Berger's Reversal
Kenneth Clark's The Nude distinguished the naked from the nude:
- naked: a body simply deprived of clothes.
- nude: a body re-formed and balanced by art.
John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) reframed this debate around who is looking. His key points include:
- The subject is almost always a woman, painted by a man for a male buyer.
- The composition assumes a male spectator standing outside the canvas.
- The depicted figure displays an active awareness of being watched.
Berger transformed the nude from an artistic form into a social relation.
Laura Mulvey expanded this in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". She defined the male gaze in film through camera movement and editing.
This reveals a widespread convention of address. It names a structural technique rather than a universal rule for all paintings.
Common pitfall: treating "the male gaze" as an accusation against individual artists. It is a historical convention of address, not a personal moral failure.
Nature and Landscape
Landscape paintings also depend on their intended audience. In the eighteenth century, two main categories emerged:
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| the sublime (Burke, 1757) | Pleasurable terror before the vast and overwhelming |
| the picturesque | Land judged by its fitness to become a picture |
Landscape art frequently functions as a record of property and control. Berger demonstrated this in his analysis of Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews.
The couple sit beside their vast estate. The land itself is the painting's true subject.
A genre that seems to celebrate raw nature often celebrates legal ownership instead.