orientalisme (1838; de oriental) 1. Science, goût des choses de l’Orient 2. Caractère oriental
-Dictionnaire Petit Robert
“Partly due to the reassessment of the last century- the ridiculous has again become the sublime- as well as to a renewed esteem for technique, Orientalism has again come back into favour.”
- The Orientalists: Painter-Travellers, by Lynne Thornton
The science and taste- as the French would say- for things of the Orient. I’ll test a bite of that. When I was young my grandfather repeatedly screened a 16mm print of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves featuring, as the trailer would have it, the “tantalizing beauty of Maria Montez”- real name, Maria Africa Gracia Vidal, a Dominican actress known as the Queen of Technicolor for her acclaim in heavily colorized action adventure movies.
Maybe that was what hooked me, as the trailer went on to scream in scrolling block print, on “the splendor and spectacle of the Exotic East” and “the fiery adventure of Daring Rogues.” When the end credits bled out to black, I was left in the dark with my imagination. But then I came upon the pictures…of French paintings from the same exotic East, with the same daring rogues and tantalizing beauties.
Ingres, Gérôme, Delacroix, and others perhaps you’ve never heard of- Chassériau, Decamps, Vernet, and Benjamin-Constant (whose painting The Serbian Concubine depicting not one but two nudes in the war-helmeted and armoured sultan’s bed is not on view for obvious reasons, but said to be “emblematic of his production” as reads the accession note)- unless you visit the Orientalist painting gallery (named for Kenneth Jay Lane, a designer of costume- dit fake- jewelry) at the Metropolitan Museum located just outside the Islamic wing so you can easily pivot from the real to the make believe.
Edward Said put Gérôme’s painting The Snake Charmer on the cover of his critique of Orientalism, as if to illustrate the wrong headedness of the entire genre- here in a mosque is a naked boy wearing a snake like a sousaphone before a panel of Islamic calligraphy whose spelling and orthography is as ridiculous as you might imagine a non-Arabic speaking non-Muslim can make it, as far from the sublime as one can take it.
Benjamin-Constant’s The Serbian Concubine, off view at the Metropolitan Museum