2 - Representational Relationships Between Men and Women in Art

Ways of Seeing

In chapter three of Ways of Seeing, John Berger makes the point that women in art have been treated in various ways throughout the course of history. This ever-changing role of women is altered directly by the artists, who are often men, shows a shift in the way that women and men interact with one another throughout the course of artistic history.

In early paintings, women in art presented an image of themselves that was to be shown off to the world, but should not reveal too much of the actual person behind the image.

"She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others... is of crucial importance for what is normally though 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" (Ways of Seeing, 46). 

Here Berger is implying that the woman has herself become an image - that she is less of a person and more of an object in society. This implies that the relationship, as seen by Berger, between men and women is one where the men live life and women act as mannequins around them who design themselves to look as presentable as possible.

However, this role, according to Berger, began to shift from a positive light where painters where attempting to show off the beauty of women around them into a less kind light where artwork showed off the dark side of attempting to improve yourself only for those around you.

"The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman... You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure" (Ways of Seeing, 51)

Here I would like to break from this train of thought and make the point that it is likely that the painter himself has felt a sort of dismissal from women in his life - he may have been disillusioned in his own life by vanity in someone he cared for or by his inability to connect to the opposite sex. In his attempt to capture that emotion in his mind, he painted a scene of how he felt at the time about women around him.

Of course this is just speculation, and does not dismiss John Bergers argument that women began to be painted in less flattering lights as the age of artwork progressed. However, as artwork became more and more mainstream, it is likely that there were more artists in the world who felt a similar lack of companionship in their lives. Because many painters were male at this time in history, it is natural that they would represent this lonely bitterness against the female sex.

So when Berger says that the painter of Vanity has commited some moral attrocity by his representation of women in his artwork, I am forced to wonder if perhaps he is reading into the situation in a direction that the artist had not intended.

However, if we did know the context, we would (According to Ways of Seeing, chapter 1) be robbing the image of its ability to allow viewers to draw their own conclusions. As such, this change in the relationship between men and women in artwork over the years is left to speculation.