Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 9780520924406, 0520924401

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page ix)
List of Illustrations (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
1. Orient or France? Nineteenth-Century Debates (page 11)
2. Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism (page 33)
3. A Society for Orientalists (page 57)
4. Orientalists in the Public Eye (page 79)
5. Colonial Panoramania (page 105)
6. Traveling Scholarships and the Academic Exotic (page 129)
7. Matisse and Modernist Orientalism (page 159)
8. Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts (page 191)
9. Mammeri and Racim, Painters of the Maghreb (page 221)
10. Colonial Museology in Algiers (page 249)
Conclusion (page 275)
Notes (page 283)
Selected Bibliography (page 325)
Index (page 337)

Citation preview

ORIENTALIST AESTHETICS

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Orientaltst Aesthett ART, COLONIALISM, AND FRENCH NORTH AFRICA, [660-1930

Roger Benjamin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley / Los Angeles / Lendon

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benjamin, Roger, 1957 Orientalist aesthetics : art, colonialism, and French

North Africa, 1880-1930 / Roger Benjamin.

p. cm. “Ahmanson Murphy fine arts imprint.”

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN O-§20-22217-2 (alk. paper)

1. Orientalism in art—France. 2. Orientalism in

art—Africa, North. 3. Painting, French—rgth century. 4. Painting, French—2oth century. 5. Africa, North

Inart. I. Title. ND1460.E95 B46 2003

758'.995——de21 2002022627 Printed in Canada

I2 Il 10 09 O08 oF 06 of O4 03 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39-48-1992 (R 1997)

(Permanence of Paper). @

For Kate, Sophia, and Stuart

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Contents

Acknowledgments / 1x

List of Illustrations / xt Introduction / 1 1. Orient or France? Nineteenth-Century Debates / 11 2. Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism / 33 3. A Society for Orientalists / 57

4. Orientalistsin the PublicEye / 79 5- Colonial Panoramania / 105 6. Traveling Scholarships and the Academic Exotic / 129 7. Matisse and Modernist Orientalism / 159 8. Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts / 191 9. Mammeri and Racim, Painters of the Maghreb / 221 10. Colonial Museology in Algiers / 249

Conclusion / 275

Notes / 283 Selected Bibliography / 325

Index / 337

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Acknowledgments

he story of this book’s long preparation has been a péripatie undertaken in diverse corners

| of the globe. Despite the disembodying facilities of electronic mail, I think of the friends and colleagues who have contributed so much as located in specific places.

The project was devised at the University of Melbourne, where Margaret Manion, Margaret Riddle, Chris McAuliffe, and the late John Pigot gave initial encouragement and advice. It became a re-

ality thanks to the award of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, which took me to Baltimore, New York, and Paris. My work at Johns Hopkins was facilitated by Charles Dempsey, while Maria Gough, Judith Butler and Yve-Alain Bois were valued interlocutors. A visit to the University of Texas

at Austin gave me the benefit of Richard Shiff’s guidance and support. In New York the discovery at the Frick Art Reference Library of the catalogues of the Society of French Orientalist Painters shaped my research in unforeseeable ways. My colleagues Christopher Robinson, the regretté Robert Boardingham, Fred Bohrer, John Klein, and Elizabeth Childs were the source of excellent research clues. Two summer months in London provided some serendipitous ac-

quaintances, including Perry and Benedict Anderson, Gill Perry, Kathy Adler, and John House. In France the Getty funds supported work at the Bibliothéque Nationale de France and the Musée Na-

tional des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, and an all too brief journey to Tangier, Fez, and Meknés. Robert Simon, Laurie Monahan, Barbara Comte, and Héléne Hourmat were most helpful, as were

Lx

Michael Enright and Francois Frey in Aix-en-Provence, where the Centre des Archives d’OutreMer are a Mecca for research on the French colonies. My major debt in Paris is to Lynne Thornton, the doyenne of Orientalist studies. Her books and sale catalogues have been largely responsible for recovering the enormous corpus of Orientalist art.

Lynne has been remarkably generous in answering queries and providing materials. I also want to acknowledge the precious contribution of my research assistants, particularly Peter Rudd for his two long stints in Paris and, more recently, Lara Smith and Natalie Adamson. Their work, as well as much of the material of scholarship, was funded by generous grants from the Australian Research Council.

I have grateful memories of my hosts at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, who were

extraordinarily kind to a stranger at a time when it was becoming difficult for foreigners to travel there: Malika Bouabdellah, then director of the museum; my hosts Samia and Djafaar Boulharouf; and my guide in the city, Nouredine Ferroukhi. They have often been in my thoughts during the turmoil of their country. Two major exhibitions gave a scholarly fillip to my research. I thank Caroline Turner and Doug

Hall of the Queensland Art Gallery for the exhibition Matisse, which gave me the opportunity to revisit his Moroccan phase. Edmund Capon’s commission to curate Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee facilitated my work in all kinds of unexpected ways. His colleagues at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in particular Anne Flanagan and Ursula Prunster, were most helpful, as were Brahim Alaoui,

Mounira Khemir, Caroline Mathieu, Geneviéve Lacambre, Dominique Taffin, and Jean-Francois Heim in Paris. I have fond memories of working with Brian McDermott of the Mathaf Gallery, of Tayeb Zahzah and Maitre Si-Ali Tiar. The specialist booksellers of Paris, particularly Michéle Dhennequin, must be thanked. Frangois Pouillon’s brilliant scholarship in Orientalist art has been matched

by his generous friendship.

Along the way I have been the fortunate recipient of advice from Peter Kohane, David Brand, Timothy J. Clark, Aimée Brown Price, Phillip Goad, Terry Smith, Thomas Crow, Karen Esielonis, Paul Duro, Emily Apter, Richard Pennell, Zeynep Celik, and Peter Hulme. The students in my sem-

inar on Orientalist visual culture at Melbourne University challenged my intellectual stasis, while former students Mary Roberts, Caroline Jordan, Lara Smith, and Luke Gartlan have been most enrich-

ing interlocutors. The librarians of Ormond and Trinity Colleges in Melbourne graciously provided me with places to write. The book was finalized at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National Uni-

versity, Canberra. I am profoundly grateful to its foundation director, Nicholas Thomas, for providing the luxury of a research fellowship in this uniquely stimulating environment. Thanks also to the ever-supportive lain McCalman, Howard Morphy, and Caroline Turner, and those able admin-

istrators Anne-Maree O’Brien and Julie Gorrell. Anne McGrath, Hollis Clayson, David MacDougall, Lynne Thornton, and Francois Pouillon read chapter drafts at this time, while CCR col-

2 Acknowledgments

leagues, including Christopher Pinney, Klaus Neumann, Greg Dening, and above all Nicholas Thomas offered fruitful conversations. Chaitanya Sambrani and Natalie Adamson helped order illustrations, while Neal McCracken and Stuart Hay proved to be the nec plus ultra of black-and-white

photography. At the University of California Press, 1 want to offer my commissioning editor, Deborah Kirsh-

man, and her assistants Kim Darwin and Jennie Sutton my thanks for their faith in this project and the gift of their patience. The Press’s three external readers offered extremely productive suggestions and advice. My editor, Stephanie Fay, improved my expression in a way I no longer believed

was possible and, with Fronia Simpson, brought the manuscript to a new level of consistency and rigor.

Finally to Kate Sands, my wife, I owe an inestimable debt—for her calming encouragement and

advice, for her skillful reading of drafts, and her sustaining ways over months and years. Our children, Sophia and Stuart, were born and have grown alongside this book; they have shown me that satisfaction in a task completed is a primal pleasure that should never be deferred too long. Author’s note: In the interests of accessibility, I have translated all French texts (unless another trans-

lator is acknowledged). I have used English versions of names for museums and organizations except where convention demands it (e.g. Ecole des Beaux-Arts). Titles of paintings are given in both English and French, books and articles in French only. For the orthography of Arabic names I have used the French rather than the English model.

Acknowledgments we

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Tllustrations a]

Abbreviations ADAGP Société des Auteurs Dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques, Paris ANU Australian National University, Canberra RMN Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris

Map of North Africa circa 2900 (opposite page 2)

Plates (following page 104) 1. Eugéne Fromentin, Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat (La rue bab-el-Gharbi a Laghouat), 1859, oil on canvas, 142 x 103 cm. Musée de la Chartreuse Douai (photo: Claude Theriez)

2. Henri Regnault, Hassan and Namouna (Hassan et Namouna), 1870, watercolor, gouache, and black pencil on paper, 56.5 x 79 cm. Alain Lesieutre Collection, Paris (photo courtesy Beaussant & Lefévre) 3. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mosque at Algiers (La mosquée a Alger), 1882, oil on canvas, 49 x 60 cm. Private

collection (photo: A. C. Cooper Ltd)

4. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The jardin d’Essai in Algiers (Le Jardin d’Essai, Alger), 1881, oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm. Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas

x1iL

5- André Suréda, 4 Fountain at Tlemcen (Une fontaine a Tlemcen), 1916, gouache. From LZ Vlustration, 1930

(photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne)

6. Etienne Dinet, “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute) (“La quesba” [longue flite de roseau/), ca. 1914, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy Gros & Delettrez, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris) 7. Etienne Dinet, Andalusia in the Time of the Moors (L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures), 1900, color lith-

ograph poster, 257x 97cm. Courtesy Dominique Durand, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris) 8. Victor Prouvé, Arab Horseman (Cavalier arabe), 1890, oil on canvas, 80 x 54 cm. Musée de |’Ecole de Nancy. © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

9. Léon Carré, The Nude Dancer (La danseuse nue), 1912, gouache and gold leaf, 21.3 x 14.5 cm. Private

collection (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris) 10. Charles Dufresne, Oriental Scene or Bathers (Scéne orientale or Baigneuses), ca. 1914, watercolor, wash, and pencil on paper, 36 x 47 cm. Photothéque du Musée des Années 30, Boulogne-Billancourt. © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

11. Henri Matisse, The Casbah Gate (La porte de la Casbah), 1912-13, oil on canvas, 116 x 80 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (photo: Art Resource, New York). © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001

12. Henri Matisse, Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape (Les acanthes, paysage marocain), 1912, oil on canvas, 115 x 80 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 13. Azouaou Mammeri, View of Moulay-Idriss (Vue de Moulay-Idriss), ca. 1929, oil on canvas, 100 x 130 cm.

Private collection 14. Mohammed Racim, Illumination with Koranic verse, 1916—17, gouache and gold leaf, 24.5 x 19 cm. From

Dinet and Ibrahim, Za vie de Mohammed, prophéte d’Allah, Paris, 1918 (photo courtesy Gros & Delettrez, Paris)

15. Mohammed Racim, The Rais (Le rai’s), ca. 1931, gouache heightened with gold, 18.5 x 13.5 cm. Tayeb

Zahzah Collection, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris) 16. Ketty Carré, The Courtesan (La courtisane), 1918, distemper on cardboard, 30.3 x 23 cm. Private collec-

tion (photo: ArtGo / Mare Guermeur, Paris)

Figured 1. Eugéne Giraud, Théophile Gautier Smoking His Chibouk (Théophile Gautier fumant son chibouk), 1862,

watercolor, 51 x 38 cm. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 13 2. Emile Lessore and William Wyld, View of Algiers, Seen from the Faubourg Bab-Azoun (Vue d’Alger, prise du Faubourg Bab-Azoun), from Voyage pittoresque dans la Régence d’Alger, 1835, lithograph, 22 x 33 cm.

Private collection (ANU Photography) / 14 3. Adrien Dauzats, The Place du Gouvernement at Algiers (La Place du Gouvernement a Alger), 1849, oil on

canvas, 17 x 22 cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly (photo: Bridgeman Art Library) / 14 4. Riding Camels, anonymous wood engraving, from Cox, dn Search of Winter Sunbeams, 1869 (photo:

Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 15

XIV Illustrations

5- Eugéne Delacroix, Arabs Traveling (Arabes en voyage), 1855, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm. Museum of Art,

Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Appropriation / 16 6. Eugéne Fromentin, Arab Falconer (Fauconnier arabe), 1863, oil on canvas, 108 x 73 cm. Chrysler Museum

of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.71.648 / 20 7. Théodore Chassériau, Arab Chiefs Challenging Each Other to Single Combat under the Ramparts of a City (Chefs de tribus arabes se défiant au combat singulter, sous les remparts d’une ville), 1852, oil on canvas,

91 x 118 cm. Musée d’ Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN, Gérard Blot) / 21 8. Jean-Léon Gérome, The Almeh (Arab Girl in a Doorway) (L’Almée), 1873, oil on canvas, 53 X 40.5 cm.

