“Since the time
of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist,
an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” - Edward Said
For Art Sunday
today, Jean Léon Gérôme who was born May 11th, 1824, in Vesoul,
France and died January 10th, 1904, in Paris. He was a French
painter, sculptor, and art teacher. Son of a goldsmith, he studied in Paris and
painted melodramatic and often erotic historical and mythological compositions,
excelling as a draughtsman in the linear style of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres,
work typical of the Academicism.
His best-known
works are scenes inspired by several visits to the Orient and Egypt. In his
later years he produced mostly sculpture. He exerted much influence as a
teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts; his pupils included Odilon Redon and
Thomas Eakins. A staunch defender of the academic tradition, he tried in 1893
to block the government’s acceptance of the Impressionist works bequeathed by
Gustave Caillebotte.
In 1853, Gérôme
moved to the Boîte à Thé, a group of studios in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs,
Paris. This would become a meeting place for other artists, writers and actors.
George Sand entertained in the small theatre of the studio the great artists of
her time such as the composers Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms and Gioachino
Rossini and the novelists Théophile Gautier and Ivan Turgenev.
He started an
independent atelier at his house in the Rue de Bruxelles between 1860 and 1862.
He was appointed as one of the three professors at the École des Beaux-Arts. He
started with sixteen students, most who had come over from his own studio. His
influence became extensive and he was a regular guest of Empress Eugénie at the
Imperial Court in Compiègne. When he started to protest and show a public
hostility to “decadent fashion” of Impressionism, his influence started to wane
and he became unfashionable. But after the exhibition of Manet in the École in
1884, he eventually admitted that impressionism “was not so bad as I thought”…
The painting
here, “Harem Women Feeding Pigeons in a Courtyard” is typical of the
Orientalist style, of which Gérôme was a prime proponent. Orientalism is a term
used by art historians, literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation
or depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern, and East Asian cultures (Eastern
cultures) by American and European writers, designers and artists. In
particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically “the Middle East”,
was one of the many specialisms of 19th century Academic art. Since the
publication of Edward Said’s “Orientalism”, the term has arguably acquired a
negative connotation. This is especialy the case in the art of Gérôme, where in
the wake of the burgeoning movement of impressionism, his art became
old-fashioned and subject to derision by the new wave of moderns.
As an academic
painting this is masterly, with beautiful composition and remarkable touches of
colour, movement and an evocation of lofty space. The contrast of the “imprisoned”
harem women with the soaring freedom of the pigeons is an obvious thematic
element of the painting. As far as Gérôme’s style is concerned, this is typical
of his orientalist paintings and one that is rather modest, given that he often
took the opportunity to include sumptuous nudes of women in his paintings – something
always popular with his (male) patrons as an example of respectable erotica…
Jean Léon Gérôme and the other Orientalist artists loved the countries they visited, in North Africa, Turkey or the Middle East. The artists may have fantasised a bit about how much they really saw, but that was never racism in the way that Said meant it.
ReplyDeleteThe local characters were rarely shown as uneducated creatures who depended on violence to keep order. Even when he made mistakes, Gérôme seemed to me to be showing admiration for a foreign culture, not contempt.