His painting Rue Bab-el-Gharbi à Laghouat (1859, Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse) was commissioned by the French government. In 1852, Fromentin witnessed violent battles in Algeria, which he described in A Summer in the Sahara. La Rue Bab-el-Gharbi à Laghouat, by Eugène Fromentin. I close my eyes and I see flames, radiant orbs, or a vague spreading glare,” he wrote. Fromentin suffered temporary blindness after one such expedition. Le Pays de la Soif (between 18, Musée d’Orsay) shows Arab and African travellers dying of heat stroke and thirst in the desert. Eugène Fromentin published two books about his travels in north Africa, which he portrayed as a cruel and often lethal place. The painting reads like an orientalised version of Manet’s Olympia, which scandalised Paris 18 years earlier.Īrab men figure far less often in orientalist paintings than women. It shows a half-naked female black servant massaging a white woman who lies stomach down on a marble slab, against a backdrop of tiles. Le Figaro’s critic notes that Debat-Ponsan was a minor painter, whose masterpiece “was long considered to be the height of kitsch voyeurism”. Édouard Debat-Ponsan’s Massage in the Hammam (1883, Toulouse, Musée des Augustins) is the signature painting for the exhibition. Edward Said used this painting on the cover of Orientalism. The men lean against a wall of ornate turquoise blue tiles. He holds it by the head and tail, for the amusement of an ageing Arab potentate and the African slaves or warriors who sit alongside him. In The Snake Charmer (1879, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute), also by Gérôme, a naked Arab boy has wrapped a python around his body. It is really the West which transformed and perverted this image.” I don’t think Ingres had perverse sexual tendencies. “This western concept of the eastern woman as a sensual slave became very toxic over time. “The problem is us, not the East,” Almiot- Saulnier said. Jean-Louis Gérôme's travels in Egypt and Turkey lent a veneer of authenticity to the decorative backdrops of his paintings, but he too portrayed scenes he could not possibly have seen, including a beautiful white nude standing passively as a potential buyer in Arab robes inspects her teeth in The Slave Market (1866, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Massachusetts). It is really the West which transformed and perverted this image This western concept of the eastern woman as a sensual slave became very toxic over time. I don't think Ingres had perverse sexual tendencies. He called her The Jewess of Tangiers (Reims, Musée des Beaux-Arts). Some 13 years after his 1853 trip to north Africa, Charles Landelle painted a milkmaid from Normandy in a gauzy gold-embroidered dress. Théodore Chassériau visited Algeria in 1846 but subsequently painted bare-footed Arab women dancing with shimmering veils, and a naked woman emerging from the bath in the serail. Not unlike modern-day journalists and academics who travel to the Middle East and then continue to churn out cliches, the painters were not affected by first-hand experience. He titled her Young Algerian Woman Lying on the Grass (1871-1873, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.) Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot painted his favourite model, Emma Dobigny, reclining in the French countryside in eastern clothing. The female slave or concubine “is the alpha and omega of western fantasms about the East”, says the show’s commissioner, Emmanuelle Almiot-Saulnier. His Petite Baigneuse (1828, Musée du Louvre) opens the exhibition at the Musée Marmottan. Jean-Dominique Ingres’s paintings of velvety odalisques languishing in harems set the stage for 19th-century orientalism. In its largest sense, orientalist painting goes back to Gentile Bellini’s 1480 portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, or Rembrandt’s numerous 17th-century portrayals of men wearing turbans. He gave orientalism such a bad name that the fascinating exhibition Oriental Visions: From Dreams into Light, at the Musée Marmottan Monet, in Paris, until July 21st, studiously avoids the term. The exposé of deeply ingrained western prejudice against the Orient – for which read "Near East" – remains Said's greatest legacy. Throughout their imperial, colonial and then neocolonial epochs, western powers used their domination to impose a simplistic view of the East as sensual, corrupt, devious, lazy, tyrannical and backward, Said explained in his 1978 book Orientalism (which he updated in 1994 and again in 2003, the year of his death). The concept of orientalism is the legacy of the great Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said.
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