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French Eyes And The Male Gaze

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French Eyes And The Male Gaze
French Eyes demonstrate the effect of the male gaze in French oil paintings, almost all drawn from the extensive collection from Carnegie Museum of Art and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The ten selected works feature one or more female sitters and are painted by male artists from 1870 through 1910.

The concept of the gaze in examining visual culture deals with how the audience views the subjects in the presented work, in this case, oil paintings. There are multiple forms of the gaze that can be characterized by who is doing the looking. Examples include the spectator's gaze or the audience, intra-diegetic gaze where one person is looking at another person in the work, and extra diegetic gaze where the person depicted looks at the spectator. There is also a relationship between the gaze between the offering and demanding gaze. An indirect gaze that is offered by the spectator, that is where the viewer initiates the gaze and the subject is not aware of this, and the direct gaze that is demanded by the subject, who looks directly at the viewer. (CITE) …show more content…
Two important French pioneers and theories include philosopher Michel Foucault's medical gaze, the method that medical professionals separate the body from the person, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage development of the human psyche, where the infant recognizes their mirror image as themselves. (CITE?) The gaze theory then spread to feminist theory, where the gaze now deals with how men look at women, women look at themselves and other women, and the effects of the male gaze. The key text with regards to the male gaze is feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema from 1975. Mulvey’s article
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