Lured by the Exotic East

By Patricia Blake

In Washington, an opulent survey of the Orientalist movement

"The pictures used to seem exaggerations--they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, they were not wild enough. They have not told half the story." So wrote Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, carried away as he was by the exotic sights of Morocco in 1867. Whether Twain was right or not, whether the reality of life in the Islamic world was more fanciful than its images in 19th century art, there could be no doubt that the popular pictures of the day exuded a fictive sensuality: the odalisque, her breasts exposed, her belly barely covered by harem trousers, lounging on a divan as she awaited a pasha's pleasure; swarthy eunuchs, armed with saber and musket, standing guard at the seraglio gates; the almah, or Egyptian dancing girl, clapping her castanets as she strips off her veils; the nubile concubine displaying her roseate flesh in a Turkish bath.

These erotic scenes, replayed in countless variations by such academic painters as France's Jean-Leon Gerome and England's John Frederick Lewis, kept the crowds coming to the shows organized by the Academic des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. By the turn of the 20th century a host of French and English artists, and a few venturesome Americans, had been drawn by the lure of "the Orient": a term that then denoted not the Far East but the Middle East and North Africa.

Capitalizing on the rage for things Oriental that had also seized writers such as Pierre Loti and Gustave Flaubert and scholars like Sir Richard Burton, the Orientalist artists vied with one another in seeking out exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesqueness, of brilliant color, of light and shade. There is a picture in every street and at every bazaar stall." Some 70 years later another novelist, E.M. Forster, foresaw a dreary end to the Orientalist movement. In a letter to a friend about a voyage through the Suez Canal, he wrote, "It was like sailing through the Royal Academy--a man standing by a sitting camel, followed by a picture of a camel standing by a seated man: picturesque Arabs in encampment, ditto in a felucca."

As Forster had predicted, Orientalist painting in its academic manifestations fell into disrepute in this century, though a few of its pictorial motifs continued to exert a lively influence on some modern painters. That the movement's appeal can be readily reactivated, however, is attested by "The Orientalists," an opulent exhibition of 102 paintings currently on view at Washington's National Gallery. The phenomenal attendance at the show--124,000 people since July 1--indicates that the paintings are still as much fun to look at as they are instructive to contemplate. And in the case of the great master of the movement, Delacroix, and its modernist heirs, Matisse and Kandinsky, Orientalism remains a source of bedazzling beauty.

The vogue for Orientalism began with Napoleon, who had a knack for creating fashion out of his bloodiest conquests. The French occupation of Egypt in 1798 produced a rash of armchairs decorated with ormolu sphinxes, tables on pyramidal bases and paintings by Baron Jean-Antoine Gros. These canvases were exuberant depictions of Napoleon's exploits, based on detailed accounts by eyewitnesses. But, as in most propagandists art, the eyewitnesses turned out to be conveniently blind. For example, the celebrated The Pesthouse at Jaffa (one of three Gros works included in the Washington exhibition) purported to document Napoleon's visit in 1799 to French soldiers struck down by the plague in Egypt. Bonaparte is portrayed as the picture of compassion, braving infection as he reaches out, Christlike, to touch one of his stricken men. In reality, as one person later reported, Napoleon was seen "lightly kicking the infected men with the sole of his boot."

Towering over Gros's minor historical curiosities, the show's eight canvases by Delacroix stand out as supreme achievements of 19th century Orientalism. Combat Between the Giaour and the Pasha was inspired by Byron's 1813 poem The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale, wherein a Venetian warrior (the giaour, or infidel in Turkish) steals a pasha's favorite concubine. So enamored was Delacroix of this saga of passion that he depicted its violent conclusion six times. In the Combat version, the giaour and the pasha do battle astride black Arabian horses, brandishing Turkish weapons that Delacroix had sketched from originals belonging to a French collector.

Yearning for the real Orient, Delacroix complained of life in Paris in his journals: "Is it living to vegetate like a fungus on a rotten trunk? ... What can Egypt be like? Everyone is mad for it. Please God! The Salon will soon bring in enough to allow me to start on my travels." Delacroix's wish was finally granted in 1832, when he was invited to join a French diplomatic mission that was negotiating with the Sultan of Morocco. During his six-month trip he kept seven notebooks of pen-and-watercolor sketches and written notes that together constitute one of the marvels of French art history.