Najd Collection (photo courtesy of the Mathaf Gallery, London) / 26 g. Eugene Fromentin, photographic carte de visite, ca. 1870. Société de la Géographie, Paris. Bibliotheque

Nationale de France photographic plate / 28 to. Gustave Guillaumet, Weaving Women at Bou-Sadda (Tisseuses @ Bou-Sadda), ca. 1885, oil on canvas,

55 x 75 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN) / 30 11. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Copy after Delacroix s “Jewish Wedding” (Copie d aprés “Les noces juives” de Dela-

croix), 1875, oil on canvas, 108.7 x 144.9 cm. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts / 35 12. Photo of Mosque Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, Algiers, ca. 1929. From Georges Rozet, L’Algérie, 1929 (ANU

Photography) / 38 13. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Stairway in Algiers (Escalier a Alger), 1882, oil on canvas, 73 x 60.5 cm. Private

collection / 39 14. Albert Lebourg, Algiers Street (Rue a Alger), ca. 1876, oil on canvas. Musée National des Arts d’Afrique

et d’Océanie, Paris (photo: RMN) / 40 15. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume, 1882, oil on canvas, 126.5 x 78.2 cm.

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1955.586 / 44 16. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Algerian Figures (Types algériens), 1882, oil on canvas, 35 x 40 cm. Musée Na-

tional des Beaux-Arts, Algiers (photo: Giraudon) / 46 17. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Old Arab Woman (Vieille femme arabe), 1882, oil on canvas, 30 x 24. cm. Worces-

ter Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, museum purchase / 47 18. Albert Lebourg, The Port of Algiers (Le port d’Alger), 1876, oil on canvas, 31 x 47 cm. Musée d’ Orsay,

Paris (photo: RMN) / 50 19. Nadar Studio, Léonce Bénédite, ca. 1900. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 51 20. Gustave Guillaumet, The Seghia, Biskra (La Séguia, Biskra), 1884, oil on canvas, 100 x 155 cm. Musée

d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN, Hervé Lewandowski) / 54 21. G.Fraipont, Algerian Exposition: The Interior Courtyard (Exposition algérienne—La cour intérieure), wood

engraving. From Huard, Livre d or de l’exposition, 1889. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic

plate / 60 22. Eugene Grasset, At the Place Clichy (A la Place Clichy), ca. 1895, typographic poster. From Les maitres

de laffiche, 1895—96 (photo: National Gallery of Australia) / 63 23. Frédéric Régamey, The Colonial Delegates, November 1892 (Les délégués aux colonies, novembre 1892), oil

on canvas, 90 x 79 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (photo: RMN) / 64

Illustrations xv

24. Marius Perret, Souvenir of the Fouta Expedition (Souvenir de la colonne de Fouta), 1892, lithograph. From Les peintres-lithographes: Album spéctale, les Orientaltstes. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic

plate / 68 25. The Bonvalot Mission in Abyssinia (La mission Bonvalot en Abyssinie). Maurice Potter second from left,

Gabriel Bonvalot center. From Z’///ustration, 1897 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 68 26. Alfred Dehodencgq, Execution of the Jewish Woman (Le massacre de la Juive), n.d., oil on canvas. Musée

Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris (photo: RMN) / 70 27. Etienne Dinet, Portrait of Sliman ben [brahim (Portrait de Sliman ben Ibrahim), ca. 1902, oil on cardboard.

Whereabouts unknown (photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 72 28. Paul Leroy, The Chourbah: The Orientalists’ Dinner (La Chourbah: Diner des orientalistes), March 1897,

lithograph. From Les peintres-lithographes. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 73

29. Paul Leroy, symbol of the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Marque de la Société des Peintres

Orientalistes Francais), 1895, wood engraving (ANU Photography) / 75 30. Victor Peter, medal awarded by the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Médaille de recompense de la Société des Peintres Orientalistes Frangais), 1899. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1899. Bibliotheque

Nationale de France photographic plate / 75 31. Adolphe Chudant, A/giers—Cocktail Hour (Alger —lheure verte), ca. 1895, lithograph. From Les peintres-

lithographes. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 76 32. Adolphe Chudant, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters (Ge Exposition des Peintres Orientalistes Francais), 1899, lithograph. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1899. Bibliotheque Nationale de France

photographic plate / 76 33. Alexandre Lunois, Stxth Exhibition of the French Ortentalist Painters (Ge Exposition des Peintres Oriental-

istes Francais), 1899, maquette for poster, oil on canvas, 116 x 81 cm. (photo courtesy Gros & Delettrez,

Paris) / 80 34. Charles Cottet, Low Mass in Winter, Brittany (Messe basse en hiver, Bretagne), 1902, oil on canvas. Musée

du Petit Palais, Paris (© Photothéque des Musées de la Ville de Paris; photo: Pierrain) / 84 35. Charles Cottet, Fe/lah Women (Femmes fellahs), 1894, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne

et Contemporain de Strasbourg / 85 36. Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. Evening Promenade, Morocco (Promenade du soir), ca. 1930, oil on canvas,

81x65 cm. Private collection / 88 37- Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Portrait of Pierre Loti, “Phantom of the Orient” (Portrait de Pierre Loti, “Phan-

tome de Orient”), 1896, pastel, 42 x 56 cm. Musée Basque de Bayonne / 88 38. Emile Bernard, Cairo Merchants (Les marchands du Caire), 1900, oil on canvas, 242 x 196 cm. Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris (photo: RMN) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Syd-

ney,2001 / 90 39. Théodore Riviére, Salammbé and Mathé (Salammbé et Mathé), 1895, bronze. From The Paris Exhibt-

tion, 7900 (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 91 40. Paul Gauguin, /a Orana Maria (We Greet Thee, Mary), 1891, oil on canvas, 114 x 88 cm. The Metropol-

itan Museum of Art, Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 51.112.2. All rights reserved / 93

AE Illustrations

41. Etienne Dinet, mam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia” (Imam présidant la priére: “At Tahia”), ca. 1921, oil

on canvas, 78.2 x 85.4 cm. Private collection (photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 96 42. Etienne Dinet, The Son of a Holy Mrabeth (Le fils d’un saint M’rabeth), 1900, oil on canvas, 87.6 x 92 cm.

(photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 97 43. Etienne Dinet, Siman ben Ibrahim at the Place de la Concorde (Sliman ben Ibrahim a la Place de la Concorde), before 1908, oil on canvas. Whereabouts unknown. From Dinet and Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie

arabe, 1908 (ANU Photography) / 99 44. Dinet painting on his terrace [at Bou-Saada], ca. 1925 (ANU Photography) / 101 45. Colonial precinct of the Trocadéro Palace gardens, west side, Paris, 1900. From Hachette, Paris Expo-

sition, 7900. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 107 46. The Algerian Street—Unofficial Section, Paris, 1900. From The Paris Exhibition, 7900 (photo: State Ref-

erence Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 108 47. Joseph de la Néziére, Diorama of Fez, 1922, oil on canvas, 32 m. long. Moroccan Pavilion. From Livre d or de l’exposition coloniale, 1922. Bibliothéque Nationale de France photographic plate / 111

48. Louis Tinayre, The Panorama of Madagascar (Panorama de Madagascar), Paris, 1900, oil on canvas, timber, and plaster. From Le Panorama, i900 (photo: Bibliothéque Forney, Paris) / 112 49. Scellier de Gisors, Pavilion of the Dioramas (Pavillon des dioramas), Paris, 1900. From Souvenir de exposition coloniale de 2900 (photo: Bibliotheque Forney, Paris) / 113 50. Moving Stereorama, or Poéme de la Mer, Palais des Attractions algériennes, Paris, 1900. From De Natuur,

1900 (ANU Photography) / 115 51. Louis Dumoulin and Alexandre Marcel, Le Tour du Monde, 1900. From Ze Panorama, 7900 (photo:

Bibliothéque Forney, Paris) / 115 52. Javanese dancers with Louis Dumoulin’s painted view of Angkor Wat, in Le Tour du Monde. From Le

Panorama, 7900 (photo: Bibliotheque Forney, Paris) / 117 53- Lion Court (Cour des lions), in L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures, Trocadéro Gardens. From Le Panorama, 7900 (photo: Bibliothéque Forney, Paris) / 119 54. The Arena (Les Arénes), in L’ Andalousie aux temps des Maures, Trocadéro Gardens. From Ze Panorama,

2900 (photo: Bibliotheque Forney, Paris) / 120 55- Installation of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Francais, Moroccan Pavilion, Ghent Exposition, 1913.

From L’Action africaine, 1913. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 121 56. Jules Charles-Roux, ca. 1906. From Notice officielle et catalogue illustré des expositions des Beaux-Arts,

Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille, 1906 (photo courtesy Frick Art Reference Library, New

York)» “4 G23 57- Abyssinia—Arrival at Harrar of M. Lagarde, envoy of the French government (Abyssinie—Arrivée a Harrar de M. Lagarde, envoyé du gouvernement frangais). From LZ ‘//ustration, 1897 (photo: Baillieu

Library, Melbourne) / 133 58. Paul Buffet, The King of Kaffa (Central Africa) (Le roi de Kaffa [Afrique centrale/), pen sketch after a

painting, ca. 1897. From Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1899 (photo: National Gallery of Australia) / 134

Illustrations XVII

59. Etienne Dinet, The Terraces of Laghouat (Les terrasses de Laghouat), 1885, oil on canvas, 27 x 39 cm. Musée

National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 137 60. Victor Prouvé, Fantasia, 1888, watercolor from the Liber Amicorum of René Wiener, 31 x 23.7 cm. © Musée Lorrain, Nancy (photo: P. Mingot) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 141 61. Victor Prouvé, At the Menzel Foutain (A la fontaine de Menzel), 1895, lithograph. From Les peintreslithographes. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate© ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Syd-

ney,2001 / 142 62. Jean Bouchaud, The Villa Abd-el-Tif Overlooking Algiers, gouache. From L Vlustration, 1925 (photo: Bail-

lieu Library, Melbourne) / 146 63. Léon Cauvy, Wintering—Tourism—Algeria (Hivernage—Tourisme—Algérie), ca. 1930; color lithograph

poster (ANU Photography) / 148 64. Léon Carré painting in a garden overlooking Algiers, ca. 1913. From L’4rt et les Artistes, 1914 (ANU

Photography) / 149 65. Léon Carré, The Muleteer (Le muletier), 1910; oil on canvas. From L’4rt et les Artistes, 1914 (ANU Pho-

tography) / 150 66. Léon Carré, Murals in Presidential Antechamber, ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothéque

Forney, Paris) / 152 67. Léon Carré, Muslim Life (La vie musulmane), ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothéque

Forney, Paris) / 153 68. Marius de Buzon, Return from the Market (Retour du marché), ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothéque Forney, Paris) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 154 69. Charles Dufresne, North African Landscape—the Oued at Bou-Sadda (Paysage nord-africain—l oued de

Bou-Sadda), ca. 1910-12, pen and ink, 26.5 x 36 cm. © Centre Georges Pompidou (photo: P. Migéat)

© ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 155 7o. Charles Dufresne, Algerian Oasis (Oasis algérienne), ca. 1912, gouache, pastel, Chinese ink, pencil on cream paper, 45 x 40 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (photo: Lysiane Gauthier © Musée des

Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 156

71. Biskra, with old indigenous village in the foreground and new town beyond. From Georges Hardy, Géographie et colonisation, 1933 (ANU Photography) / 162 72. Henri Matisse, Street in Biskra (Rue a Biskra), 1906, oil on canvas, 34 x 41 cm. Collection J. Rump, Statens

Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 162

73. Etienne Dinet, 4n Ouled-Nail, before 1906, oil on canvas. From Dinet and Ibrahim, Khadra, danseuse Ouled-Nail, 1927 edition (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 166 74. Henri Matisse, H. Matisse by Himself (H. Matisse par lui-méme), 1912, pen and ink on paper, 19.3 x 25.3 cm.

