Linda Nochlin and The Imaginary Orient

by Ibn Warraq (June 2010)

 

Nowadays when discussing Orientalist art, one often begins with Linda Nochlin’s article The Imaginary Orient ,


It is unfortunate for her ideological argument that she begins with Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, which she claims is “a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology.” It was placed in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire and seat of the Caliphate, and, of course, was not a European colony. The fact that so many Orientalist artists were working in parts of the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey itself, or Syria and Palestine and the Holy Land, is a simple refutation of this non-stop nonsense about “colonialist ideology.” Egypt was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517 and remained a Turkish colony until 1798, when the French expedition under Bonaparte arrived with the intention of reinstating the authority of the Ottomans. The French interlude lasted barely three years. In 1801 a joint British-Ottoman expedition ended the French adventure. Between 1801 and 1882, Egypt was not occupied by a European power, and it was certainly not a European colony, and indeed, in a strict sense, it was never a European colony. It was an Ottoman colony for nearly three hundred years. David Roberts, who painted many magnificent scenes of Egypt and her monuments, died in 1864, and so could not have known that country under European occupation. Algeria was under French rule for 132 years, but as we shall see, those artists who went there developed an affection for and commitment to it, artists such as Eugene Fromentin. Morocco and Tunisia were under French rule for a brief period, roughly forty years each, only in the twentieth century.

Nochlin continues, “the watchers huddled against the ferociously detailed tiled wall in the background of Gérôme’s painting are resolutely alienated from us, as is the act they watch with such childish, trancelike concentration. Our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque delectation.” “Ferociously detailed tiled wall?” What exactly is her complaint? The wall is very skillfully rendered, and Gérôme, like many other Orientalist painters, delighted in depicting sensuous, colorful detail of materials, cloths, carpets, costumes, and ceramics and marble. “Childish, trancelike concentration”: apart from the condescension implicit in “childish,” Nochlin’s finds their gaze “trancelike;” I would describe it rather as “interested,” especially the black figure on the left who leans forward in eager anticipation, with a slight smile on his face.

“Clearly, these black and brown folk are mystified—but then again, so are we. Indeed, the defining mood of the painting is mystery, and it is created by a specific pictorial device. We are permitted only a beguiling rear view of the boy holding the snake. A full frontal view, which would reveal unambiguously both his sex and the fullness of his dangerous performance, is denied us. And the insistent, sexually charged mystery at the center of this painting signifies a more general one: the mystery of the East itself, a standard topos of the Orientalist ideology.”

Notice how Ms Nochlin’s own mystification suddenly, by a sleight of hand, becomes the Orientalists’ topos of “the mystery of the East.” What is the mystery? We cannot see the boy’s genitals. In which case, how does she know he is a he? She finds his buttocks “beguiling,” and apparently is disappointed that she cannot see more. She hates being left in an “ambiguous” state. And why are the spectators—condescendingly described by Nochlin as “black and brown folk”!—mystified, since they do have a full frontal view of his sex and hence of his performance? Sexually charged mystery indeed! In what way would a full frontal view reveal to us a “dangerous performance” that is not obvious from the dorsal view? Perhaps the performance is dangerous simply because it involves a snake, but we do not need a front view to figure that out; any angle will do. It is Nochlin herself who leaps from one canvas to generalize about all the Orient. It is Nochlin herself who is guilty of the very reductionistic, essentialist Orientalist generalization of which she accuses this artist. How can one go from one scene depicting a snake charmer to the claim that this represents the entire East? Perhaps it does for Ms Nochlin. It certainly does not for me or thousands of others.

Nochlin claims that the watchers in the painting are “huddled” against a wall, but huddled implies discomfort. They do not look at all uncomfortable. It is Nochlin who is uncomfortable looking at them. She claims that they are “alienated” from “us,” but the “us” is really an elliptical expression for herself, for Linda Nochlin. Some of the watchers are looking at the boy with the snake, but some appear to be watching an unrendered event behind the flutist. This further undermines Nochlin’s analysis.

“Gérôme suggests that this Oriental world is a world without change.” Gérôme, claims Nochlin, avoids the French presence. But there was no French colonial presence in Turkey where this painting is placed. “The absence of a sense of history, of temporal change, in Gérôme’s painting is intimately related to another striking absence in the work: that of the telltale presence of Western man. There are never any Europeans in “picturesque” views of the Orient like these.” But here Gérôme is not painting a historical subject or scene. All that Nochlin’s extraordinary criticism amounts to is a demand that he paint another picture altogether, whose subject matter is to be dictated by her. Gérôme did indeed paint historical subjects, such as his impressive Napoléon and His General Staff in 1867, now in a private collection. 

Of this painting, Lisa Small of the Dahesh Museum wrote, “This particular image combines Gérôme’s two great themes, Orientalism and history, depicting a somber Napoléon retreating from Acre. As [Earl] Shinn [ 1837-1886, editor of one hundred photogravures of Gérôme’s paintings in ten volumes] describes it, the emperor, mounted on his ungainly beast of burden, in this burning and dreary march…with his discontented and defeated army around…experiences, for the first time, the bitterness of disappointed ambition.”[3]

Several points need to be made. First, history was one of Gérôme’s important themes. Second, the subject is Napoléon’s defeat; there is no colonial or imperialistic triumphalism. Many Orientalist painters tackled historical subjects, especially the presence of the French in the Near East and North Africa, though Nochlin insists that the French are always “absent.” Phillipe Julian’s excellent survey defines Orientalism as “a form of Romanticism just as it is a new way of painting history, with which it is often closely linked. The artists found fresh inspiration in political events. Between 1820 and 1830, the independence of Egypt, the liberation of Greece, and the conquest of Algeria brought the Near East and the Middle East into the mainstream of European affairs.”[5]

The Battle of Aboukir by Antoine-Jean Gros

“Indeed,” continues Nochlin, “it might be said that one of the defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence.”

