Source: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972), Essays 5 and 7. Essay 5 concerns the representation of women in European painting; Essay 7 concerns the language of publicity and its relationship to oil painting.
Essay 5 — Women, the Gaze, and the Nude
The Split Self: Surveyor and Surveyed
Berger opens with a structural observation about gender: a woman's social presence is fundamentally different from a man's. A man's presence projects outward — what he is capable of doing to or for others. A woman's presence expresses her attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her.
"A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself... From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually."
This produces a split identity: the woman becomes both the surveyor and the surveyed within herself. Her sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being seen. The surveyor within her is male; the surveyed is female.
Man's Presence
- Projects outward toward others
- Defined by power he can exercise
- His actions are expressions of himself
- Men act
Woman's Presence
- Directed inward, toward herself
- Defined by how she appears to others
- Her actions are read as indications of how she wishes to be treated
- Women appear
"Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves."
Naked vs. Nude
Berger draws a sharp distinction, building on Kenneth Clark's The Nude:
To Be Naked
To be oneself. Nakedness reveals itself. To be naked is to be without disguise — the body in its own right, expressing its own feelings and reality.
To Be Nude
To be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. The nude is an object — placed on display for a spectator. "Nudity is a form of dress." The nude is condemned to never being naked.
Key Point: "In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there."
The European Nude Tradition
The first nudes in the tradition depicted Adam and Eve. In Genesis, nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder — "they knew that they were naked." The woman is then punished by being made subservient to the man, who becomes the agent of God. This mythological structure — the male as judge, the female as the judged — runs through the tradition.
- The mirror as symbol: Often used as a symbol of female vanity. But Berger argues its real function was to make the woman connive in treating herself as a sight — she joins the spectators of herself.
- The Judgement of Paris: Paris awards the apple to the woman he finds most beautiful. Beauty becomes competitive; the prize is to be owned by a judge.
- Susannah and the Elders: "We join the Elders to spy on Susannah taking her bath. She looks back at us looking at her." The viewer is positioned as voyeur.
"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure."
The Spectator-Owner
The imagined viewer of the traditional nude is the spectator-owner — a man, with his clothes still on, for whom the woman has assumed her nudity. Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it. Even when a male lover appears in the painting, the woman's attention is directed past him toward the spectator.
The Exceptional: Paintings of Loved Women
Among hundreds of thousands of nudes, Berger identifies perhaps a hundred exceptions: paintings of loved women, more or less naked, where the painter's personal vision is so strong it makes no allowance for the spectator. He uses Rubens's portrait of his young wife Hélène Fourment as an example.
In the Rubens, her body contains a deliberate anatomical impossibility — her upper and lower body cannot physically meet as painted. This formal distortion "permits the body to become impossibly dynamic. Its coherence is no longer within itself but within the experience of the painter." She is naked as he sees her, not as the spectator-owner demands.
Today's Continuation
The tradition of the nude has given way to other media — advertising, journalism, television — but the essential way of seeing women has not changed.
"Women are depicted in a quite different way from men — not because the feminine is different from the masculine — but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him."
Essay 7 — Publicity, Glamour and the Language of Oil Painting
What Publicity Is
In cities we see hundreds of publicity images every day. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently. Publicity belongs to the moment — it must be continually renewed — but it never speaks of the present. It always speaks of the future.
Publicity's single proposal: "It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer — even though we will be poorer by having spent our money."
Glamour and Envy
Publicity persuades through transformation by showing people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. Publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.
"Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you."
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. Publicity steals her love of herself as she is and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
Publicity vs. Pleasure
Berger distinguishes publicity from the actual pleasure of the things it advertises. Publicity begins with a real appetite for pleasure — clothes, food, cars, sunshine — but it cannot offer the real object of pleasure.
The Paradox: The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer becomes aware that she is hundreds of miles away. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. It is always about the future buyer, not the present experience.
"Publicity is about social relations, not objects." Its promise is not of pleasure but of happiness — happiness as judged from the outside by others.