Private collection. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 171 75. Henri Matisse, On the Terrace (Sur la terrasse), 1912-13, oil on canvas, 115 x 100 cm. Pushkin Museum of

Fine Arts, Moscow. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 172 76. Henri Matisse, The Standing Riffian (Le Rifain debout), 1912, oil on canvas, 146.6 x 97.7 cm. The State Her-

mitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 175

LVLIL Illustrations

77. Abd el-Krim. From Z’///ustration, 1922 (ANU Photography) / 177 78. A. Delannoy, Marcel Sembat, ca. 1910. From Les Hommes du Jour, 1910 (ANU Photography) / 178 79. Henri Matisse, Landscape Viewed from a Window (Paysage vu d'une fenétre), 1912-13, oil on canvas, 115 x 80 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy,

Sydney, 2001 / 182 80. Bab el Assa, Tangier, 1991 (photo: Héléne Hourmat) / 183 81. Henri Matisse, Moroccan Café (Café marocain), 1912-13. Distemper on canvas, 176 x 210 cm. The State Her-

mitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 185 82. E.-A. Séguy, Mass of Anthuriums in the Garden at Hamma, Algiers (Massif d’anthuriums dans le jardin du

Hamma, a Alger), 1921. From LMllustration, 1922 (ANU Photography) / 187 83. Henri Matisse, Moroccan Garden (Jardin marocain), 1912, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas, 116.8 x 82.5 cm.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Florene M. Schoenborn (photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 188

84. Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey. From Z ///ustration, 1931 (ANU Photography) / 193 85. Goldand silver Berber jewelry from Algeria. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1901. Bibliotheque Nationale

de France photographic plate / 196 86. Mme Luce Ben-Aben’s indigenous embroidery workshop (Ouvroir de broderie indigéne de Mme Luce Ben-Aben). From A. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts... en Algérie, 1907. Bibliotheque Nationale de

France photographic plate / 197 87. Edouard Herzig, Trial Creation of a Carpet in Hispano-Moorish Style (Essai de création d’un tapis de style hispano-mauresque), ca. 1907. From A. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 1907. Bibliotheque

Nationale de France photographic plate / 199 88. Bennani-abd-el-Hadi, 4 Daisy (Une marguerite), pencil. From France-Maroc, 1917. Bibliothéque Nationale

de France photographic plate / 204 89. Bennani-abd-el-Hadi, 4 Bouguet of Flowers (Un bouquet de fleurs), pencil. From France-Maroc, 1917.

Bibliothéque Nationale de France photographic plate / 205 go. Classic Rabat carpet, mid—nineteenth century. From Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, vol. 1, 1923 (photo:

La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 206 91. Josephde la Néziére, photo of the Exhibition of Moroccan Carpets at the Pavillon de Marsan, 1919. From

France-Maroc, 1919. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 208 92. Rabat carpet of modern manufacture, ca. 1920. From Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, vol. 1, 1923 (photo:

La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 209 93. Analysis of the design of a Zaian carpet. From Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, vol. 2, 1926 (photo: La

Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 209 94. Central Patio of Moroccan Pavilion, International Colonial Exposition of Marseille, 1922. From LMlustration, 1922 (photo: La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 212 95. The “Studio orientale,” apartment of Jacques Doucet at Neuilly, ca. 1929. Moroccan ceramics in vitrines. From Z ‘Wlustration, 1930 (Photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 214

LLLUSET@LTONS Ce A a

96. Office/Smoking-Room and Bathroom (Bureau-Fumoir et Salle de Bains). Moroccan section, International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, Paris, 1925. From Monde colonial illustré,

1925. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 216 97. Léon Cauvy, Carpets and Their Manufacture (Les tapis et leur fabrication), mural, Algerian section. From Album de l’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs, 1925 (photo: Bibliothéque Forney, Paris) / 218

98. Azouaou Mammeri, The Fountain (La fontaine), ca. 1917, crayon drawing. From France-Maroc, 1917.

Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 225 99. Azouaou Mammeri, /nterior of a Koranic School (Intérieur d ‘une école coranique), ca. 1917-18, oil on can-

vas, 77-5 X 92.1 cm. © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001, Gift of Jacques Cartier, 1923.223 / 227 too. Azouaou Mammeri, View of Fez (Vue de Fez_), ca. 1920, oil on canvas, 70 x 92 cm. Musée d’ Orsay, Paris

(photo: RMN, Hervé Lewandowski) / 230 tor. Fez from the tombs of the Merinids. From LZ V//ustration, 1922 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 231

102. Azouaou Mammeri, The “Monteée des Rats” at Fez (La “Montée des Rats” a Fes), ca. 1920, oil on can-

vas. From L ‘Vlustration, 1921 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 232

103. Si Azouaou Mammeri, Muslim artist and drawing teacher... Rabat (Si Azouaou Mammeri, artiste musulman, professeur de dessin . . . Rabat). From Z V//ustration, 1921 (photo: Baillieu Library, Mel-

bourne) / 234 104. Mohammed Racim, frontispiece for Mardrus, Les mille nuits et une nuit, vol. 10, 1930. Courtesy Gros &

Delettrez, Paris (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris) / 239 105. Mohammed Racim, Persian Hunt (Chasse persane), ca. 1920, gouache heightened with gold. Musée

National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 240 106. Mohammed Racim, Casbah Terraces (Les terrasses de la casbah), n.d., gouache heightened with gold,

26 x 32 cm. Musée National des Beaux-Artsd’Alger / 242 107. Bayot, Terraces of Algiers (Terrasses d’Alger), 1837, lithograph. From Berbrugger, L’Algérie historique,

pittoresque, et monumentale, 1843 (ANU Photography) / 243 108. Barbary Galley (Barbarjsche Galeyen), Flemish engraving, seventeenth century. From Z 7//ustration, 1930

(photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 246 109. Mohammed Racim, Naval Battle (Bataille navale), ca. 1932, gouache heightened with gold, 30 x 23 cm.

Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger / 246 110. The Monument aux morts, Algiers. Boy Scouts salute the fallen of World War I. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 253

111. Pierre-Marie Poisson, Centenary of French Algeria medal, 1930. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de

l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 253 112. Dormoy, Algeria, Land of Great Agricultural Production (L’Algérie, pays de grande production agricole),

maquette for centenary poster, 1930, oil on board (photo: Centre des Archives de l’Outre-Mer, Aix-

en-Provence) / 254 113. Indigenous Chiefs Await the President of the Republic (Les grands chefs indigénes attendent le Président de

la République). From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 255

Doe Illustrations

114. The Salle Pierre Bordes, concert hall in Algiers, 1930. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930

(ANU Photography) / 256 115. Installation of the Armée d’Afrique, Musée de la Casbah, 1930. From Mercier, Le Centenaire de ['Al-

gérie, 1930(ANU Photography) / 257 116. Regnier and Guion, architects, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Le Bulletin des Musées

de France, 1930. Bibliothéque Nationale de France photographic plate / 260 117. Paul Guion, design for the terrace of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, ca. 1928. From Le Bulletin de Vart ancien et moderne, 1930. Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 262 118. Hall of plaster casts, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Note sur lethnographie, | archéolo-

gie, les musées, et les beaux-arts en Algérie, 1948 (ANU Photography) / 262 119. Claude Monet, Rocks at Belle-Ile (Les rochers de Belle-Ile, or Mer démontée), 1886, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm. Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger (photo: Giraudon) / 264 120. Facade with Antoine Bourdelle’s La France, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Note sur

lethnographie .. . et les beaux-arts en Algérie, 1948 (ANU Photography) / 265 121. Francois Barry, /nauguration of the Statue of the Duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers, 2846 (Linauguration de la statue du duc d’Orléans sur la place du Gouvernement, a Alger en 1846), n.d.,

oil on canvas. Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Le Bulletin des musées de France, 1930.

Bibliotheque Nationale de France photographic plate / 267 122. Albert Marquet, The Admiralty Dock at Algiers (Le Bassin de l’Amirauté a Alger), ca. 1930, oil on canvas. From LZ Vlustration, 1930 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy,

Sydney, 2001 / 270 123. Charles Halley, architect. Palace of Contemporary Colonial Fine Arts, Vincennes. From Edma Nicoll,

A travers l’exposition coloniale, 1931 (ANU Photography) / 277

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the elegant Moorish buildings so as to continue its frightful arcades.”’ As if in a prelude to the arguments over Baron Haussmann’s demolition of old quarters of Paris to make way for the great boule-

vards in the 1860s, Gautier in 1849 regretted the passing of old Algiers. The most glaring act of de-

struction there was the razing of the Turkish Palace of the Deys to open up the vast Place du Gouvernement (soon ringed with Haussmannesque buildings).° Adrien Dauzats was one of the early artists to depict this much-painted center of public life in Algiers (Fig. 3). The recently erected statue of the duc d’ Orléans (a leader in the war against Abd-elKader) and the masts of ships beyond contrast the French presence with the Mosquée de la Pécherie,

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|+set ys Ss or Arab Chiefs Challenging et fae > y F 5 n Each Other to Single Combat

4 j +eea we we Sa oil under Ramparts of a Se is City, onthe canvas, 1852. There Fromentin details a falconry hunt at Lake Haououa and a fatal fantasia (a display of riding and skill in arms by a mass of galloping horsemen) that followed. In the latter a key character in the narrative, a Mozabite (town-dwelling desert Berber) beauty friendly to the narrator, named Haoua, is crushed by a horse ridden by her jealous husband. The drama of both the fantasia and the accident is absent from Fromentin’s painting, however, as are the scenes of harsh desert life in the Sahara volume (with the notable exception of the Land of Thirst (Pays du soif.).”®

Fromentin admitted he was emotionally drawn to the glamour of the exotic yet rationally repelled by it. That incompatibility of responses can be linked to his technical limitations as a painter, which he himself lamented. (He felt, for example, that Delacroix was the only artist skilled enough to represent adequately that great image of Maghrebian horsemanship, the fantasia.)”’ But the broader prob-

lem was to communicate with a European public lacking the wherewithal to appreciate the exotic scene, because the Oriental landscape, for Fromentin, “escapes every convention; it is outside any discipline; it transposes, it inverts everything.” *”

Such classicizing biases impinge on one last aspect of Fromentin’s travel books: his sense of the East as biblical. Presuppositions shared by Delacroix, Gautier, and many other travelers to the East in the nineteenth century led them to compare the Oriental scene to ancient Rome and Palestine. Fro-

Orient or France? Zt

mentin pushed the biblical analogies further than most.’! In Sahara, for example, his encounter with

a tribe on a march evoked the migrations of ancient Israel. Painter colleagues in Paris had recently argued that the old masters “had disfigured the Bible by painting it,” and the only way to revive its spirit was to go to the Orient and contemplate its “living effigy.”” In theology the correlate of this argument was Ernst Renan’s Vie de Jésus Christ of 1861, a con-

troversial ethnographic reconstruction of Christ’s life that had the effect of querying his divinity. Against such modernism Fromentin sided with the old masters, reinforcing the biblical character of the Arab people of the Sahara, who possessed “real grandeur,” achieving “without being nude, . . .

that almost complete stripping back of exterior form that the masters conceived in the simplicity of their great souls.”** Fromentin was not pleading here for painters to use Bedouin sitters to give local color to biblical paintings. For him that approach was doomed: “To costume the Bible is to destroy it.” Such conversations about race and ethnicity continually animate Fromentin’s narratives. His observations treat not just Arab people but also categories like “Moors” and “Negroes,” whom he had trouble defining, and the mercantile classes of Jews, who were ancient immigrants, and Mozabites, who were autochthonous people. Fromentin wrote almost nothing, however, about the various south-

ern Mediterranean peoples—Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, and Spanish, who, with the Provengals, Alsatians, and other French, made up a good proportion of the colonials arriving in North Africa in the nineteenth century. Such exercises in ethnographic classification typify the writings of French visitors to, and settlers in, the colony, starting with the military observers of the Bureaux arabes who had first begun to cat-

egorize the peoples with whom they had either to negotiate or to fight. As Patricia Lorcin has admirably demonstrated, such writings propagated the Kabyle myth, which argued for the racial sep-

arateness of the Berber peoples of Algeria (primarily the Kabyle, Chaouia, and Mozabite groups) from the Arabs. The Berbers were considered autochthonous Algerians who had resisted the waves of Arab conquest by retreating to the Atlas Mountains of Kabylia and the Aurés. They lived in villages and farmed, unlike the nomadic Arabs, and thus had developed characteristics and social insti-

tutions that brought them far closer to Europeans than the Arabs would ever come. The Berbers’ conversion to Islam had only ever been partial, unlike that of the “fanatic” Arabs. According to the racial scale most Europeans accepted in the nineteenth century, the Berbers were well above the Arabs,

if below the Europeans. Arabs were generally denigrated for their immorality (their practice of polygamy), their irrationality (their acceptance of Koranic religion), their lack of productivity (their

failure to either farm or pursue a trade), and a general duplicity.” Fromentin’s observations contradict the conclusions of the Kabyle myth while preserving its struc-

ture and its contrast between nomadic and sedentary peoples. He idolized the Arabs, writing of the heroism of their nomadic life, their moral toughness, their simplicity. In Sahe/he spends pages defining

ae Orient or France?

