How Do Women Look? The Female Nude in the Work of Suzanne Valadon

Abstract

The representation of women in the visual media has become a crucial area of concern for the Women's Movement over the last few years. Most energies have been put, quite rightly, into countering the stereotyping and sexism of media images. Evidence of how wide such concerns have become is shown by the very useful booklet published by the Trade Union Congress this year, Images of Inequality: The Portrayal of Women in the Media and Advertising (TUC, 1984). At a more theoretical level, a body of feminist work has been developed which analyses the position of the male spectator in relation to the female image as being one of power and control. This work has developed a powerful feminist critique of the ways in which women are represented in the nsual media. It has constituted an important challenge to the notion that there can be a common experience of images across gender (and also race and class) divisions. However, an analysis of images which focuses exclusively on their relationship to a male spectator leaves certain problems unexplained and difficult to resolve. Centrally, it offers no explanation of how women look at images of women. Itis this question which I wanttodevelophereintwo main ways. Firstly, what does it mean to look from a woman's point of new? And, secondly, how do women appear in images made by women? The focus of the first part of the article will be on the question of spectatorship, both male and female, in relationship to representation of women's bodies. I want to argue that women can and do respond to images of themselves in ways which are different from, and cannot be reduced to, masculine 'ways of seeing'. The work of Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) shows how a woman artist working within a maletradition of representation could produce images which disrupt the conventions of a genre. My starting point for looking at Valadon was a general interest in women artists working at the beginning ofthe century many of whom are perhaps known by name, but whose work is diff1cult to see either in reproduction or in exhibition. It was the discovery that she worked extensively on the female nude, a subject linked almost exclusively to male artists, which seemed to connect up with wider questions about the relationship of women to

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