Art Museum Visit

I recently paid my visit to the Saint Louis Art Museum. I wandered around every time period and genre of art, but the art from the late 1800s interested me most in regards to what we have discussed in class. For instance, in the picture I took of me at the museum I am standing next to a painting in which the male artist predicts the atrocities of WW1. If you look around the painting you will see men and animals running around a city in chaos. There were many more paintings near this one depicting the horrors of WW1 and WW2, all of which had men as the main subjects and were painted by male artists. I wandered to the next room where the paintings were from the same time period, but had a light-hearted more aesthetic purpose. All of these paintings had naked women laying on beds with care free expressions. What I took from this was that women are not supposed to be seen as suffering, or used to tell a story that one can empathize with, but instead are supposed to be what calms the chaos. They seemed to be objects only used to soothe the suffering of men. This of course implies that women will not be looking at these paintings, only men, and therefore women do not need to be in the photographs that are ment to be empathized with because how could a man empathize with a women's pain? The women will instead be used to soothe the all male audience. This is seen today through the sexualization in commercials I feel. For instance, when Hardies has women eating their burgers seductively it just sends the message to me that they only believe men are their customers, or the customers they want. Yes, men are sometimes sexualized in commercials, but i think only 'female specific' things. Its just some food for thought, and shows how this theme can still be seen today.