Sonia De Klamery

Ultimately, if women manifest themselves in a sensual manner it is the contention of man to assume that this is her physical emanation, thus, it is the assumption of the public to consider her imprudent, unladylike, and not feminine. Anglada most likely incorporated the male peacock in Sonia de Klamery’s portrait to highlight this masculine domination that berger speaks of; to emphasize the fact that Sonia lays here on this branch, despite her intimidatingly sexual gaze, for men. Essentially, we often see that in modern art, man’s sexual freedom is usually portrayed in certain spaces where women become a subjected class. Usually this is seen in urban spaces like bars and brothels, but Anglada places Sonia de Klamery in an exotic, forestlike

This quality is found in Sonia de Klamery’s portrait because although she serves solely to satisfy the male gaze, to contribute to the voyeuristic pleasure of posing for men, she confronts more than she subjects. Although displayed as a woman with no agency of her own, Sonia de Klamery does have one thing going: the display of her own sensuality. Take for example, Goya’s 1797-1800 nude painting of La Maja Desnuda. This painting was received with public outcries because the nude and reclined woman possesses a facial expression as daunting, unashamed, and sensual as Sonia de Klamery’s. Essentially, it is imprudent and improper to think that women may have sexuality of their own, let alone publicly display it the way la maja does in Goya’s painting. Although this painting was made in the early nineteenth century, Sonia de Klamery’s painting possesses many of the same confrontational qualities as La Maja Desnuda. A reclining frontal position, red lips, fearless and bold eyes, and most importantly, a brazen gaze of utter eroticism. An important note that John Berger makes in his novel, Ways of Seeing is that although women are portrayed in paintings as being they often appear as ‘a compliant object of the painting-method’s seduction’ which is precisely what we see in Sonia de Klamery; a woman whose body is defined by the meticulous and decorative shawl that wraps her snakelike body, yet her upper body somehow loses definition through liquefaction. An interesting example of this is William Blake’s 1795 painting Pity, where woman appears as a liquid structure, who ‘makes is figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other… to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects’ (pg. 93). The technique of