I think we should also be careful not to presume that any female nude per se is intended for the male gaze, that would be a misunderstanding of the theory. The Seville drawing and painting by van Hove are less oriented toward male gaze...
I think that most artists create for themselves and imagine an audience (although perhaps not consciously) not unlike themselves. I don't believe any work of art has a universal appeal... although certainly, a work of art created with one audience in mind can appeal to different audiences. If we are to argue that a female nude... or even a male nude... painted by a woman is not to be imagined as being intended for a male audience, then the reverse is equally true. And yet I love Praxiteles'
Hermes and Michelangelo's
David ... and this Freud as well:
It seems to me that art should convey the artist's thoughts and perceptions without any thought to what is acceptable to a given audience according to the fashion or socio-political norms of the moment. One of the values of music, painting, literature, etc... is that these works of art allow us some inkling of the experiences and thoughts of others. I don't look to works of art to reinforce my own points of view, experiences, beliefs, biases, etc... I can find a work of art disturbing, unsettling, or disagree with what is being communicated... and yet still greatly appreciate it as a work of art.
The thing to ask with the male nudes in relation to male gaze is whether they are targeting an audience with the same implicitly erotic intent. I'm not entirely sure that the works in question are doing that.
I feel that Praxiteles
Hermes is clearly quite erotic. The sensuous and feminine flow of the figure give some real idea of what his
Aphrodite must have been like:
Most of the extant Roman copies are variations on the "modest Venus"... clearly aware that she is naked and of the presence of an audience/voyeurs... yet the original Aphrodite by Praxiteles was described as being closer to these copies:
... unashamed of her nudity and making no attempt to cover herself. Not long after Praxiteles, we get the
Aphrodite Kallipygos or "Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks" in which she is portrayed admiring her reflection in a pool of water... but also, presumably, posing for a male audience.
There are certainly quite a few male nudes in art that have a rather definite erotic content:
Surely, that's true of Donatello's
David more than of Michelangelo's... although the
Bacchus seems to have a real erotic charge.
We should probably also consider that male gaze tend to assume heteronormativity. But it's plausible that at least one of the women whose work you post is sexually attracted to women.
That is true of several of the artists I posted... and possibly true of several that I am unaware of. Picasso, Klimt, Renoir, Rilke, Rodin, Marlene Dumas, Yeats, Adolf Loos, Baudelaire, and any number of others have admitted to the link between the erotic and art. I suspect that we wouldn't have as much condemnation of paintings/sculpture/etc... of the female nude by male artists if we didn't have art historians and critics putting forth so much effort in denying the erotic aspect/intention of such art.
