Left to right: Eugene Delacroix. Woman in
White Stockings. c. 1832. The Louvre; J.D.
Ingres. Roger and Angelica. 1867. The Nation-
al Gallery, London; Hiram Powers. The Greek
Slave. 1843. Marble. Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York.

Her essential quality is castratedness. She ab-
solutely must be young, her body hairless, her
flesh buoyant, and she must not have a sexual
organ.

That is, in the modern era, woman’s desirability
increases as her humanity and health (relative
to male norms) are diminished.

The need to see women as weak, vapid,
unhealthy objects—while not unique to the
modern era—is evidently felt with unusual
intensity and frequency in bourgeois civiliza-
tion, whose technical advances so favor the
idea of sexual equality. Indeed, as women’s
claims to full humanity grew, the more relent-
lessly would art rationalize their inferior status.
For while literature and the theatre could give
expression to feminist voices, the art world
acknowledged only male views of human sexual
experience. In that arena, men alone were free
to grapple with their sexual aspirations, fanta-
sies and fears. Increasingly in the modern era,
artists and their audiences agreed that serious
and profound art is likely to be about what men
think of women. In fact, the defense of male
supremacy must be recognized as a central
theme in modern art. Gauguin, Munch, Rodin,
Matisse, Picasso and scores of other artists,
consciously or unconsciously, identified some
aspect of the sexist cause with all or part of their
own artistic missions. Art celebrating sexist
experience was accorded the greatest prestige,
given the most pretentious esthetic rationales,
and identified with the highest and deepest of
human aspirations.

Nudes and whores—women with no identity
beyond their existence as sex objects—were
made to embody transcendent, “universally”
significant statements. In literature as in art, the
image of the whore even came to stand for
woman in her purest, most concentrated form,
just as the brothel became the ultimate class-
room, the temple in which men only might
glimpse life’s deepest mysteries: “A Henry
Miller, going to bed with a prostitute [in Tropic
of Cancer], feels that he sounds the very depths
of life, death and the cosmos.”2 Picasso’s fa-
mous brothel scene, the Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907), where the viewer is cast as the male
customer, makes similar claims —claims that art
historians advocate as “humanistic” and uni-
versal.3 Art-making itself is analogous to the
sexual domination of whores. The metaphor of



the penis-as-paintbrush is a revered truth for
many 20th-century artists and art historians. It
also insists that to create is to possess, to domi-
nate, and to be quintessentially male.

| try to paint with my heart and my loins, not
bothering with style (Vlaminck).4

Thus | learned to battle the canvas, to come to
know it as a being resisting my wish (dream),
and to bend it forcibly to this wish. At first
it stands there like a pure chaste virgin...and
then comes the willful brush which first here,
then there, gradually conquers it with all the
energy peculiar to it, like a European colonist.
_..(Kandinsky). >

The kind of nudes that prevail in the modern
era do not merely reflect a collective male
psyche. They actively promote the relationships
they portray, not only expressing but also shap-
ing sexual consciousness. For the nude, in her
passivity and impotence, is addressed to women
as much as to men. Far from being merely an
entertainment for males, the nude, as a genre,
is one of many cultural phenomena that teaches
women to see themselves through male eyes
and in terms of dominating male interests.
While it sanctions and reinforces in men the
identification of virility with domination, it
holds up to women self-images in which even
sexual self-expression is prohibited. As ideology,
the nude shapes our awareness of our deepest
human instincts in terms of domination and
submission so that the supremacy of the male
“1” prevails on that most fundamental level of
experience.

Twentieth-century art has equally urged
the victimization and spiritual diminution of
women, shedding, however, the narrative trap-
pings and much of the illusionism of the 19th
century. The abandoned Ariadnes, endangered
captives and cloistered harem women of 19th-
century art become simply naked models and
mistresses in the studio or whores in the broth-
el. In nudes by Matisse, Vlaminck, Kirchner,
Van Dongen and others, the demonstration of
male control and the suppression of female sub-
jectivity is more emphatic and more frequently
asserted than in 19th-century ones. Their faces
are more frequently concealed, blank or mask-
like (that is, when they are not put to sleep),
and the artist manipulates their passive bodies
with more liberty and “artistic’” bravado than