin Child, Migrant Mother, Marilyn Diptych, Benetton ad, Madonna’s combination the Madonna and Marilyn Monroe, Behold My Heart Painting, to the sculpture of Britney Spears in the nude. The common denominator here are representation of mother and child (minus Madonna’s combination of “the religious iconography of the Madonna and the sexual iconography of Marilyn Monroe”). We see that the iconic image connotes over time and meanings do change by the viewers