...the exhibition isn’t just about “looking at women”; it’s about how we, as a culture, look at women, through the eyes of the artist and as viewers. How do you want to see women? As goddesses, fairies and Earth mothers? As embodiments of sexuality, whether sordid or detached? As eternal figures, always waiting for something to happen, for their men to return, from work, from war, or waiting for the light of the eternal to strike them in the glow of annunciation? How about as period kitsch, nostalgic and sentimental? These 15 pieces in myriad genres and materials touch on all of those motifs. The problem with what’s called the “male gaze” is that it flattens vision and objectifies its subject into a scheme that’s as formal and hierarchic as a Byzantine icon of the Blessed Mother. There is no “there” there except for what the gaze pours into it. Individuality becomes reduced to such dichotomies as the classic Madonna vs Whore or, more appropriate for our era, Soccer Mom vs Female CEO. Can art transcend these oppositions, or being a product of its time, does it reinforce them? ...Of immense interest, and revealing a canny sense of arrangement, is that immediately to the left of “Perfume” hangs a large painting in a beautiful original frame, “Portrait of Mrs. Harvey Gibson, Locust Valley, Long island,” done in 1923 by Savely Sorine (1878-1953), a Russian artist who worked mainly as a society painter in the West. Mrs. Gibson is undeniably fashionable — her red shoes in an otherwise monochromatic plane are a touch of genius — and she looks back at the viewer with a frank, intelligent and appraising gaze that pretty much puts us in our place. [http://archive.commercialappeal.com/entertainment/arts/visual/art-review-memphis-brooks-museum-of-art-plumbs-collection-for-diverse-looking-at-women-ep-831008474-324101281.html]