I’m really interested in the Monday/water section of Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté (1934), especially in examining the male gaze and representation of women. I was struck by the image on page 51. It displays a room with a woman lying in a bed that seems to rest upon water. A man stands by the bed on top of the water with his hand on his chin, looking at the woman. His stance and gaze imply that he is assessing the woman. There are also human figures protruding from the water that appear desperate and frightened; one of the figures only has an arm emerging from the water, and no face is visible. I’m not sure what to make of the partially submerged figures, besides their relation to Ernst’s themes of violence, power and the grotesque, but I’m interested in the relationship between the male and female figures in this image. The female figure is rendered in the pose characteristic of the way female nudes have been most traditionally painted. She lies in a bed with ruffled sheets, propped up by pillows, with her hands behind her head in a passive and sensual pose. The woman in this image greatly resembles images of Venus in paintings like Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus. Artists have explored the male gaze in relation to the female nude for centuries. Manet’s Olympia is a prime example of a female nude that challenges tradition and confronts the viewer with discomfort because of the techniques Manet uses to create a sense of the subject’s (Olympia’s) awareness of the viewer. In this image Ernst doesn’t interact with the gaze in the same way as Manet does, but he refers to it very directly by depicting a man who represents the assessing gaze that the concept of the male gaze, which emerged in the 1920s, refers to. To me, this image seems to be a very direct commentary that criticizes the representation of women in art.
That particular collage was very interesting to me as well! The man viewing the woman looked altogether sinister, which to me speaks to the way the male gaze in society sexualizes and scrutinizes women and the female form relentlessly.
I was also really struck by this particular collage. However, I sort of disagree with Charlotte. Though I definitely think that the man looking at the woman is doing so in a critical way, the woman appears to be totally uninterested in the man and is more focused on sleeping in. Rather than being a victim of over sexualized representation, the woman ignores the man and in doing so sort of takes the power away from the male gaze. I think the same idea is at work in Olympia, since Olympia looks back at the viewer and is laying on the bed proudly rather than shying away.