men dream of women women dream of themselves being dreamt of men look at women women watch themselves being looked at [Music] women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look behind every glance is a judgment some times the glance they meet is their own reflected back from a real [Music] mirror e [Music] a woman is always accompanied except when quite alone perhaps even then by her own image of herself while she is walking across a room or Weeping at the death of her father she cannot avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping from earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually she has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others and particularly how she appears to men is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life [Music] a woman in the culture of privileged Europeans is first and foremost a site to be looked at what kind of site is revealed in the average European oil painting there were portraits of women as the were port of men but in one category of painting women were the principal ever recurring subject that category was the nude in the nudes of European painting we can discover some of the criteria and conventions by which women were judged we can see how women were seen what then is a nude in his book on the nude Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes the nude according to him is a form of art I would put it differently to be naked is to be oneself to be nuded is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself a nude has to be seen as an object in order to be Ann newed in the European an oil painting nakedness is not taken for granted as in archaic art nakedness is a sight for those who are dressed that is why Mana is painting which really marks the end of the period I'm considering is so profound a comment on all the works which preceded it The Story begins with the story of Adam and Eve As Told in Genesis and when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise she took of the fruit thereof and did eat and she gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat and the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked and the Lord God called unto the man and said unto him where art thou and he said I heard thy voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself unto the woman God said I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception in sorrow Thou shalt bring forth children and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee two things are striking about this story they become aware of being naked because as a result of eating the Apple each sees the other differently nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder the second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man in relation to the woman the man becomes the agent of God in medieval art the story is often Illustrated scene following scene as in a strip cartoon during the Renaissance The Narrative sequence disappears and the single moment which is nearly always depicted is the moment of Shame the couple wear fig leaves or make a modest gesture with their hands but now their shame is not so much in relation to one another as to The Spectator it is the spectators looking which shames them later as painting became more secular many other subjects offered the opportunity of painting nudes but always in the European tradition the nude implies an awareness of being seen by The Spectator they are not naked as they are they are naked as you see them often as with a favorite subject of Susanna and the elders this is the actual theme of the picture we join the elders to spy on her she looks back at us looking at her sometimes the woman Susanna looks at herself in a mirror picturing to herself how men see her she sees herself first and foremost as a sight which means a sight for men thus the mirror became a symbol of the vanity of women yet the male hypocrisy in this is blatant you paint a naked woman because you enjoy looking at her you put a mirror in her hand and you call the painting vanity thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you have depicted Ed for your own pleasure and thus incidentally repeating the biblical example by blaming the woman the Judgment of Paris was another favorite mythological subject with the same inwr idea of men looking at naked women and judging them Paris Awards the Apple to the woman he finds most beautiful Beauty in this context is bound to become competitive the Judgment of Paris is transformed into the beauty contest Aesthetics when applied to women are not as disinterested as the word beauty might suggest I don't want to deny the crucial part that seeing plays in sexuality but there's a great difference between being seen as oneself naked or seeing another in that way and a body being put on display to be naked is to be without disguise to be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin the hairs of One's Own body turned into a disguise a disguise which cannot be discarded amongst the tens of thousands of European oil paintings of nudes there are perhaps 20 or 30 exceptions paintings in which the artist has seen the woman revealed as herself this rubins this rembrand this George deur these paintings are as personal as love poems and their character is quite distinctive most nudes in oil paintings have been lined up by their painters for the pleasure of the male spectator owner who will assess and judge them as sites their nudity is another form of dress they are condemned to never being naked with their clothes off they are as formal as with their clothes on those who are not judged beautiful are not beautiful those who are are given the prize the prize is to be owned that is to say to be available Charles II commissioned this secret painting from leel it's like hundreds of others it might be Venus and Cupid but in fact it was a portrait of one of his mistresses is n Gwinn it shows her passively looking at The Spectator staring at her naked her nakedness is not an expression of her own feelings it is only a sign of her submission to his demand the painting when he shows it to others demonstrates this submission his guests envy him by contrast in another tradition nakedness is a celebration of active sexual love as between two people the woman as active as the man the actions of each absorb the other in oil painting the second person or the second person who matters is the stranger looking at the picture compare the expression of these two women one the model for what is considered a masterpiece by Ang and the other an ill-paid model for a photograph in a girly magazine or these two just the expression the look what do you see it seems to me that in each pair the