the Bedouin peoples of the plain against the sedentary Moors, city dwellers of Turkish heritage and

commercial disposition. Kabyle farmers scarcely appear in his account, perhaps because he rarely encountered them. Such racial preferences underwrite the imagery of his painting, so wholly given over to the people of the plains and arid zones. As for indigenous perceptions of the French, Fromentin had few illusions. Indeed, in a politically

precocious passage he describes the Arab hatred of the French. But he defends his countrymen as much better rulers than the Turks, even as he details the estrangement of a colonized people in their own land because of the abhorrent presence of an invader: “What [the Arabs] detest in us . . . is not our administration, more equitable than that of the Turks; our less venial legal system; our religion,

which is tolerant of theirs. ... What they detest is our proximity, that is to say, ourselves: our style, our habits, our character, our genius. They fear our very kindness. Not being able to exterminate us, they endure us; unable to flee us, they avoid us. Their principle, their maxim, is to be silent, to disappear, and to have us forget them.” ”

The Realtst Critique of Orientalism: Castagnary and Duranty

It is not far from Fromentin’s ambivalence about the French presence in the Orient to outright opposition, both to colonialism and the more specialized art it engendered. It is not surprising that when

an intellectually sustained critique of Orientalist painting challenged the unmitigated approbation of Gautier and Baudelaire and the equivocation of Fromentin, it came from the realists. Members of that camp were both opponents of the academic order and critics of the social order. Baudelaire’s distaste

for military painting and all it stood for was shared by authors on the French Left, but as the century advanced, their perception of the problems of the colonial enterprise became more far-reaching. The socialist position—that capitalists in the international framework had as little right to exploit work-

ers in foreign climes as they did the European proletariat—was articulated well before the turn of the century. Charles-Robert Ageron has shown that leftists had no monopoly on anticolonial sentiment.*® They were joined, for differing reasons, by French royalists and by republicans such as Georges

Clémenceau, who felt that after the defeat of 1871 France should muster all its military resources to

face the threat on the border with Germany, rather than spread them thin across territories outside Europe. Argument also raged (and has continued to rage) over the economic benefit of the colonies

to France—whether they cost more to run than they returned, thus draining the nation’s resources in the name of national pride and in the desire that France hold a position commensurate with that of her European rivals, England in particular. Such arguments only occasionally filtered through to discussions of art. More often writers on the

visual arts justified French colonialism on cultural grounds. Because, they argued, colonialism is a civilizing enterprise, bringing to African and East Asian countries the “benefits” of a modern social

Orient or France? 23

order, trade, communications, literacy, and—perhaps above all—treligion, it was an indisputable good.

The argument against modernization also found its place early on in art criticism, with Gautier, as we have seen, leading the way. He valued the East for its difference from modernizing Europe and feared European urbanism, imported from across the Mediterranean, as a destructive force. Realist writers such as Champfleury, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and above all Antoine Castagnary

seldom dismissed Orientalist art on explicitly political grounds, instead relying on aesthetic arguments. Yet there is a logical congruence between rejecting European colonial hegemony and the realists’ call for French artists to occupy themselves with the problems of the national school on French

soil, to prefer France to the Orient. Castagnary developed a critique and sustained it over two decades, from 1857 (when as a young law clerk he published his first Salon review) to 1876, when he effectively declared Orientalism dead

and buried.*’ He may be credited with introducing the term “Orientalism” to define a tendency in art, as often happens, in a pejorative sense, isolating and decrying what he considered a negative development. Gautier, an ebullient but unsystematic critic, had written positively of “Africanist” and then of “ethnographic” painting but let both rubrics quickly fall into disuse. Castagnary realized the advantages of being consistent in his negativity. In his “Salon of 1857” he refused to describe exoticist painting in detail, considering it a waste of

space he could devote to the contemporary French school of landscape, led by his hero Gustave Courbet, which was making important advances. He classed exponents of exotic scenes among the

inferior landscapists, who “go far off to search in the Orient, deep in the desert, for a nature that is

extraordinary and lacks any relation to our ideas and our temperament. ...In vain do they... reproduce effects that we, as men of the Occident, are unable to judge, as these effects find no harmony in ourselves.” **

These arguments have a familiar ring. Fromentin had appealed to concepts of “le beau” in claiming that the African landscape stretched the limits of representation. Castagnary appeals, not to such

elite values, but rather to the psychology of the broad public, whose faculty of judgment is seemingly limited to affirming the veracity of what it knows by experience. Courbet put that view of paint-

ing in his famous letter to his students of 1861, a manifesto of realism thought to have been ghostwritten by his friend Castagnary. The letter argued that painting was an essentially concrete art that

should be concerned only with real and existing things, and that judgments about beauty and truth were always relative, dependent on an individual’s faculty of understanding.” It follows for Castagnary that painting the local French scene makes the best sense in art: “I love the nature that surrounds

me because, being born into it, used to seeing it, I and such a nature are in intimate correlation. It has, as it were, entered into the development of my ideas, participated in the formation of my personality, and wherever I go, I carry it with me. Now your desert, your palm trees, your camels may

astonish my intelligence, but they will never produce the sweet and peaceful emotion given me by

24 Ortent or France?

the sight of cows in a meadow edged with poplars.” *’ That affirmation of place and European identity is almost xenophobic. In describing some archetypal Barbizon landscape replete with cows, mead-

ows, and poplars, Castagnary excludes any image of the nation made outside the hexagon of true France. The French colonial empire—what came to be called greater France or France overseas— did not qualify as a subject for painting. Fromentin’s growing reputation caused Castagnary to make a few concessions. It is not clear when

he first read Fromentin’s Sahara, but in his next major Salon review Castagnary betrayed a sneaking admiration for Fromentin, an amateur writer envied by professionals, a lawyer and artist unan-

imously considered preeminent among painters of the Orient. Nevertheless for Castagnary, Fromentin remained too much the romantic, interested in the “picturesque point of view,” always searching for “the joujou, the pretty touch that fits in well.” But the critic continued to hope Fromentin would take a more naturalist turn, and again paint French subjects, French identity."'

The term “Orientalist” first appears in Castagnary’s writing when he returns to the attack in his “Salon of 1864.” There is nothing remarkable about the term itself, which, as Said has shown, was regularly used to describe nineteenth-century scholars, in particular linguists, philologists, and historians of the Near and Middle East. Indeed in 1873 the International Congress of Orientalists was founded in France to promote such studies.*” Castagnary sought reason to find the painters he called

Orientalists (such as Léon Belly and Narcisse Berchére) unpatriotic, guilty of a failure to believe in

the beauty of France and its people. Orientalists, consumed by a hatred of the here and now, have but one desire, to “flee Paris, to abscond from the world around them, to escape the obsession with the real and the present. There is nothing they would not prefer to what is.”*” It is not surprising to find the realist associating escapism not only with place but also with time. That imaginative transposition includes both mythological subjects and the painters of distant ages, like Lawrence Alma-Tadema, in his Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Egyptiens de la dix-huitiéme

dynastie). Jean-Léon Gérome, an exponent of the neo-Greek taste, was one of the most prominent contemporary Orientalists who traveled regularly (Fig. 8). Castagnary was scathing about Géréme’s selling off the studies he had made during his voyage to the Orient: “His 4/meh is a note he should have kept in the portfolio. It is of a coldly calculating indecency, and I recoil from describing it. Petit métier, in any case, mean, unpleasant, boring in the extreme.”™

Escapism, lack of patriotism, abhorrence of social realities, technical conservatism—such were the insults the realist critic threw at Orientalism in the year following the Salon des Refusés. Before

the end of the decade little had occurred to counter the decadence of the genre for Castagnary.” Then the young Henri Regnault burst onto the scene. His Spanish work, the Portrait of General Prim (Portrait du Général Prim) and his Salomé of 1870, attracted considerable attention from the many artists and critics who still had faith in the Salon as the location of important new art. Regnault was an elite convert to Orientalism: winner of the Prix de Rome, he had defected from the academic main-

Orient or France? BS

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Weaving Women at et rnWeen tg ge>=. | eS OP Bou-Sadda, oil on “ser Boe LE RE.Silpe: ee Eset SSeS » canvas,as, ca.ae1885. tN : surrection of 1871 reversed such prospects. A stronger alliance between military, Catholic, and com-

mercial colonial interests in Algeria meant the tightening of the colonial fist throughout Algeria.” Strangely for a leftist, Duranty appears to approve the colonization of Algeria; it is not clear, how-

ever, whether Fromentin’s heroizing of the Arabs in their precolonial state would have helped or hindered the Arab cause, if indeed it had any effect at all.”’ Duranty develops his case against Fromentin by allying him with the symbolist Gustave Moreau (the artist’s close friend), claiming that together they propagate a strange system of painting, “lim-

P 8 ) g, and p passag y

ited in the south by Algeria, in the east by mythology, in the west by ancient history . . . the confused ainting of an era of criticism, curio-hunting, and pastiche.” In an ironic passage Duranty denounces

such painting as the ridiculous outcome of studio painting practices:

They fraternize with the chaouchs [Algerian servants] and dzskris; they have taken

their black-bearded model down from his studio platform and stuck him on a camel before the Portail de Gaillon. They have cloaked him in a woollen bedspread borrowed from the butcher next door because this fraternizing with Arabs has made them blood-thirsty. Finally, they have added the secar la cabeza of the sabir [Algerian

working-class dialect] jargon of the swarthy natives in the province of Oran to their Italian vocabulary brought back from Rome.”

30 Orient or France?

The passage is as notable for its contemptuous references to indigenous Algerians as for its scathing comments on any painter who dresses and poses models, rather than simply observes the daily life of French people in their work or their domestic environment (Edgar Degas was Duranty’s favorite artist).”” Echoing the arguments for a patriotic geography that would ban exoticism altogether, Duranty (perhaps inadvertently) showered Algerians themselves with contempt and managed to voice

support for the French colonial effort at the same time—hardly a pleasing posture for one of the early apostles of modern art. Despite the rain of criticism that seemed to fall upon Orientalism in the year 1876, in painting it did not die. Castagnary, Duranty, Zola, and even Fromentin himself proved wrong in their dire prognostications. While Orientalism may have been quiescent over the next decade (except in Guillaumet’s

notable work in oasis towns [Fig. 10] and Renoir’s trips to Algiers), by the late 1880s a new genera-

tion of vigorous Orientalists had come into view. There are reasons for the ultimate failure of the realist critique. The first is that (unlike Gautier, Baudelaire, and Fromentin) its exegetes did not correctly read the public psychology that pushed French artists to travel abroad. The second is that the energy of French colonial expansion greatly increased as the century advanced, with attendant propagandist machinery (including the Universal Expositions of 1889 and 1900) that will be discussed

in later chapters. The further breakdown in the Rome School’s dominance of academic aesthetics meant that during the 1880s exoticism was promoted through the vehicle of state-funded traveling scholarships. And in the end there were flaws in the logic of Castagnary’s position: the nationalist argument to which he appealed could be inverted, for example, by writers of the 1890s like Léonce

Bénédite, who claimed colonial painting as a patriotic mission to establish the glory of “greater France.” More profoundly, Castagnary’s points about the cultural ken of the French public and the need to “verify” painting assume that desires, the imagined, and the unfamiliar have no place in the

consumption of art.

Orient or France? 31

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In fact impressionism was by no means innocent of the exotic. Claude Monet, after the first year of his painting studies in Paris, allowed himself to be drafted into military service and chose to travel to Algeria, where he spent seventeen months in the fashionable regiment of the Chasseurs d’ Afrique. In 1900 he recalled: Nothing had attracted me so much as the endless cavalcades under the burning sun, the razzias [raids], the crackling of gunpowder, the saber thrusts, the nights in the

desert under a tent. . . . I succeeded, by personal insistence, in being drafted into an African regiment... . In Algeria I spent two /sic/ really charming years. . . . In my moments of leisure I attempted to render what I saw. You cannot imagine . . . how much my vision gained thereby. . . . The impressions of light and color that I received there were not to classify themselves until later, but they contained the germ of my future researches."