If you have ever visited the Taj Mahal, the seventeenth-century Moghul masterpiece in Agra, you have not resisted the temptation to take a photograph of it. If you have taken a photograph, you were anxious not to include some fat Western tourist, in shorts, hat, and sunglasses, with a camera slung ’round his neck, in the frame. You waited until there were no tourists near to spoil the view; such tourists would have looked out of place and as inapproriate as their dress. Orientalist paintings were often commissioned by Europeans or Americans back home, and the latter certainly did not want to buy views that showed tourists. Evidence of this comes from the books of two very gifted modern Indian photographers, Raghu Rai and Raghubir Singh. No Western tourists disfigure their photos. In Raghu Rai’s photo portrait of Calcutta,
Raghu Rai’s book of photographs of the Taj Mahal is pure Orientalism, using this term in a non-pejorative sense. Taken in the 1980s, his photos have a remarkable affinity to the work of the Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century. One shows what may be a camel skeleton lying in a river bed, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Gustave Guillaumet’s Le Sahara in the Musée d’Orsay. There are striking images of decaying monuments, Indian women in colourful traditional costumes, naked children playing on dirt roads, and women carrying copper or metal vessels on their heads.[8]
[10]in sight.

One can imagine what Nochlin’s criticism of an Orientalist work that did show a European in one of their paintings would be: “Of course, Gérôme would have to put in a European to remind us that it is really the European who is the master; there is no space that belongs to the Oriental, it has all been usurped by the colonialist. The Oriental cannot be left alone even in his own home…..”

Nochlin complains of Gérôme’s technique: it is too smooth, she thinks he is trying to hide his art. But Gérôme is famous precisely for his meticulous finish; it is a style of painting shared by other great painters, such as Ingres, with his superb draughtsmanship and precise Neo-Classical linear style, and without thick impasto. As Delacroix put it, “…the sight of a few Ruysdaels, especially a snow effect and a very simple marine where one sees no more than the sea in dull weather, with one or two boats, appeared to me the climax of art, because the art in it is completely concealed. That astounding simplicity…..”[12]

In any case, Gérôme’s technique was not followed or copied by all Orientalists. Some were even close to the Impressionists in their style, such Félix Ziem; some Impressionists, in the strict sense, such as Degas, Renoir, and Manet, also painted scenes from the Orient.

Nochlin complains about “a plethora of authenticating details,” especially the “unnecessary ones.” Orientalists are accused of painting an imaginary Orient, and then also accused of “insisting on authenticating details. One cannot have it both ways. Should they have left out the authenticating details? Would that have improved the paintings? And would not these details help dispel the mystery that seems to vex Ms. Nochlin? Surely it is the artist’s prerogative to decide which details are necessary and which not.

“Neglected, ill-repaired architecture functions, in nineteenth-century Orientalist art, as a standard topos for commenting on the corruption of contemporary Islamic society.” Has Nochlin ever been to the Orient? It is her Orient that seems to be imaginary. Even now, one of the most distressing sights, at least for me as someone originally from India, is the physical decay of so many beautiful historical palaces and monuments in contemporary India. It was even worse in the nineteenth century, until a British Viceroy, Lord Curzon, did something about it. The situation was, and is, similar in North Africa, Syria, Egypt, and other Islamic lands. The Orientalists painted what they saw. It is true that ruins do attract the Romantic mind, and have been popular at least since the ruins of ancient Rome were painted by Hubert Robert [1733-1808]. But delight in ruins is an aesthetic attitude, not a political statement.

New York Times journalist Alan Cowell wrote in 1989 that Cairo “oozes decay.”[15]

And, it is well-attested that tiles in Turkish mosques often fell off simply because of the poor quality of the glue used.
Nochlin complains that there are too many lazy natives in Orientalist paintings, not enough people doing their jobs, not enough activity. But she cannot have looked carefully. There is a rich-toned work by Rudolf Ernst in the Dahesh Museum of two men in their workshop, beating into shape copper objects; Charles Wilda’s A Coppersmith, Cairo [1884]; E. Aubry Hunt’s The Farrier, Tangiers</i>; Edwin Lord Weeks and Eugène Girardet painted tailors at work; and there are any number of paintings of the bazaar bustling with activity, such as Germain-Fabius Brest's View of Constantinople of 1870, now in the museum in Nantes; Albert Pasini’s Bazar at Constantinople</i>; Amadeo Preziosi's Market Scene in Cairo</i>; Fausto Zonaro's Barbers Working in a Square in Constantinople. Then there are busy port scenes in numerous paintings such as Carlo Bossoli’s Oriental Port. Dervishes are often portrayed, and they are hardly inactive. There are also paintings of hunting with falcons, guns, on horseback, and so on, as in the works of Eugene Fromentin. And what of the exhilarating sense of movement in Giulio Rosati’s Successful Raiding Expedition?[17]