Oil Painting and Publicity: A Direct Continuity
Berger's central claim in Essay 7: there is a direct continuity between the language of oil painting and the language of publicity. Both speak in the same voice about the same things.
| Dimension | Oil Painting (1500–1900) | Publicity (Today) |
|---|
| Spectator |
Spectator-owner: already possessing |
Spectator-buyer: desiring to possess |
| Promise |
Confirms and enhances what the owner already has |
Offers an improved alternative to what the buyer currently is |
| Technique |
Oil paint renders tactile reality of objects |
Colour photography (the modern equivalent) renders texture and tangibility |
| Tense |
Began with facts — what the owner already enjoyed |
Speaks of the future — what the buyer might become |
| Core logic |
You are what you have (property) |
You are what you have (commodity) |
| Social anxiety |
Status and position in a hierarchy |
"All publicity works upon anxiety. The sum of everything is money." |
Why Publicity Uses Oil Painting's Language
- Authority and prestige: A work of art quoted in an advertisement says two almost contradictory things simultaneously — it denotes wealth and implies spirituality. Luxury + cultural value at once.
- Nostalgia: Publicity is essentially nostalgic — it must sell the past to the future. It cannot supply the standards of its own claims, so all references to quality are retrospective and traditional.
- Technical development: Cheap colour photography (developed roughly 15 years before the book's publication in 1972) can reproduce the colour, texture and tangibility of objects as only oil paint had previously been able to do.
Glamour Is Modern
Oil Painting — Grace & Authority
Earlier ideals of grace, elegance, and authority were qualities intrinsic to the person. Gainsborough's Mrs Siddons is wealthy and beautiful — but "her qualities are her own and have been recognized as such." She is not glamorous.
Publicity — Glamour & Envy
Glamour is a modern invention. It depends on envy — being seen as enviable by others. Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe is its emblem: she is purely the creature of others' envy, not a person recognized for her own qualities.
Publicity's Political Function
"Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable."
Publicity is "the life of this culture — in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive — and at the same time publicity is its dream." It excludes the present entirely: publicity is eventless. All real events happen outside it. Experience is impossible within it. All that it offers is the act of acquiring.
Exam-Style Questions
Question 1 — Men Act, Women Appear
Q: Explain Berger's claim that "men act and women appear" in the context of Essay 5. How does the concept of the surveyor/surveyed split illuminate the European nude tradition?
Model Answer: Berger argues that a structural asymmetry governs how men and women relate to their own self-image. A man's presence projects outward — toward what he can do to others. A woman's presence is directed inward — toward how she appears. From earliest childhood she is taught to survey herself continuously, producing a split identity: the surveyor within her (male) and the surveyed (female).
This structure directly shapes the European nude tradition. In the average nude, the principal protagonist who is never painted is the male spectator-owner — everything in the image is arranged for his gaze. The woman does not look at herself as she is; she looks outward toward an imagined male viewer. The mirror, used as a symbol of female "vanity," in fact performs this function: it makes the woman join the spectators of herself. The result: to be nude is to be seen naked by others without being recognized for oneself. Nudity is placed on display; nakedness reveals itself. The nude is condemned to never being naked.
Question 2 — Oil Painting and Publicity
Q: Berger argues there is a "direct continuity" between the language of oil painting and the language of modern publicity. What is the nature of this continuity, and where does it break down?
Model Answer: The continuity is rooted in a shared core logic: "you are what you have." Oil painting rendered the tactile reality of possessable objects with unprecedented conviction — its medium was designed to make surfaces feel real, desirable, acquirable. Modern colour photography performs the same function for publicity: both media play upon the spectator's sense that they can almost touch what is shown, reminding them how they might possess the real thing.
Both speak the same visual language: romanticized nature, the glamour of materials (fur, leather, polished metal), frontal arrangement of figures for the spectator's benefit, and the use of classical or historical references to lend authority and cultural prestige.
But the break is equally important: oil painting addressed the spectator-owner — someone already possessing — and consolidated their sense of their own value, beginning from facts. Publicity addresses the spectator-buyer — someone constituted by dissatisfaction — and makes them marginally dissatisfied with their present life in order to propose a transformed future self. Oil painting spoke from the present tense of possession; publicity speaks from the perpetually deferred future of desire.