Monet’s preconception of military adventure reads like a page out of Vernet or Delacroix. After just a year of service an attack of typhoid fever sent him back to convalesce in Le Havre, where his fam-

Renoir and Impressionist Ortentalism ee

ily agreed to buy him out of the regiment. He returned to his promising career as a painter. Nothing remains of the works Monet recalled making in Algeria, even if, as he told a journalist in 1889, they were numerous and directly presaged some of the techniques of his impressionism.’ But I will return in the course of my argument to his claim that his impressionist techniques were in fact predicated on North African light. No doubt Monet’s memories of Africa helped prompt his friend Renoir’s two trips to Algiers, for a month in February 1881 and two months in spring 1882. Renoir’s biographers agree that he was in crisis about the direction of his art when he traveled to the Cote d’ Azur, Italy, and Algeria. His discovery of the Mediterranean prompted Monet’s subsequent return, which led to his series of garden

paintings of Bordighera in 1884. I am less interested in the art-historical “crisis of impressionism” than in the patterns of travel disclosed by Renoir’s Algerian trips, which were comparable to those of British and American painters beginning to journey in greater numbers to Algeria, often after sojourns in France. Algiers was the obvious destination: the Islamic sultanate of Morocco was off-limits (apart from the international port of Tangier), and Tunisia did not become a French protectorate until 1881. Renoir’s travels had a therapeutic aspect as well as a seasonal logic. Undertaking a budget

Grand Tour, Renoir, like a good tourist, was effectively engaging in winter tourism in Algeria (to translate the French term Aivernage). He did so partly to recover from pneumonia—a common pathology for travel to the Orient. The idea and itinerary are encapsulated in the title of abook by an American congressman, Samuel Cox: Search for Winter Sunbeams in the Riviera, Corsica, Algiers, and Spain,

of 1868. Such a search relied on the new steamship and rail technology that Gautier had vaunted as delivering new subjects for painting. One may fairly characterize Renoir and a host of fellow artist tourists as peintres d ‘escale, to adapt the term /ittérature d ‘escale, or “port-of-call” literature. Renoir

was an artist of the stopover. But it is surprising how much good painting he was able to produce during his brief stays in Algeria. He visited Algeria some fifty years after the French wars of conquest had begun, and in the tem-

perate north the infrastructure of a modern state—roads, railways, ports—was being imposed on the country. Since the insurrection of 1871, French laws had forced Kabyle farmers off their land and

broken up the old system of Arab land tenure. The French were energetically cultivating crops like the grapevine that had no place in the Islamic economy. For two generations the colonists had been knocking down sections of Algerian towns and building in the European (but not yet the Moorish)

manner. The process was especially advanced in the capital Algiers, where, except for the hillside precinct of the Casbah, much of the original town and the waterfront had been remodeled, as Gautier had lamented, in imitation of the arcades and apartment blocks of the Rue de Rivoli.

The “exotic” was thus retreating in Algeria, where many thousands of French and other European colonists lived, where their language and their money were accepted, where the police and the army provided security. Hardier travelers could chase the exotic south by train and stagecoach to oa-

306 Renotr and Impressionist Orientalism

sis resorts like Biskra (where Gustave Guillaumet and Charles Landelle painted in the 1870s and 1880s),

or they could, like Renoir, seek it out in the easy environs of Algiers itself. The best-known of Renoir’s Algerine cityscapes is Arab Festival, Algiers: The Casbah (Féte arabe,

Alger: La Casbah). Exhibited at the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1895 as La mosquée a

Alger and described as “a picturesque milling of Arab multitudes on uneven ground,”’ it was purchased by Claude Monet in 1900. The occasion Renoir painted, never firmly identified, is a performance by North African musicians (like those painted previously by Delacroix, Fromentin, and Alfred Dehodencgq). In the center of the canvas a ring of five male dancers in turbans and red caps play tambourines and flutes before a large crowd. Such musicians were often hired to help celebrate parties and some religious feasts. Local men, women, and even children are scattered across the nat-

ural amphitheater formed by the raw earth of the heights behind the Casbah—identifiable as the crumbling Turkish ramparts (today built over) above the Jardin Marengo and the Bab el Oued quarter of Algiers. Indigenous people mingle with a small number of European observers suggested by black suits, hats, and occasional women’s bonnets. Below this terrain vague, the corner of bleached domes and cubes appears to depict the precinct of the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman looking down

to the blue sea. Thus the ancient buildings of “Algiers the White” help anchor this unconventional composition.

Renoir probably considered the North African spectacle as a characteristic problem of pictorial Orientalism: how to render the light and color of the exotic site. If so, he was true to the tradition of

Delacroix’s painting and of Fromentin’s travel books. His son Jean, recalling that Renoir “discovered the value of white in Algeria,” quotes him as saying, “Everything is white: the burnous they wear, the walls, the minarets, the road. . . . And against it, the green of the orange trees and the grey

of the fig trees.”* In that comment everything betokens the problem of the palette—the Algerian locals matter most for the white they wear. In short, the colonial traveler, enjoying the fruits of his country’s dominance, aestheticizes the colonized people, treats them as spectacle. That attitude re-

turns us to Monet’s construction of Algeria as a site of visual revelation and, still earlier, to Fromentin’s description of the Orient as a site of “unclassifiable” experiences. Fromentin believed that his canvases rarely met the challenge of painting such experiences, and neither perhaps did those of Renoir, who preferred the temperate Mediterranean zone in and around Algiers. In about 1880 Al-

giers boasted numerous sites where foreign landscapists could set up their easels to paint outdoors with little risk of interference, provided they observed propriety and the view, rather than the figure, was their subject (as Fromentin had recommended). Moorish architecture held great attraction for Renoir. Mosque at Algiers (Mosquée a Alger; see Plate

3) was painted on his second trip. Many of the traditionally garbed figures (with the exception of a

wealthy-looking woman in a head-to-foot haik) are rendered wraithlike before the solidity of bleached Moorish architectural forms. Renoir’s picture shows one of the most venerated of all Al-

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Albert Lebourg, Algiers Street,foal ae | mi b. 50 oil on canvas, ca. 1876. : long stone staircase to the facade and dome on the right, adapts Dutch picturesque devices, like the perspective along an avenue of trees, to an exotic situation. Renoir, in defining an aspect of the Al-

giers experience as a vertiginous optic, the view that plunges up or down, concurred with the photographers and painters of the day who similarly recorded the cramped, stepped streets of the Casbah. Earlier still, some of the first lithographers visiting Algiers had transcribed views from the heights

of Casbah terraces, out across the rooftops to the distant port below. Renoir, like them, provides a local staffage: an implausible mother-and-child group, and several burnous-clad men, boys, and alley cats sheltering, like Fromentin’s “cadavers,” in the shadows on the stairs. Renoir’s inclusion of the Algerian populace in his architectural scenes differs from the practice of Lebourg, who spent the years 1872—76 in the city as drawing master at the Société des Beaux-Arts.

Most of Lebourg’s small oil paintings study streets of the old Turkish quarter and port of Algiers. They are almost universally unpeopled, as if the crumbling, bleached walls were enough of a sub-

40 Renotr and Impressionist Ortentalism

ject in themselves (Fig. 14). Roger Marx was later to remark on “the intensity of luminous vibrations, the limpidity of the air, the transparency of shadows” in Lebourg’s painted études, “whose technique . . . inaugurates new directions in the representation of the lands of the East.” "’

Lebourg precedes Renoir in importing a modernist vision into North African painting, not only in time, but also in the abstracting effect of his brushwork. In Port of Algiers (Port d ‘Alger; see Fig. 18)

the vigorous blocking of the architectural elements and the animated strokes on the water are com-

parable to those in the toughest impressionist landscapes. Lebourg was also modernist in his use, more than a decade before Monet, of the loose series as a structure for visual research. What held back Lebourg was his palette: his Algiers views were tonal compositions, extensions of earlier landscape traditions. Hence his exclusion from the ranks of canonical impressionists——Camille Pissarro,

for example, criticized Lebourg’s later French landscapes as “black.” * Renoir, in contrast, brought a new coloristic intensity to the North African scene with his already well established blond, high-

color palette. Jean Alazard (author of the first major history of Orientalism) recognized that: “He looks at the Jardin d’Essai and the Moulin de la Galette with the same eyes, sensing vivid impressions and immediately crystallizing them in color. . .. One must recognize that the scale of his col-

ors is the same in Algiers as in Paris; he did not modify it. . .. He [understood] the Mediterranean rather than the Oriental element in the atmosphere and sky of Algiers.” ? It was precisely the atmosphere and human spectacle of this Mediterranean zone that Fromentin had evoked in his book centered on Algiers, 4 Year in the Sahel. Reprinted with his Summer in the Sahara in 1874, that text may have encouraged Renoir to visit Algiers and directed him to the nearby

hamlet of Mustapha, where Fromentin had had his lodgings. The verdant crescent of the Bay of Algiers went well beyond the city, where the French now occupied the elegant Moorish villas built by rais (corsair captains) under the Ottoman Regency. Renoir lodged in the center of town, at the Rue de la Marine (with its cafés and bistros) next to the port. But he painted out at Mustapha, describing the landscape in this letter to a patron: “You ought to see this Mitidja Plain at the gates of Algiers. I have never seen anything more sumptuous and more fertile. At this moment they are planting vines

with such frenzy that it looks as though they are doing it for the arrival of a king, as though to say, ‘Look how my people work.’ . . . Normandy is poor by comparison.”!* Renoir’s letter is remarkable for the completely positive light in which he sees the colonial process. He encapsulates the sense of possession, of both the land and the labor of the indigenous, in his image of a visiting sovereign with

power over all he surveys. Like other Frenchmen, Renoir was proud of this richest province of what was called l’Afrique francaise, where imported Australian eucalypti were proving a success along-

side the vineyards. Renoir added, “The farmers here are making enormous fortunes, the properties are increasing in value, and in ten years Algiers will certainly be the most beautiful city in the world.”

On the contrary, within a decade artist visitors were fleeing Algiers for the interior, likening it to a noisy and polluted industrial suburb of Paris.

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 4l

Renoir was particularly interested in the subtropical vegetation that grew in profusion in the Mediter-

ranean zone of North Africa. In the Orientalist iconography, plants like the palm tree become archetypal markers of the exotic, even when abstracted from their desert oasis habitat. In fact, much of the

plant life of the Mitidja was introduced rather than native, including the banana trees that appear in Renoit’s Field of Banana Trees (Champ de bananiers; Musée d’ Orsay, Paris). Congressman Cox, a keen

amateur botanist, evokes Renoir’s subject in describing a day trip from Algiers: “an... excursion... into the hills and among the vegetable wonders and beauties which surround the city. . . . Lining the roads in the meadows are orchards of bananas. In fact, the banana is a great crop here.” ” In Renoir’s

canvas—one of two Algerian pictures he chose to exhibit at the 1882 impressionist exhibition—the vigorous banana palms form an allover screen of variegated fronds. Renoir nonetheless carefully located this compositionally daring scene, with the Mustapha hillside and the city glowing white in the distance.

It is likely that Renoir did this painting in the Jardin d’Essai (an experimental garden), the only Algerian site he returned to repeatedly, painting a suite of striking pictures. Founded soon after the 1830 invasion, Cox explains, it was “somewhat after the manner of similar gardens at London and Washington, for the collection and acclimatization of all the rare grains, plants, trees, fruits, and flow-

ers.”'° The fascination of the famous botanical garden consisted in this variety of specimens grown to maximum proportions, an exotic picturesque. Renoir’s Jardin d’Essatin Algiers (Le Jardin d’Essai, Alger; see Plate 4) depicts one of the avenues in which dragon palms alternate with tall palms. As with Field of Banana Trees, Renoir experimented

in turning over most of the picture space to the spiky, vigorous foliage itself. He assumed the vantage point of a casual stroller looking down a deep perspective of trees, almost shutting out the sky

with the canopy of palms, like Corot or Monet in the woods of the Ile-de-France. Here the fronds, seen overhead against the sunlight, make patterns of striated shadows on the path. When Renoir ex-

hibited the work in 1882, the cartoonist Draner (Jules Renard) lampooned it in a thumbnail sketch of feather dusters, to which he gave the punning (and untranslatable) caption “Un jardin qui a ses plumeaux par un peintre qui a son plumet.”'’ Moorish buildings could also be motifs in the garden’s picturesque ensemble, as in another work, the more pastoral Jardin d’Essai at Algiers ( Jardin d’Essai a Alger; private collection), comparable to Monet’s later Bordighera palm gardens. In both Monet and Renoir the Mediterranean appears as

a zone where Africa and the Riviera interpenetrate—in the quality of their light and in their vegetation. The Jardin d’Essai, where extraordinary plants were ordered by the controlling lines of French

formal gardening, remained a favorite site for twentieth-century painters; its connection to the aesthetics of exoticism was cemented by the establishment nearby of the studios of the Villa Abd-el-Tif in 1907 and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers in 1930. In considering Renoir’s figure painting, it is useful to recall that the Orientalist enterprise is fun-

42 Renotr and Impressionist Orientalism

damentally informed by differences of power between the indigenous and settlers or tourists, who usually presume that their presence provides a right to carry on cultural operations with little heed to violence that may be done to the cultural priorities of the indigenous. There is evidence of that presumption in Renoir’s figure paintings and his commentaries on them. On the brief first trip to “this beautiful country” he wrote to a friend: “The women so far are unapproachable; I don’t understand their jabber /éaragouin/ and they are very fickle /trés Jacheuses/. ?m scared to death of start-

ing something again and not finishing it. It’s too bad, there are some pretty ones but they don’t want to pose.” ®

The reluctance to pose is understandable: it contravened the Islamic convention against picturing people or animals in the plastic arts that applied broadly in the Maghreb at the time, and it violated

the laws of propriety that forbade a woman to appear in public without her veil. That obstacle, endemic to Orientalist painting, may explain why some of Renoir’s Algerian figures are no more than sketches, hasty impressions of people caught unawares or seen at a distance. Renoir’s letters suggest

that it was not for want of trying that he painted rather little in Algiers. He wrote to Durand-Ruel: “Here I am, more or less settled in Algiers and negotiating with some Arab [men] to find models, which is not easy, since it’s a question of who is the trickiest /guz trompera le plus/. But I hope that this

time I will manage to bring you back some figures. . . . ’'ve seen some incredibly picturesque children. Will I get them? I’ll do whatever is needed for it.”'” Part of the problem of models was financial: although a few were available, Renoir could not match what the many wealthier traveling artists

paid them: “The figure, even in Algiers, is getting more and more difficult to obtain. If only you knew how many bad painters there are here. It’s insane, and especially some Englishmen who spoil the few available women. C’est insupportable!””