expression is remarkably similar and that it is an expression of responding with calculated charm to the man whom she knows is looking at her although she doesn't know him it is true that sometimes a painting includes a male lover but the woman's attention is is very rarely directed towards him she looks away from him or she looks out of the picture towards he who considers himself her true lover The Spectator owner this painting was sent as a present from the Grand Duke of Florence to the king of France the boy kneeling on the cushion and kissing the woman is Cupid she is Venus but the way her body is arranged has nothing to do with that kissing her body is arranged in the way it is to display it to the man looking at the picture the picture is made to appeal to his sexuality it has nothing to do with her sexuality the convention of not painting the hair on a woman's body helps towards the same end hair is associated with sexual power with passion the woman sexual passion needs to be minimized so that the spectator may feel that he has the Monopoly of such passion there were paintings which depicted male lovers these did exist but they were mostly private semi- pornograph graic pictures in most paintings which were painted to be seen rather than hidden the only rival to the male spectator is a cupid and how extraordinary it is that the pictorial symbol of passion was a small boy for a similar reason women in the European art of the oil painting are seldom shown dancing they have to be shown languid exhibiting a minimum of energy they are there to feed an appetite not to have any of their own the appetite was theoretically gargantuan the absurdity of this male flattery although it was not seen as absurd then reached its peak in the public academic art of the 19th century Prime Ministers discussed under paintings like this when one of them felt he had been outwitted he looked up for consolation the nude in European oil painting is usually presented as an ideal subject it is said to be an expression of the European humanist spirit I don't want to reject entirely the truth of this but I've tried to add to it starting off from a different Viewpoint Dura who believed in the ideal nude thought that this ideal could be constructed by taking the shoulders of one body the hands of another the breasts of another and so on was this humanist idealism or was it the result of an indifference to who any one person really was do these paintings celebrate as we're normally taught The Women Within them or the male voer is there sexuality within the frame or in front of it I showed the program as you have seen it up till now to five women it began to seem absurd that the only images you were seeing were of women silent mute so I showed it to them and asked them to comment to comment not so much on the program but rather on the questions raised by it above all on the question of how men see women or have seen them in the past and how this influences the way women see themselves today we have an image of course we all have an image of ourselves and it's a visual image uh but I wonder how much this sort of classical European painting has shaped that image in my own case I find it quite impossible when I look at the paintings that you show in your film I can't take them seriously I cannot identify with them because they are so immensely exaggerated always you know they fasten on to some secondary sexual characteristic you all these enormous breasts and sort of great big beasting bottoms you know and those huge things like that and they just aren't real whereas with photographs um you you can you can that is potentially that's possibly me although it probably isn't but these these nearly all the paintings you have shown um are what is called idealized um and therefore they are to me very unreal in connection with with any deep down image that I might have of myself and in connection with any deep down pleasure that I might have in looking at another female body they don't give me that kind of pleasure at all can admire them as painting but they are they they don't mean human beings to me um the image that I compare myself with is the photograph because it's with photographs that I've been encouraged to think of myself in this way it is essentially advertising for me that's contributed to this and consequently I find it extremely interesting to go back and think of nudes in this way because I've never done so but having seen the film I have no doubt that the same thing applies and do you find the the nudes in painting unreal in the same way yes well you can't get any information from it can you it's no guide towards the future what kind of information is lacking oh well activity you know dynamism anything it is how someone sees you and that's all it's something laid on you I'm glad you showed the Manny picture because I always find this extremely shocking and because the men are dressed and and the women are naked and this seems to me sum up the whole situation it's a humiliating position and these women are aware of being humiliated um and I think this is part of the whole scheme of things I mean as most people have had and some station have sort of nightmares about running through the streets with nothing on and everybody else's dress uh and this seems to me one element in the pictures um very interesting thing you said in the film was about um how nudity was really a kind of Disguise it wasn't the real person themselves and free but it was just another garment they were wearing and worse than a garment in a sense because there something that you can't take off this comes I think from nudity being combined with a pose and that's inevitable if you're going to have a painting of a model um in a way I think that we're always dressing we're always dressing up for apart always uh putting on a uniform of one kind or another and I think women do this almost more than men men have only begun doing it fairly recently women are always dressing to show the kind of character that they want to to represent the mother the working woman the pretty young chick uh and nudity is a uniform in a way for I'm ready now for sexual pleasure you see and so it doesn't you you you can't com you can't identify being nude with being free I've only just recently read that book do um which describes um the way in which a woman is reduced for the sexual pleasure of the man who's in love with to a complete object and what struck me in all that book as the most impressive image was the fact that she was told that she was never to touch her own breasts to entirely close her mouth or to close or to put her legs together and so the whole point about her stance all the time was that she was available