Male Gaze in Art

After spending a few weeks immersed in art from Romanticism to Modernism — particularly the period from 1860 to 1970s — there was one thing I couldn’t unsee. Over and over again, there she was: the nude woman. Sometimes reclined, sometimes bathing, sometimes draped across a chaise lounge like she’d fainted from the weight of being painted again. It wasn’t subtle. It was persistent, and frankly, kind of exhausting.

Textbooks package it as tradition, beauty, or classical influence. But when you strip away the reverence, the repetition starts to feel like fixation. Art from this era — especially the so-called modern masters — is full of women displayed, exposed, and stylized through the male gaze. What passes as “high culture” in the gallery wouldn’t survive a day on Instagram without a content warning.

Take Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). A white nude woman reclines on a bed, making direct eye contact with the viewer. There’s a Black maid offering flowers — presumably from a male admirer — and even a small black cat at the foot of the bed. Olympia caused a scandal when it debuted, partly because she didn’t pretend to be modest. She looked right back at you. Yet even in this moment of defiance, she is still a subject of desire, not a subject with agency. The composition screams: Look at her. Consume her. Normalize this dynamic.

Then you hit Paul Gauguin’s paintings, and things get even more uncomfortable. Gauguin traveled to Tahiti and painted dozens of native women, often topless or nude, often very young. In works like Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892) and Nevermore (1897), his subjects are reduced to mystic, exotic figures — flattened by colonial imagination and sexualized through Western fantasy. Gauguin left France not just for “inspiration,” but to escape scrutiny. He literally abandoned his family and lived among teenage girls whom he treated as both muses and mistresses. And yet, in art history, he's a "visionary."

There’s a haunting stillness to many of Gauguin’s paintings, but it’s not the kind of stillness that honors the subject — it’s a silence that feels imposed. The women rarely smile. They rarely resist. They are painted as part of the landscape, part of Gauguin’s mythmaking. Their nudity isn’t an accident; it’s a decision. And it’s always about the viewer, never about the person being viewed.

In contrast, when male nudity does appear in modern art, it’s often framed very differently. Consider Gustave Caillebotte’s Man at His Bath (1884). It’s one of the few times a male body is shown in a vulnerable, private moment. There’s nothing titillating about it. He’s drying himself off, back turned, completely unaware of the gaze. The nudity doesn’t invite desire — it feels almost clinical, even boring. That disparity says a lot about what art chooses to sexualize.

Or look at George Luks’ The Wrestlers (1905). Two nude men, locked in combat, muscles tense. The scene is all about raw force and masculine energy. Even in the absence of clothes, the mood isn’t sensual — it’s powerful. No vulnerability, no softness, no viewer invited to linger too long. When men are nude in modern art, they’re allowed to be active, athletic, almost mythical. Women, meanwhile, are expected to lie down and look beautiful.

Not all artists bought into this formula. Suzanne Valadon’s The Blue Room (1923) disrupts everything. A fully clothed woman lounges in bed, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by clutter and color. She’s not a muse — she’s a person. Valadon, once a model herself, knew the other side of the canvas. She painted women who occupied space without being defined by how they looked in it. Her brush didn’t flatter; it humanized.

Another quiet rebellion came from Paula Modersohn-Becker, who painted some of the earliest known nude self-portraits by a woman. In Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906), she shows herself naked, direct, pregnant — though she wasn’t actually pregnant. It was symbolic, raw, and completely self-possessed. No one posed her. No one sexualized her. She took back the brush. Interestingly, these paintings weren’t shown during her lifetime; they were only discovered and broadcast to the world after her death. That says a lot — even when a woman creates something deeply personal and private, the world can’t help but obsess and expose it. The urge to consume the female form doesn’t respect boundaries, even when the original intent was purely for oneself.

Still, examples like Modersohn-Becker’s are rare. The norm remained: male painter, female nude. Again and again and again. And it’s not just annoying — it’s revealing. These paintings don’t just reflect art preferences; they reflect power structures. Who gets to be looked at? Who gets to look? Who decides what's "beautiful"? For centuries, women weren’t just excluded from the studios — they were trapped inside the frame.

I’m not here to preach or cancel. I’m just pointing out the imbalance. If we’re going to admire the works of Manet, Gauguin, and others, we should at least be honest about the world they came from. They weren’t just painting forms — they were painting fantasies. And those fantasies, even today, shape what we think is worthy of walls, awards, and applause.

Art is supposed to challenge us, not lull us into aesthetic sleep. So maybe the real challenge is looking back at these “masterpieces” and asking: Who benefits from this image? Who disappears in it? And what would art look like if it stopped obsessing over how women look — and started listening to who they are?