One way Renoir could get around the intercultural and colonial obstacle was to dress European sitters in Eastern costume, a time-honored expedient of Orientalists from the eighteenth-century Swiss

artist Jean-Etienne Liotard on. For one such cross-cultural masquerade Renoir dressed the ten-year-

old daughter of Louis Fourcaud, a Parisian art writer and journalist, in a specially purchased costume and produced an admittedly saccharine study of her head and bust.

He employed the same procedure in the most appealing and elaborate of all his Algerian figure paintings, recently retitled Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume (formerly Jeune fille au faucon, Fig. 15). Recalling his second trip to Algeria, the artist told Ambroise Vollard: “I caught the inevitable cold in my chest at L’Estaque, which decided me to take a second trip to Algeria. There I made a lifesize portrait of a young girl named Mlle Fleury, dressed in Algerian costume, in an Arab house, holding a bird.”?! Mlle Fleury may have been related to General Fleury of the Armée d’ Afrique. (Renoir

certainly had a growing reputation as a portraitist to the metropolitan Aaute bourgeoisie.) The unlikely addition of the flapping European kestrel was very likely provided to satisfy public expectations of Orientalist imagery, as MaryAnne Stevens suggests. The seductive passages of painting—as

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism 43

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wpe 2a— aests Ss ss repsy + phe Fost ad : hh. AR r; + v=, eae FIGURE IfA “ oi - :aes a Lee ae tsi”ail at: a—— ee eens . tsAuguste weed a “sd —7 =e Pog a. Le Pierrea = je , , =¥ gee es 2-3) ~~ Renoir, —— = ‘ 2 ee ee . i cat a . ; asl —2 ee rat pa of =ye t'ipety Faein ifeehae SS xives . |, ametcae — a as gs) 28 aoe

Algerian :_ 4ee ee £&s,Costume, on = ty ‘e) eS, 72-ae > ° “ = J ~~oil > 7per isi - ald heim - ie =eae La

Be, aktS Be.=a4 Mets rhe ¢i~ > Ps ae oe PF ed ee Canvas, 1882. gts ~ = oy ie r Sen r=useas— ; em eT re ae a OY 4aii akin a, aa oe xanit {n‘ : :Cc “s 7eean; : aan St, ae - 3 iNG ae ne; A ae 2/!j A “5 Sea wl) +S: ts —s-. oer eeSos aie

t- , fa _. = - = = + > —= >, = 5S ge eS "> = > E == sot ' = =e = =. — — 1 ~

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y ‘ ; 3 ot 0S ae — . "Se Ry eee oe . j . > A - shames | ; . ‘sie i, aFAT, NS =oafn.ea=ERE a ee Repo ae: a-==i xgeVR : ire :wn ; *soe hig’ ee - .a=a :> arm ay oree YY = ; em ee ——— 7 —oeS 2 ie ee Ma) te Fanehe =

FIGURE 18 Albert Lebourg, The Port of Algiers, oil on canvas, 1876.

fully debate the role of impressionism in relation to the Orientalist tradition. For Marx, “Our Mediter-

ranean colony stimulated . . . the aspiration of our school toward brightness. Not a single master of impressionism has dwelled there without profit, Claude Monet first of all, Lebourg soon after, Renoir

more recently. In regard to |[Lebourg], Algeria was the veritable midwife of his talent... . I know

of no Orientalist for whom the brightening of the palette has been so rapid.”*! Marx considered Lebourg’s Algerian works more technically evolved than those of his near-contemporaries Regnault or Guillaumet, the abbreviated detail of Lebourg’s studies contrasting with their accumulated visual facts. But Marx also remarked on Lebourg’s repetition of motifs, in particular the port of Algiers. In retrospect such repetition might seem to anticipate the modernist serial practice of Monet’s

Haystacks and Cézanne’s Mont Ste-Victoires. Marx is sensitive to this issue of repetition, writing that Lebourg painted “the Admiralty and the navy buildings lapped by cerulean waves . . . many times,

from the same point, in every weather, in the middle of the day, at sunup and sundown... . He drew from a single theme the text of pictures that were similar yet unlike.” *” While Marx’s terminology

bears the imprint of writing on Monet’s series of the 1890s, he does not claim any precedence for Lebourg in inventing a serial structure. Not so Léonce Bénédite, from 1892 curator of the Luxembourg Museum in Paris (Fig. 19). Bénédite

50 Renotr and Impressionist Ortentalism

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1% ~ J f , 3, “6 44 as at Ny Bits Ys : The Bonvalot ' aw »%ae ‘4

. ‘ . . with * Mey é : 3‘~ =; F. d=, Abyssinia, Maurice AS) Potter second from left, ae oe ee et a. a. a oake ~she Te Wee Gabriel Bonvalot */ )ya Was “4 4 : ' bP iP center, 1897. , .\ .a. a. et 5 &4 an" . ;¥ i * a= ft é.s »—" J| ue. . : BS) —¥

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FIGURE a©~~ »=es by :26 ~uh “ae :.. e. Alfred Dehodencg,

Execution of the Jewish a. | . : Woman, oil on canvas, ss

n.d. eo oe roa : ” a tr

taken in adultery. But in transposing the scene to the sultanate of Morocco (Dehodencgq was a long-

term resident of Tangier prior to his suicide) and omitting a Christ-like protector for the terrified kneeling woman, Dehodencg makes it easy to indict the severity of Islamic justice meted out by the dark-skinned figures towering over her. For the 1895 retrospective Bénédite and Dehodencq’s biographer, Gabriel Séailles, gathered a group of such images. They included Execution (L’Exécution), Bastinado (La Bastonnade), and The Punishment of Thieves (Le supplice des voleurs), the last presum-

ably showing the atrocious torture of cutting and binding the hands in salt—a detailed account of

£6 A Society for Orientalists

which is the most indelible image in the contemporary travelogue by Pierre Loti, 4u Maroc. Such paintings have much in common with the violence in the Luxembourg’s Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada by Dehodencq’s contemporary Henri Regnault. It would have been unfair and repellent to focus on such scenes, however, and Bénédite gave ample space to Dehodencq’s more peaceable subjects. Thus a Little Gypsy Girl (Petite bohémienne) and a Little Orange Seller (Petit marchand d oranges) form the counterpoint, as do Dehodencq’s best-known

series, his carefully observed Moroccan storytellers, traveling musicians, and marriage ceremonies.” Such subjects take up the agreeable sociality and color of Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding, enlarging in oils on scenes of daily life that Delacroix had left latent, as it were, in his Moroccan notebooks and watercolors. In 1897 it was the turn of Chassériau, the star of late romanticism who had combined the colorism

and tumult of Delacroix with the seductions of Ingresque line in some of the best Salon pictures of the 1840s and 1850s. Bénédite was able to borrow his famous Portrait of the Caliph of Constantine from

the Chateau de Versailles and some of the small scenes of battling tribesmen now in the Louvre.” These and numerous other works were assembled with the aid of the artist’s descendant, Baron Arthur

de Chassériau (who became the society’s president after Bénédite’s death in 1925). The retrospectives of 1898 and 1899 presented landscapes and figure paintings by Belly and Guillaumet that exemplified the preoccupation with conditions of light and atmosphere; again family connection explains

how some fifty works by each artist were lent by Bénédite. Belly’s remarkable Pilgrims Going to Mecca, from the Salon of 1861, was a popular work on continuous exhibition at the Luxembourg in the 1870s, and the Louvre after 1881. Today Belly’s and Guillaumet’s role in the history of Orientalism has been recognized at the Musée d’ Orsay, where their works dominate the one room permanently given over to the movement. Thus ended the series of exhibitions of acknowledged masters, frankly genealogical in purpose, intended to legitimize the nascent group, give historical substance to Orientalism as a pictorial practice, and also, as Bénédite remarked, inspire young painters entering the vocation of painter traveler. His strategy for giving the Orientalist Painters prestige was certainly successful: many reviewers were

delighted to expatiate on the work of these indisputably impressive artists. If the society’s retrospectives in the nineties achieved genealogical consolidation, after 1900 came

the moment of institutional self-reflection. The society moved from Durand-Ruel’s to the Grand Palais, built to house the fine arts at the Universal Exposition of 1900 and thereafter the main staterun venue for temporary Salons and exhibitions of all kinds. At the Grand Palais the Orientalist exhibitions could expand greatly in scale. (The apogee of one thousand paintings was reached in 1913.)

The society also began to assert its institutional identity in a different way: the retrospective gaze turned from illustrious predecessors to its own members. Just as the death of Guillaumet in 1887 had

precipitated the group’s initial sense of mission, so the tragic deaths of two young members led toa

A Society for Orientalists 71

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FIGURE 27 et 1a VAS SSeS rae Etienne Dinet, Portrait Va oe ; : : eh rad ‘ >.of«: ) »A eoi w “aae | —_

Sliman ben Ibrahim, oil on —, lcd i , > FE : cardboard, ca. 1902. prace! ONS. 4 ae

new form of group solidarity. Shows were mounted for the Ethiopian casualty Maurice Potter and for Marius Perret, who had died of illness in Java in 1900. Gérdme’s death in 1904 at the age of eighty-

two led to a memorial exhibition of seventeen works. Later retrospectives showed works by the ethno-

graphic sculptor Charles Cordier and by Constant-Georges Gasté, who died while painting in India in 1910.” Such consecrations consolidated the membership of the Orientalist Painters and, with the

assurance that members’ deaths did not go unrecognized, established the atmosphere of a friendly society or union. The Orientalist Painters had other strategies for encouraging its members to identify with the society. Membership offered distinct ceremonial advantages: these, after all, were the “banquet years” of which Roger Shattuck wrote so exuberantly.*’ In those days an annual exhibition was celebrated with a formal dinner. A journalist recounts the banquet that closed the exhibition of 1896: “The menu

was frankly exotic . . . a couscous, prepared in nomad fashion, had actually been executed under the direction of Sliman ben Ibrahim, a Mozabite sheikh brought to Paris by M. Dinet. . . . Adding to the seductions of the cuisine was the table, embellished by the little Caravan of M. Théodore Riviere, so ingenious and so vibrant, and at the end by magnificent baskets of exotic fruits. Several toasts were

72 A Society for Orientalists

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| (La cHOURSAE | Sm Orierilalistes p>) (Aa)

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FIGURE 31

ORAS T Ul Be Wene EeW7 AWAY,

Adolphe Chudant, HRA aahacnase AE Aiea baleen E 7. ‘ Lt) eRe e NE Li ia 1 tay ee: r Algiers—Cocktail Hour, Fst + Bel) EXP OS] Ti ONS ay lithograph, ca. 1895. psec: DE SPEINTRES. Set P
f pt. = * p>) b R4 . . . . J MFINTRES ORIENTALIST: a ee PO te ee | me TEE. EN I fuel Loy % 7 f — —_~ . a

