he public holds artists in such high esteem. The public is able, through viewing and appreciating art, to share in the artists' fantasies and thus experience relief from their own repressions. Freud suggests that male artists express their deepest primitive fears in their depiction of women. One of these fears involves sexual masochism. This explains the frequent occurrence of the femme fatale in art. According to Freud, man "has the habit of projecting his own inner feelings of hostility onto the outside world . . . to whatever objects he dislikes, or even is unfamiliar with (thus) woman is also looked upon as a source of such dangers."
Prompted by underlying feelings of fear and hatred of women, male artists compensate by their efforts to exert power over women through the visual images they create and also through the tools and techniques they employ in their art. Males exert power over women by allowing sex and sexuality to dominate the representation of the female body in art. This is demonstrated most clearly in art involving female nudes. In some cases, a fine line exists between art and pornography. For example, "The way language is used in accounts of the female nude allows us to assess the role of sexual metaphor in recent art criticism." Men view the canvas as empty, virgin, and receptive. They refer to their male sexuality as channeled through their paintbrushes. Men assume the traditional active, dominating role in giving the canvas life through their artistic expression. One male artist openly confided his views on art in terms of sexual connotation: "Kandinsky evokes the practice of painting as a rape scene--the violation of the female body/canvas which he then compares to the forced subordination of a colonized subject by the colonizing power." Kandinsky's attitude gives credence to psychologists' views about rape being more an act of violence and control than an expression of sexual desire.
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