Abstract

The nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in painting. First of all, it was signified by the departure from habitual art forms and traditions that were characteristic of Academic paintings in the previous centuries. Such values as the absence of impressions, prevalence of traditions, fear of new concepts, and tendency to use existing schemes were greatly challenged by artists in the nineteenth century. This paper will touch on the topics of the "male gaze" and "European Orientalism", describing some changes that occurred in Academic paintings.

Keywords:art, paintings, Orientalism.

Art and Mass Media

The nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in painting. First of all, it was signified by the departure from habitual art forms and traditions that were characteristic of Academic paintings in the previous centuries. Such values as absence of impressions, prevalence of traditions, fear of new concepts, and tendency to use existing schemes were greatly challenged by artists in the nineteenth century.

Thomas Couture, a very popular artist, used realism to change his paintings into cinematic dramas. His works of art placed the viewer within an event or a scene. His work "The Romans of the Decadence" was a rebellion against Academic standards. Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904) was one of the first artists to employ "European Orientalism", which was well expressed in his painting Slave Market European Orientalism can be defined as depicting images of the East in Western paintings. That style was characterized by elimination of humanistic values in order to master the subject (Brown, 2005, p. 5). Many Hollywood movies like Gladiator present their ideas with similar emotional impact.

Artists who painted pictures in the style of Orientalism used a lot of images of women with their bodies displayed. The idea behind those paintings presumed that the spectator was a male. That is how the term the male gaze came into existence. Males were portrayed as active beings and females - as passive objects, designed to flatter men (Brown, 2005, p. 7). Modern advertisers use a lot of the 19th century techniques to portray the advertised goods, using women who display sexually accessible bodies.

Academic painting of European Orientalism presented photographically detailed scenes providing the only visual image records in the 19the century. Though depicting scenes of real life and, at the same time, pictures of realistic imagery, Orientalism disguised the revolutionary conflicts that influenced art and society at that time (Brown, 2005, p. 9) leading to the historical period known as Modernism.