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Bernard, famous in the history of modernism as Gauguin’s collaborator in founding the School of Pont-Aven. Doubtless following the example of Gauguin, he fled France in 1893 for Cairo, where for the next decade he lived the life of an Arabophile cosmopolitan gentleman.” Bernard’s painting

there began with a Pont-Aven primitivist reinterpretation of the Egyptian fellah. In early Egyptian pen-and-watercolor drawings like Women at Market (Femmes au marché), these long-robed agricul-

tural workers are flattened forms rendered in radically simplified pen outlines, with no attempt at modeling. In a more sustained canvas like Arab Festival (Féte arabe) the visual treatment owes some-

thing to Bernard’s cloisonnist handling of fieldworkers in Brittany (making him a second artist to “Bretonize the fellah”), passed through the screen of Tuscan primitives he had admired in Italy in 1893. After 1898, however, partly as a result of his visits to Italy and a growing disaffection with the

modernist project, Bernard developed an idiosyncratic rendering based on his admiration for the Venetian old masters Tintoretto and Veronese. The style of a canvas like The Hashish Smoker (La fumeuse de hachisch) (purchased by Bénédite for the Luxembourg in 1902) only superficially resembles contemporary academic realism. At Bernard’s successful one-man show at Vollard’s in 1901, the critic for L’Ermitage distinguished the artist’s new work from that of a literalist like Dinet: “He knows

too well the artistic value of the trompe l’oeil, however remarkable, of a Dinet. More than ever he interprets, but without his [former] tendency to excess. He aims at being noble, simple . . . austere and harmonious.”” Bernard’s sepia-toned, smoky palette persists in his Cairo Merchants (Les marchands du Caire), con-

trasting with the brilliant hues common to both Géréme-school Orientalism and impressionist painter

travelers (Fig. 38). The frieze-like spatial organization of this very large canvas shows, in the care exercised in rendering each static figure, an admiration for the decorative approach of quattrocento and even Byzantine muralists. But the praise Bernard received for his Orientalist works is an indica-

tion of his declining reputation with the avant-garde; for Julius Meier-Graefe, the Luxembourg Hashish Smoker “justifies Gauguin’s severe prophecy that Bernard would yet end with Benjamin Con-

stant.”*° Despite undertaking an exotic expatriation comparable to Gauguin’s, Bernard renounced the possibility of pioneering an equivalent modernist Orientalism. One thing that does link Bernard to more academic Orientalist painters is his general avoidance

of literary themes in the Egyptian paintings. Given the importance of literary references in critical discussions of Orientalist art, it is surprising that so few Orientalists who traveled made such imag-

inative forays. Bénédite and Ary Renan delighted in erudite citations of eighteenth-century Orientalist writers, and symbolist critics evoked such key sources in the culture of exoticism as Baudelaire’s

poems, Flaubert’s novels and stories, and the Thousand and One Nights, the last not an Orientalist composition but a classic of Arabic literature that had been available in French since Galand translated it about 1710. The so-called Arabian Nights had recently been given new currency in a translation by the influential Arabist Dr. Joseph Mardrus, serialized in La Revue blanche. When such texts

Orientalists in the Public Eye 89

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a = —a?— Weee ae ewe \= = FIGURE 38 fed ae |>;2;a‘ Ss Frcure 38 es .Emile , atMerchants, —Bernard, P: ws. —— }A| ——e, ee Re égeex a=z==ts a3 + \ Tap Pipe) “i — Cairo oil 5 Se / Bae lets on Canvas, 1900. =e = a ee did engender Orientalist art, it was usually paintings or sculptures illustrating specific figures.”’ Flaubert’s novel Salammbé, for example, inspired the hieratic bronze Salammbé and Mathé (Salammbé

et Mathd) by the sculptor Théodore Riviére (Fig. 39) and Victor Prouvé’s rampant naked figure of the Carthaginian queen in a cartouche of arabesques. For some critics the very richness of the literary Orient and the images it nourished in the receptive mind told against the modern school of painting. So Adolphe Dervaux of La Plume could expostulate: “Where is the Orient of the Sanctuaires of Edouard Schuré, the Orient of Marco Polo, of Lamartine; where is . . . the Orient of [Hugo’s]| Orientales, that of Byron, of Lord Lytton, of Loti? . . . These

Grand Palais Orientalists ... paint Gabon, Spain, Venice, and Palermo .. . but rarely the Orient. It is ordinary, mediocre, even bad image making.” * There is a discrepancy between the romantic aspiration for the Orient evinced here and the real-

90 Orientalists in the Public Eye

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a : 40

eee. Oe a Si TS | Tate \ tis aul Gauguin, /a Orana

E .: yee ‘ORANA :or1>’a.seen he y a Ls , . . " ee ae » ) | Maria (We Greet Thee, |bsITA oe :asad Rhee Mary), oil on canvas, MARIA © ~ Be hehe Xiah 1891. den of Eden in which the luxuriance of vegetation and fruit matched that of the inhabitants’ bodies in a time before the birth of sexual shame. (Gauguin’s own letters encourage that reading.)

Yet if Gauguin imposed Christianizing presuppositions on the Tahitian scene, he was also fascinated by what can be called an ethnography of Tahitian religion. His illustrated manuscript Ancien

culte mahorie claimed to recount the vestiges of pre-Christian religion in the islands, transcribed from

conversations with his teenage Tahitian girlfriend. Yet as is well known, the book in large part was

Orientalists in the Public Eye 93

copied out from Jacques-Antoine van Moerenhout’s 1837 book Voyage aux iles du grand océan. Be-

hind Gauguin’s creative subterfuge was an impulse to collect those “precious fragments . . . of the great national patrimony” (as Léonce Bénédite called them) constituting the “civilization, customs, history, and arts” of indigenous races in the colonies.” In certain related paintings, such as the wellknown Mana’ tupapau (The Specter Watches Over Her; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), Gau-

guin evoked, not the syncretic Christian beliefs of contemporary Tahiti, but what he believed was the burden of pre-Christian superstition among the young women of his acquaintance. His visual language is creative and allegorical, as he improbably places a spirit figure inside the sleeping girl’s room. True to his symbolism, he may have expected the picture’s imagery and ineffable color to evoke

sensations of dread equivalent to the feelings he attributed to the frightened girl on the occasion that inspired the picture. As Stephen Eisenman observes somewhat optimistically of Gauguin, “To call him an ethnographer is not quite right, for it implies the passive stance of a spectator and not the ac-

tive perspective of the modern artist who understands that cultural traditions are made and remade in the present, not just recovered unchanged from the past.” *° Dinet made numerous paintings treating the religious life of the southern Algerian oases, basing

them on a knowledge of the religious practices of the region much more precise than Gauguin’s: Dinet, after all, converted to Islam. As paintings his works, however, eschew the allegory almost always present when Gauguin paints a religious subject. The ethnography in Dinet’s works is at once more exact, and the formulation more literal. One series of small canvases depicts different phases of prayer in the desert Muslims’ religious observance, from Er Rakda, or /nclination and Es Soujoud, or Prostration to Imam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia” (Imam présidant la priére: “At Tahia,” Fig. 41).”” It is significant that such works, and related scenes of daily life in a religious context, illustrated Dinet’s

popular book La vie de Mohammed, prophéte d ‘Allah. This was the third in a series of texts (the bestknown of which is Tableaux de la vie arabe, 1908) to use painted illustrations to accompany texts writ-

ten by Sliman ben Ibrahim. The Vie du prophéte was a substantial work of scholarship and deliberate proselytizing, written in French and drawing on authorized Arabic sources. Published in 1918 as a deluxe folio, the book contains thirty color plates reproducing Dinet’s oils, “scenes from the daily life of Muslims plus the holy places of Islam.” * The publication context explains the paintings’ didacticism, if not their religious proselytizing. Another series of Dinet’s canvases treats important moments in the Islamic calandar. Dinet painted several versions of the subject of his Crescent Moon (Le croissant), in which a group of Algerian men and boys descry for the first time the moon that announces the end of the fast of Ramadan.” As Dinet

formalized his conversion to Islam (around 1913), an increasing number of his works treated such themes, just as his suprisingly erotic series of teenaged Berber girls seen bathing or frolicking on the banks of the oued, or stream, petered out. A last set of small canvases depict the sacred sites of Cairo,

Mecca, and Medina, with bird’s-eye views of the annual mass pilgrimage. These were the illustra-

94 Orientalists in the Public Eye

tions Dinet prepared for his final book, Pélerinage a la Matson Sacrée d’Allah, published in the year following his own hadj to Mecca and death soon after.” A major independent composition of 1900 such as The Son of a Holy Mrabeth (Le fils d’un saint Mrabeth, Fig. 42) achieves its impact by taking an image of strong religious feeling (Delacroix had similarly inserted one into the iconography of Orientalism with his Fanatics of Tangiers /Les convulstonnaires de Tanger/ of 1838) and attempting to release it from the prejudice of incomprehensibility.

Here we see a scene of religious exaltation in the traditional life of certain Maghrebian communities, in which the veneration of holy men, or marabouts, was a distinctive element of Islamic practice. The visual staging is undeniably impressive, the faces and hands of the devotees emerging from a mass of bone-colored burnouses. Above that roiling crowd, the child of the saint sits imperturbably,

outlined against a dark doorway. The serenity of his visage contrasts both with those of his imploring admirers and with the ferocious expression of the great black man who bears him, forcing a path through the people. A key to the image is provided in a text of Dinet and Sliman, who like Gauguin for Mana’ tupapa u but with greater assurance, describe the work, giving it an aural dimension (transcribing the violent imprecations of the child’s bearer to the faithful) and recounting its theology for their French audience: “An elevated pole around which souls gravitate like stars, the holy man is called

M’rabeth, that is ‘Attached One,’ because his heart is attached to the love of the Creator, to whom he bears all hearts that the faithful submit to him. Men, women, old and young, rush toward this young

child, whose visage is nimbed by a crown of light; they surround him . . . hoping, through contact, to enlighten their souls, which they cast his way and abandon to him entirely.””!

Clearly for Dinet such explanations were a kind of didactic obligation. They can be better understood in relation to the role of the ethnographic in Orientalist painting. Dinet’s approach seems to defy the strictures of Fromentin, who had argued against tackling exotic subjects outside the limits of beauty as the West conceived it. Bénédite, both an admirer of Fromentin and the arbiter of the Orientalist Painters’ aesthetic, had a conflicted attitude toward ethnography and beauty. The conflict

was partly one of strategic positioning: in promoting the society, Bénédite relied on the authoritative precedents of Fromentin, whose proscription of “documents,” for example, explains why the Orientalists’ exhibitions excluded photography. (It was left out despite its importance in bringing im-

ages of the East to the European public, and the existence of distinguished bodies of photographic work made in the Near East from the 1850s on.)

But the exclusion of photography did not prevent Bénédite’s recognizing, once the society was formed, the usefulness of ethnography in Orientalist painting. It could be politically expedient as “propaganda” in favor of the French colonies. Bénédite ultimately professed impatience with Fromentin’s “pusillanimous” scruples. The new painters, more empirically disposed, attempted to cap-

ture the very sights Fromentin had avoided, and with aesthetic success, for as Bénédite points out, “The eye is an organ that quickly conforms to the habits one fosters in it.” ”

Orientalists in the Public Eye 95

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PLATE I

Eugéne Fromentin, Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat, oil on canvas, 1859.

|

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}: “% i —s ;7"*; ta | . a. bh ;ie=; “ott .o ~_ «Sarg ah ' > *. % ” is 4 eo > | Ma — ' * -2 7 —:r= val eg Lx): a+ . |, es * odie i 7ae My>Oe LF *“ns ae + alae ; : ane? ae. =#— : |: :S* ae oni 4 ‘»i |den Bons— — 7= —_ i ; eZ SS7 ”——

"ts =, : , a «

’ '. ra, r = a9 3 --~ —-_ : ~ ' » Bz PLATE 3

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mosque at Algiers, oil on canvas, 1882.

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ee SA! eee wa Rs, -| ie ee ekat) ARS” tect

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a|:— ity YeW/Z : i , FMF ee - . Bi = ay A, eggeay ——. LN ViZercy : 1 >a ah (7 = | Sig ery

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ae ee

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Pa UR Cole, | —~__ OTe) Bie eg: ee Pe ee an ee ne ee ee a ee ; “REM nie eho ee oo "RE Nay Ace ear =;*+ PLATE 9

Léon Carré, The Nude Dancer, gouache and gold leaf, 1912.

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foo” “—| Jy > We OA"A Vent)

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A \ a : ,-_ Ay | _ hae | “oe

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=_ _ s — = . >} * ae , PLATE I0

Charles Dufresne, Oriental Scene or Bathers, watercolor, wash, and pencil on paper, ca. 1914.

; F a — ve 4

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i; mu ;yZ sil .i “sid' ia 'ules ’ 1 no Fy=‘4nil 4 : -.

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4.

