# The Gaze, the Body and the World

Art History I · Iconography · https://tryals.app/learn/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world

## 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.

## Practice questions

8 of this lesson's 13 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Why does Berger describe the nude as a relation rather than a form?

A. The body is formally re-balanced by high art rather than merely being deprived of clothing
B. The genre evolved over time primarily to reflect changing economic relations to artistic patronage
C. The picture is composed for a viewer outside it, and that position is part of what the picture is
D. The artist's individual moral perspective determines how the depicted subject is addressed

**Answer:** C. The picture is composed for a viewer outside it, and that position is part of what the picture is

**Why:** Because the composition **includes a position outside itself**. The body is arranged towards a viewer, frequently acknowledges being seen, and that assumed viewer is part of the picture's structure. Clark described what is inside the frame; Berger pointed out that the frame is arranged for someone.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/why-does-berger-describe-the-nude-as-a-relation-rather-than-a-form

### 2. Which are conventions Berger identifies as visible in the pictures themselves?

A. The woman arranged towards a point outside the frame
B. A signature indicating the painter's intentions
C. A mirror by which she watches herself being looked at
D. The returned glance acknowledging the viewer

**Answer:** A. The woman arranged towards a point outside the frame; C. A mirror by which she watches herself being looked at; D. The returned glance acknowledging the viewer

**Why:** The first three are what makes the argument checkable rather than speculative: you can point at the mirror, the orientation and the glance. That is why it has held up better than readings requiring assumptions about what a painter privately intended.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/which-are-conventions-berger-identifies-as-visible-in-the-pictures

### 3. Sort each statement by whether it belongs to the SUBLIME or the PICTURESQUE.

**Answer:**

- The sublime: Pleasurable terror before the vast and overwhelming, Mountains, storms and precipices, Formulated by Burke in 1757
- The picturesque: Land judged by whether it would compose well as a picture, Irregular, varied scenery with agreeable roughness, The word means fit to be made into a picture

**Why:** The picturesque is the stranger of the two once stated plainly: it assesses **land** by pictorial criteria, reversing the expected relation in which a painting represents a place. Tourists carried tinted glasses to view scenery as if already painted, which is the idea taken to its logical end.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/sort-each-statement-by-whether-it-belongs-to-the-sublime-or-the

### 4. Complete the account of the gaze and the landscape.

**Answer:** Clark distinguished the naked from the **nude**, a distinction Berger turned into a question about who is **looking**. Mulvey developed the parallel argument for **cinema**. The eighteenth-century category describing land as fit to be made into a picture is the **picturesque**.

**Why:** The third blank is the one most often got wrong in essays. Mulvey's essay is about **narrative cinema** and its mechanisms are cinematic — camera position, editing, the structure of looking over time — so applying it to painting requires an argument rather than a citation.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/complete-the-account-of-the-gaze-and-the-landscape

### 5. The male gaze is a historical convention of address rather than an individual moral failing. What follows from this distinction when an art historian analyses an eighteenth-century canvas?

A. She evaluates the personal moral intentions of the painter
B. She critiques the structural relation built into the work
C. She treats the visual convention as a universal rule of art
D. She dismisses the social relation between patron and viewer

**Answer:** B. She critiques the structural relation built into the work

**Why:** Confusing structural conventions with personal ethics reduces institutional analysis to biography. Seeing the gaze as universal overlooks historical specificity, whilst dismissing social relations ignores the spectator whom the canvas was constructed to address.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/the-male-gaze-is-a-historical-convention-of-address-rather-than-an

### 6. In what year did Berger's Ways of Seeing appear?

**Answer:** 1972 (within ±2)

**Why:** **1972**, as a four-part BBC series and then a book. The television form matters: the argument reached an audience far beyond art history, which is a large part of why "the male gaze" entered general usage.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/in-what-year-did-bergers-ways-of-seeing-appear

### 7. Arrange the steps of Berger's argument in order.

**Answer:**

1. The European oil nude is overwhelmingly a woman painted by a man
2. The picture is composed for a viewer standing outside it
3. That viewer is assumed to be male
4. The depicted woman is shown watching herself being looked at
5. The convention survives into modern advertising

**Why:** The last step is what took the argument beyond art history. Berger's claim is that the convention outlived the genre that produced it and continues in publicity imagery, which is why the book is read by people who never look at oil paintings.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/arrange-the-steps-of-bergers-argument-in-order

### 8. Arrange these contributions in order of publication.

**Answer:**

1. Burke on the sublime (1757)
2. Clark, The Nude (1956)
3. Nochlin asks why there have been no great women artists (1971)
4. Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
5. Mulvey on visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975)

**Why:** The compression at the end is the point: Nochlin, Berger and Mulvey appear within four years, and between them reframed who art history is about, who it is addressed to, and how the address works. Few disciplines change their central questions that fast.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-gaze-the-body-and-the-world/arrange-these-contributions-in-order-of-publication