Many of Delacroix's jottings concern the heroic Arabian steeds he loved to paint. He once sketched a battle between two stallions deep in the Moroccan hinterland. "They stood up and fought with a fierceness that made me tremble, but it was really admirable for a painting," he noted. For the next 30 years the artist would draw upon these and myriad other observations in his notebooks for his great Orientalist canvases, including his last, The Collection of Arab Taxes. Painted in 1863, the year of the artist's death at the age of 65, the picture is curiously emblematic. It shows a stallion fallen in the midst of an assault on a mysterious castle that shimmers like a mirage on the horizon.

Among all the Orientalists who painted odalisques, only Delacroix actually succeeded in penetrating an oda, the forbidden inner sanctum of a harem. His record of the visit, the magnificent Women of Algiers, is missing from this show, though it is arguably the most influential picture in the Orientalist canon. Cezanne remarked that the color of the red slippers belonging to the three odalisques in Delacroix's picture "goes into one's eyes like a glass of wine down one's throat." Renoir said he thought he could smell incense when he got close to the painting. But the greatest tribute to Women of Algiers was paid by Picasso, who painted 15 variations on Delacroix's picture in 1954 and 1955.

Delacroix's real-life harem scene conspicuously lacked the eroticism that made his fellow artists' imaginary concubines so popular. Indeed, painters and public alike were indifferent to the French novelist Theophile Gautier's observation, confirmed by Delacroix, that "dignity and even chastity" reigned in the Muslim harem. The naturalist painter Gerome tried to offset his ignorance of harem interiors in some instances by painting sexy French models against the background of the Turkish baths he had sketched in Cairo. Renoir, who traveled twice to North Africa in the 1880s, complained that British artists had so overpaid models in Morocco that he could not find a cheap enough sitter to represent a concubine. For his Woman of Algiers, Renoir made do with his own darkly voluptuous mistress Lise Trehot, decked out in bells, beads, Turkish pantaloons and other oddments of Eastern costume. As for Ingres, who produced the greatest odalisques of them all, he scarcely strayed from his Paris studio. The Orientalist touches in his pictures served largely as an excuse for painting the naked figure, which during much of the 19th century was unacceptable unless it was presented in a foreign or classical context. In his Odalisque and Slave, Ingres copied a landscaped garden, an ornate fan, a jeweled headdress and other details from Persian miniatures and from descriptions supplied by travelers to the Arab world.

The Orientalist exhibition originated at London's Royal Academy, but the National Gallery version has been reinforced by 50 more pictures from U.S. museums. The role of Gerome has been particularly played up, with eight pictures having been added to the four that were exhibited in London. The most arresting of them all is The Rug Merchant, with its subtly managed interior light, its meticulously executed detail and its once fashionable "licked surface," in which the canvas appears preternaturally polished and free of brush marks. Sadly scanted, however, are the American artists who heeded the siren call of Orientalism. Among the rare American pictures is Elihu Vedder's The Questioner of the Sphinx, an ineffably silly work that depicts an Arab crouched at the mouth of a sphinx. Most grievously absent is John Singer Sargent, whose wondrous concoction of white robes and smoky incense, Fumee d'Ambre-Gris, hangs in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.

But a stroll past the frankly conventional and documentary 19th century paintings in the show reaches a most satisfying climax in the final room. Here the curators have hung two Kandinskys, Improvisation 6 (Africa) and Oriental, and five Matisses. Familiar in their radical perception of intense color and patterning, these stunning modernist pictures may now be clearly seen to spring from the homely anecdotal function of 19th century Orientalist art. From Matisse's Odalisque in Red Trousers, with its wild yet canny mixture of background patterns, it is only a step or two up to the tower of the east wing of the National Gallery, where Matisse's superb Grande Decoration avec Masques permanently resides--surely the glory of Orientalism in our century. --By Patricia Blake