The Mysteries of the Orient

Painters are such liars.

Well, some of them, anyway. Take Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French 19th-century artist who travelled extensively to Egypt and rendered on canvas the exoticism of the Orient for a western audience. Snake Charmer is so lovingly detailed, so meticulously painted, it must be true. Except it's complete tosh, an utter fabrication.

In a Muslim society, a small boy was never going to be performing naked in public. Why does he look like an antique statue, anyway? How has this motley audience come together in this rather splendid interior? And hang on, these turquoise tile panels are from Turkey, not Egypt.... from the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, except that Gérôme has reassembled them in a completely different way.

The picture is from Oriental Visions: From Dreams into Light, a fascinating exhibition at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris that looks at how European (mostly French) painters were stimulated, initially by fantasies of the East, and then later by the reality. Of course, even when confronted with the reality, artists didn't necessarily record it faithfully. In the 19th century, who was to know?

And Gérôme seems to have been a serial offender. The light-skinned woman with the toned body stripped naked in the Slave Market doesn't look very realistic, and the Young Oriental with Nargile wouldn't be flaunting herself in the street in Cairo in that see-through top, even if she was a prostitute. Still, the mongrel dogs he sometimes slips in to his pictures having a sleep in the midday heat do look quite authentic.

The show starts with Ingres, who never travelled east but famously depicted a pseudo-Oriental beauty with an impossibly long back, La Grande Odalisque, for Napoleon's sister; an odalisque being a concubine in a harem. That painting doesn't make the trip from the Louvre, but we do get Ingres's Small Bather, evoking the sensuous exoticism of the harem, which no western man could ever hope to visit.

Eugène Delacroix was one French painter who did make it to the Orient, as part of a diplomatic delegation to North Africa in 1832. Fifteen years later he painted a memory of what was said to have been a visit to a harem, though may have been a brothel. It seems a misty memory, with scraps of exotic clothing and a black servant the main hints of the location, either Algiers or Oran, according to the title.

Artists after Ingres were able to travel more freely because of the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and also because of better transport and increased trade. Charles Landelle first went to Tangiers in 1853. More than a decade later, he painted this picture purporting to be a Jewish woman from the Moroccan city. But it seems his favourite model was the wife of a farmer from Normandy, in a costume lent by a fellow artist. Hold the couscous, pass the camembert and calvados.

This is all very entertaining, but it's time to get a bit more real. Not too far beyond the coast of North Africa, the exotic colour petered out and the desert began. Eugène Fromentin was a painter and writer who travelled in the Sahara and the Sahel and who experienced the torrid heat and the effects it could have on man. 

Fromentin's The Land of Thirst records an episode when a convoy of 20 travellers was taken by surprise by a desert wind, killing eight of them and three quarters of their animals. It's a painting in which grey seems to be the predominant colour.

Fromentin's work is part of a large section devoted to landscapes in this show. The ones we found most interesting were pictures like his that conveyed the sense of searing heat and aridity. Less compelling were scenes of the North African coast; Mediterranean colours aplenty but we weren't convinced that artists looking north from Algiers were getting that much of a different experience from those looking south at the sea from Nice.

Here's Albert Marquet with a view from his balcony in Algiers. It could be Henri Matisse from his hotel room in Nice....

So let's turn to Matisse, who visited both Algeria and Morocco before World War I. In Provence in the 1920s, the artist was evoking dreams of the Orient with this Odalisque with Red Trousers. But the model isn't really oriental, it's the moorish red trousers and the wall hangings that give the flavour of the exotic.

One of the few non-French artists featured in this exhibition is Wassily Kandinsky, and there are two interesting pictures from Tunisia illustrating how his painting developed rapidly and radically in the years before World War I. Arab Town from 1905 is a stripped-down but still very recognisable cityscape. Four years later, Oriental is all flat expanses of colour. Abstraction is not far away, stimulated by the glaring sunlight of the location.

But you can't get away from those oriental bathing beauties: Edouard Debat-Ponson went to Constantinople. He won't have seen a muscled black masseuse pummelling a naked white woman in a hammam, but that didn't stop him painting The Massage in 1883.

By 1907, though, the Swiss painter Félix Vallotton has turned The Turkish Bath on its head. The eternal oriental theme is stripped of its exoticism, of its mystery. Debat-Ponson's turquoise patterned tiles have given way to claustrophobic clinical white and chilly blue. There's a blonde in the foreground, not a masseuse in sight, and this is a very unsexy collection of odalisques. And how did that dog get in?

This is a fine show, and if some of the works are more interesting from the point of view of social history than for the art, that only adds to the impact. Recommended.

Practicalities 

Oriental Visions: From Dreams into Light continues at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris until July 21. The gallery is open daily except Monday from 1000 to 1800, with lates on Thursdays until 2100. Standard tickets cost 12 euros, and there are online tickets allowing you to zip to the front of the queue available here, though they cost 14 euros. We went on a Thursday evening, and found it not very busy. It's worth getting the audioguide for an extra 3 euros.

The museum is on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne at 2 Rue Louis-Boilly. La Muette is the nearest Metro station, with Boulainvilliers on line C of the RER suburban-rail network also just 10 minutes' walk away.

Images

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Snake Charmer, c. 1879, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Small Bather, also known as Interior of a Harem, 1828, Musée du Louvre, Paris.  © 2010 Musée du Louvre/Angèle Dequier

Charles Zacharie Landelle, La Juive de Tanger, after 1866, Musée des Beaux Arts, Reims 

Eugène Fromentin, The Land of Thirst, c. 1869, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Albert Marquet, Le Balcon au Store Rayé, c. 1945, Collection Plaussu, courtesy Galerie de la Présidence, Paris

Henri Matisse, Odalisque with Red Trousers, c. 1924-25, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

Wassily Kandinsky, Oriental, 1909, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich

Félix Vallotton, The Turkish Bath, 1907, Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva