Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master in Interior Architecture [Adaptive Reuse]
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Francesca Liuni
Second Advisor
Fabiana Weinberg
Third Advisor
Barbara Stehle
Abstract
Historically women have been excluded from becoming acclaimed artists due to societal, educational, and institutional barriers. This exclusion has had many repercussions in Western art––in a large part it has made celebrated male artists the norm, while celebrated female artists are the exception.
These same barriers often precluded women from depicting themselves in art. When women did paint, they were encouraged to paint domestic scenes such as flowers or still lifes and were prohibited from studying or depicting the nude form. This gap of representation was filled by male artists who have felt empowered to sexualize women with no consequence. For centuries, these artists have narrowly depicted the female body as a passive object through the sexualized male gaze, often for the enjoyment of men. This has left a large body of work that showcases an idealized female form, while suppressing women from representing themselves.
Today, this unequal dynamic is continued as museums operate under a guise of neutrality and continue to show these works without context or critique, allowing the objectified representation of women to continue. In these paintings of women and within museums, male artists and viewers have all the power and there is still no room for female bodily autonomy.
In 1986, the Guerrilla Girls famously asked “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Then, they stated that less than 5% of paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are by women, and 85% of the nudes are female. The Met has made little progress to improve these statistics. Thirty nine years later, still only 7% of paintings in the Met are by women. The lack of female artist representation, along with the sexualized view of women promulgated by male artists over thousands of years, has created a predominant, misrepresentative narrative of women that does not accurately represent the moment when these paintings were created or now.
In order for women today to have a chance to define themselves on their own terms, it is critical to challenge the artistic messaging that defines women simply as passive objects. The issue is not the nakedness of the women in these paintings. This thesis is not about censorship or putting more shame and burden on women's bodies, but rather it critiques the unequal power and gender dynamics that male artists and their representations of women have perpetuated. To address these issues, this thesis provides exhibition and curation strategies to help audiences to view historic pieces of art more critically. This proposed exhibition interrogates paintings by male artists that define women simply as passive objects. Shattering the illusion of these being neutral portrayals of women, Unframing Venus casts a critical glance at the Met’s collection and introduces female artists in their own right.
Recommended Citation
Leafsong, Sage, "Unframing Venus: Redefining the Female Nude" (2025). Masters Theses. 1405.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1405
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Interior Design Commons, Other History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, Women's Studies Commons