Feminists in the late twentieth century loved to deconstruct the objectifying male gaze. Picasso was always one of their favorite targets; pushing up to mid century XX, de Kooning was also singled out, for obvious reasons. There is no inherent problem with deconstructive analyses of the male gaze; unless the inference is built into these deconstructions that the realm of the arts would be a more sanguine place without it. The objectifying male gaze is a fact of life and both a law and a force of nature- a psycho-affective and psycho-sexual brick wall and a permanent level of human richness. What’s richly durable about it is that male creators can reveal their entire selves, including their vulnerabilities, when they perform the ocular trick of imperial conquest.
What Bonnard reveals, in “Woman Pulling on her Stockings,” is that he is enmeshed in the green haze of jealousy, fertility, comfort, and squeamishness that revealed sexuality engenders. He catches his subject here in medias res (one stocking off, a bare leg and a “darkened” one), and the paint handling has a sexualized fluidity to is so that the male gaze is “swimming” in the feminine. This fluidity amounts to an admission that, on some levels, the artist cannot see his subject clearly- all the tensions and ambiguities involved in partial nudity have rendered the portrait as much a study of male bewilderment and confusion (when confronted with raw femininity) as anything else. Yet the tenderness with which the forms are rendered make them pleasing- and the subtext of jealousy which layers of green suggest are offset by the intense sense of harmonic and textural balance between these layers. The basic point I am trying to make is that the objectifying male gaze cannot be manifested outwardly without reflecting an inward reality- every decimated woman is a kind of self-portrait (of decimation or not) as well. If feminists sense danger from it, it has more to do with self-conscious fear of their own sexual power than of any harm Picasso, Bonnard, de Kooning or others may do.
Fieled's Miscellaneous 