and this the sense of being available the sense of waiting for other people is a very antithesis of action and it you know just like the whole the the Brook Street Bureau advertisement Tony hasn't rung you know he's three minutes late and ringing and you feel this whole situation the number of women you talk to who say I stay in so many nights a week waiting for somebody to ring you know that the the concept of availability implies paity because if you're simply waiting for somebody else to act then you can't act yourself yes it's it's like um you will awake when a man Taps you you know when a man kisses you you will arise and get off your bed but um really it's an excuse to get yourself going I think women are too shy you know they're they're waiting too long yes yes could I say something there about narcissism I think that both men and women are narcissistic but in different senses and I think that one in sometimes I I have the impression that men and women are tremendously narcistic and cut off from each other by their images of themselves but but whereas a woman's image of herself is derived directly from other people the mirror you're talking about um a man's image of himself is derived from the world that is it's the world that gives him back His Image because he acts in it and you know women are drawn to him as a source as a center of activity and as a a source of worth I mean since he is in the world the fact that he values her is important um and so because they sort of centers of narcissism are different um and the woman's is essentially only related to the other person she's in a much more passive position than he is Rel to it yes do you see do you see narcissism as essentially a a a negative or positive phenomenon well I think that's very difficult to answer but in the sense that it is related to Identity um it's a positive phenomenon and it seems to me that what women Envy in men a lot of the time is that they have a sense of their own identity that there is something in them which is important to them other than simply what other people think of them and I think that that thing is the product of their interaction with the world that is other things and other people and it's sort of it's almost as if through this interaction they actually build up a store of worth a sense of themselves um which which is a constant I mean it can't be lost but that because the woman doesn't go out and act she doesn't create the store she waits only for the present inter action with a man that and that can go that can just end at any moment um there's something here that really I'd like to twist around a little bit because narcissism is a very sort of pronounced way of stating a relationship to the world whether it's a man or a woman isn't it but um this other question which is contained within it but doesn't go as far as it as an idea is this sort of self Delight of a person whether it's a man or a woman in life and what they're doing and their relationships with men or women uh and it's a thing that matters tremendously and it's not only a kind of inner thing by which you live but is a very outer Thing by which you gain relationships with your own context in the world that you can't gain any other way but it's when you have somehow been made so unconscious of yourself that you easily naturally sort of compulsively go out to whatever is going on around you now when not a child that tends more than with people to be other things doesn't it mountains streams wherever you go um uh and then only gradually as you go on you make this kind of absolutely necessary contact with people but I do think that the sort of essence of self-d delight as a kind of possible thing in the modern world and something that fewer women have than men and want and must have is the power the compulsion not the power the compulsion to make contact with the world as you are living in it and when I say that I don't just mean the people next door or your friends I simply mean what is going on I I'm not so sure about the Delight I I think it's a very double-edged thing um I know as I suppose I've always known but I became aware of it in this film that I have never consciously looked at myself in the mirror and seen myself as I am I always see the image that I want I know and my children notice it that if I make up my face I put on a certain expression if I from adolesence on if I've seen myself naked in the mirror I have not thought thought of myself as naked I have thought of myself as a nude and I think this comes very largely from having being toiled around all the major art galleries and adolesence you know this is culture this is beauty the capital B and of course up to a point from advertising too but much more um the painting thing um that you you you think the female body is beautiful I am a beautiful object if not I have to do something about it um and therefore the painful part of the narcissistic is I think the feeling of inadequacy um now this business of always posing in a mirror I think one does absolutely automatically and the result is that if you actually catch yourself in a mirror um by chance that's not deliberately because you're getting dressed or something or had a bath but because there's one in the street or you catch yourself in a in a shop window it's a tremendous shock because you suddenly see yourself as you are which is wind blown untiy badly dressed tired and so on you don't see the Poes at all and I think this is what happens to women that they're always trying to measure up to these erotic image that is projected the there there are some paintings and I think at this moment in particular of one painting where there's a woman who is wearing a garment she's not nude but it is a garment so loose so comfortable so easy and it's my idea very much um of of what a picture of a woman might be like it I think it's actually before your period almost it's so long ago I mean it's by Lauren zetti it comes in the good and bad government it's a fresco it's very very old you know and it is a picture of a woman who is supposed to represent peace it's quite extraordinary but she could be one of the liberated or trying to be liberated young women today she is at ease she is relaxed she is not playing any part at all she is able to combine pleasure with thought and with dreaming and she's she might spring into action at any moment and I for me she she has much much more to do with with with nakedness with oneself with the truth about oneself than any number of nudes that I've ever seen [Music] and the third part of ways of seeing is here at the same time tomorrow next tonight Andrew Graham Dixon is at the tape moden for an exhibition by Max Beckman [Music] [Music]