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am ogfeal E wy — tp bo!

PLATE 12

Henri Matisse, Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape, oil on canvas, 1912.

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| - — — 5 — = ile —, == '

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3 — ad s =" alt § ; i . a ‘ed L. oh = . i. B 1, a - _ >

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“ = ar = ee | ‘he if k . — i ~apal he o alll af » be

nn een ee A, ty Bi . . Why Sa = ' ZS 2, : : . By , 7 = : at paresat i ; i | — ‘ nee, eee Cy We :To|>» a, =po - He | =a =—— ae ' ia \ Aad pe aaatee SE : i Aer. Pl = a Ag wu ' |re iN b: SS a ie ee =! ' . i ail “a = A ; i : : rs 4 ; | — + phen ney Hii , “ } hy _ Ao ‘Le Lo mo M F iy / r : * 5a =" 2 aN (f ¢ rf it i ; ; " . \ : — | . | oz , az | a ; — _-Fhe ' = aa * f 'i ; : ‘@

z | W " . “ eae . rw ss ‘ —s _— oh : 9 ay * " *, i ‘4 P

il Th, i oi f {i Tl \ ‘un ' zs ae .

or iY ae SS a iUt .—AN “Mex. { ig = 2——) eS, ed‘a0

4 — 5 . es

&-. - 3 —_ +.) ; ».\ | my? 4

PLATE 13

Azouaou Mammeri, View of Moulay-Idriss, oil on canvas, ca. 1929.

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Sy DOV Pe, Ce

| AOE ONC) OE A be LAET/T NYS EUR aa RO Soe NST San Wate

ets wal 3 . e aT 9 al) te at ; 7 - . > > h* -_ i a vi it “4 - ra a Tie S 4 a

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ly ~4 te ya a a ) ny 5 f HM ' = “fe J % * A a tig = ee

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Py ee i apt: we wl Mo om " tI heat o>. ’ 3 1 >a hoa ee * Car i Al

ee Sr eS et [Pon tlateerect tt Pe ot habe re Enane a | rh tw / 4 aie 7a; | aPE | | | ot ne eS ewe ‘ ne

a Qt Aamir & Oe Se

2 i|F>alte Be — Ves. “nn = , - - aTe Vea oe =—¢-Pp et +ote ae i:teqe “+4x rh Baone

aed | Po— Hy| TE eeeNn | Wee teSES [> uw [eS a DL e| —_ f.% PP aGee, eear: esmyHive. aihty “i tyn RP iS oan . : :+ ee EU ad v2 | thine Pe. eee ame il Gee il QA ae

iara a‘tee in ~T TN efte |JttT Teea eti -gih : uk 4) PN Ps soup ee kh aS he VER a =. _ ~ =>ae ’ oH er : i a of r. iyed =f ie at ae Ms ay dtUe a)8a7, ten 7¥,ee ads . + a a ior; UL te ? Me‘Zz thee:ee i 4;i ‘pe’, Sle he “ ~ A) he 2 ak - os eat J: a ] \eee ——— hehe . a oe ee A ee ; ~% ad a ae 44) iy AS i iy Wr eS). rile, go ' yy “a i 2 pi MME ek CN | Sh 1 a thas i PAS ' ees 150 Pat ait ate iMe ey, mode) ie ‘ *od ii _L _’ig’ d 1, gry | F - i ad at * t * S ae é co Me eebk we (ee : De OG fon ay inta5 , i.i. |cb aS

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PLATE 14

Mohammed Racim, Illumination with Koranic verse, gouache and gold leaf, 1916—17.

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i=AaAr LER a ee Pe apn ages :. ame YUalte >>. gen ee ae ree Beane = aReh fF DS Cee P-3S FIGURE

53 } | Bigee 1a ae tak Sd322 omSsipLion oe Court, SE iyAndalusia eee TS fieshh < aah "a ee Been

Sant ; . or in the Time of the Moors, Paris Exposition, 1900.

inserted into the colonnades of the Lion Court, with not a European visitor to be seen—-visually reinstalling the exiled Moors of historical memory. The question of ethnic identity in the Andalusia display was cut through with a historical aware-

ness not apparent in the Tour du Monde. The Livre d or of the exposition deprecated the culture of Catholic Spain: “The domination of the Moors is incontestably the most brilliant epoch in the history of Spain. These alleged barbarians in effect brought with them—together with perfect manners and a high degree of civilization—the arts and sciences that the Germanic invasions have erased

from memory.” This theme of cultural admiration and historical regret casts an interesting light on contemporary attitudes toward the talents of the Muslims, whose descendants in the Maghreb were

now colonial subjects of the French. At the Andalusia display a small hippodrome in the shadow of the Giralda gave a spectacular physical expression to historical conflicts between the Moors and Christians (Fig. 54). Recalling the mortal entertainments of the Roman circus, its track of sixty meters was intended for “fantasias, for tournaments between Moors and Christian knights, for gazelle hunts with

sloughis (Arab greyhounds), for the attack on a caravan by Touareg, for the ceremonies of a Gypsy

marriage.””

Colonial Panoramania 729

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——— 2) al | | \ Ba, Egor ’gee a =< | fee | a |

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ens ORES 1 Bp! abypacaaa, ji i sh te i Es o a |oe ee aay Cyr oe eon. On ri.EeOOK Ao ail } f. eS”Oa ee oo.ox . Oh pe Po Pag TW aed | EeoF a : 0 oh ve

ae nae. Ie oP ¥ ie Ps I bg Letina\ Ae. x Oo tpeaeRoycote, a‘ ot) ffn leON eae eee Rs ere Se. 7 aes | ey ; 2 61 ied ess ‘pS = ee acaTO :es a ryj ON OE ee Froure eel [eee Victor Prouvé, At the 2k a eS ee aT

Menzel Fountain, > lithograph, 1895.

(rifle discreetly stowed, leather cartouches, water bottle) have all the ethnographic validity of a Dinet,

but the technique with which they are rendered— the long fluid strokes—unlike Dinet’s more stolid representation, energizes the eye rather than arrests it. No doubt this was the work Prouvé exhibited as the centerpiece of his display (eight works in all) in the first Salon of the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1893. Returning from his dourse, he had shown two landscapes, of Gabés and Menzel, in the Salon of the Société Nationale des BeauxArts in 1891,” thus throwing in his lot (like many younger progressives) with the newly formed Salon (which had split in 1890 from the Société des Artistes Francais). The Nationale’s radical privi-

leging of the decorative arts favored his work as well as that of his countrymen Gallé and Louis

1g2 Traveling Scholarships

Majorelle. Evidently the only other time Prouvé exhibited his Tunisian work was in 1895, again at the behest of the Orientalist Painters; alongside his Nancy friend Emile Friant, Prouvé showed several studies and a rare lithograph, At the Menzel Fountain (A la fontaine de Menzel, Fig. 61).*° He ex-

ecuted this work of memory five years after leaving Tunisia for the special album of prints by the Orientalist Painters. Always the ceramist, Prouvé on his first Tunisian trip had studied earthenware jars and female jar carriers at the Oued Gabés at Menzel. Something of his newly synthetic vision of the body in motion may be seen in this print, which escapes academic vision, moving toward broad rhythms of interlocking planes and lines. Even if Prouvé in France generally ceased to deal with Orientalist subjects, the body of his Tunisian

work is considerable. In the final estimate, the bourse de voyage was a turning point in his career. In

Tunisia he began to paint the landscape of observation, and, more important, he gave up the sepia tones of his studio paintings, like Sardanapalus, for the decorative colorism that marks his portraits

and murals of the 1890s: only after his return did Prouvé adopt a high-color palette equivalent to that of contemporary impressionism and even Bonnardesque post-impressionism.

The Villa Abo-el-Tif and the School of Algiers An important event in the history of the intellectual colonization of Algeria was the foundation of the Villa Abd-el-Tif. . . . Its effect was to oppose the habitual wanderings that directed young Algerian artists toward the metropole and above all the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

For twenty years the Villa Abd-el-Tif, as an institution of art and of decentralization, has achieved results aesthetically superior to those of the Villa Medici. —VICTOR BARRUCAND, “Les Abd-el-Tif,” 1928

With government bourses de voyage and additional grants administered by the Society of French Ori-

entalist Painters and its sister institution, the Colonial Society of French Artists, or Coloniale, met-

ropolitan France enabled its artists to leave the country on voyages of aesthetic discovery to the colonies. Besides this movement from the center out into the world the colonial system had another dimension—the colonies’ own measures to assure the prosperity of local visual arts. I have already mentioned Tunis, with its active cultural center, the Institut de Carthage. In Algeria, most populous of the colonies, elementary institutions were in place by the turn of the century, at least in Algiers: the small Municipal Museum of French Art, the National Museum of Antiquities and Muslim Art (established in 1892 at Upper Mustapha), the municipal Ecole des Beaux-Arts (es-

Traveling Scholarships 143

tablished in the 1880s), and the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, founded in 1897 on the model of the Parisian exhibiting society. In Algiers there was also a small but influential group of French amateurs of visual art—including

scholars (Georges Marye, Georges Marcais), men of letters (Victor Barrucand), and businessmen who were collectors (Louis Meley, Frédéric Lung). Such figures actively promoted local culture, both

French and in some cases, more surprising, indigenous. Some of them were active in the Committee for Old Algiers (Comité du Vieil Alger), a historical society and lobbying group that furthered the study of precolonial monuments and protected what today would be called the heritage values of the old city.” In 1900 a new governor-general of Algeria was appointed, Charles-Celestin Jonnart, whose aspirations for the colony and attitude toward cultural matters so differed from those of the mass of French Algerian colonists that he was called a Turk and an Arab.** Concerned about the parlous state

of the visual arts in the colony, Jonnart commissioned an independent report by the respected art critic for Le Figaro in Paris, Arséne Alexandre. Alexandre’s “Reflections on the Arts and the Arts Industries in Algeria,” published in the leading progressive weekly Z*AkAéar beginning 15 February

1905, became an influential document in the development of art in the colony.” It was reissued as a pamphlet two years later by Victor Barrucand, the editor of L’Akhbar and himself a significant figure

in the cultural history of the colony, who deserves brief introduction here. Barrucand had been a dramatist, poet, and journalist who worked on the famous symbolist Revue blanche in Paris. After covering the Dreyfus affair in Rennes for the League of the Rights of Man in 1899, he was assigned to combat the influential antisemitic movement of Edouard Drumont in Algeria, arriving there in 1900.” In 1902 he purchased the recently defunct L’Akhbar (founded in 1839),

aiming to make it “a humanitarian weekly for Franco-Arab union” that would combat the “obscurantism of the colonists’ mind-set.””! It became the colony’s first bilingual newspaper and, despite being predictably embattled, lasted until its editor’s death in 1934. The great traveler, writer, and cul-

tural go-between Isabelle Eberhardt was Barrucand’s main journalistic collaborator until her death in 1904. Barrucand had “discovered” and published her collected works in four volumes starting in 1906. L’Akhbar’s in-depth coverage of the arts is exemplified by regular reviews of the local Salon and occasional items like Alexandre’s report for Jonnart.

Although Alexandre conceived of his enquiry as having two aspects, he gave far more space to furthering the indigenous arts than those of Europe (see Chapter 8). An energetic proponent of tra-

ditional handicrafts, Alexandre was skeptical about assimilating indigenous and European art and proposed instead a series of initiatives to shore up local traditional industries. He pronounced the European arts in the colony “very weak.” “There should have been a School of Algiers. It did not exist.” Excepting the works of Maxime Noiré and one or two others, “one quickly arrives at the works

of amateurs or the efforts of beginners.” Alexandre indicts local art school teaching on the one hand,

144 Traveling Scholarships

the lack of supportive organizations on the other. He wrote that the local Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists “does not suffice for and cannot be extended to create an artistic movement.” * A vitalizing influx of French artists to the colony was needed, and Alexandre points out the paradox of

the many Orientalists who painted in Algeria yet whose work, shown in Paris, was little known in the colony itself. What was needed above all, Alexandre wrote, was a center in the colony, modeled on the Kiinstlerhaus in Munich, where visiting professional artists could gather. That proposal resulted in the found-

ing of the Villa Abd-el-Tif: “Algiers should have, beyond its museums, a Maison des Artistes. . . . Its site exists, and how marvelous it is: the house of the Abdeltifs /stc/, above the Jardin d’Essai. It is ad-

mirable but falling into ruin. This residence, still ravishing despite its dilapidation, is situated so that the artist has at hand the finest lessons of light and nature. Its terrace, its colonnade, its interior courtyard still decorated with brilliant ceramics, its surroundings of luxuriant verdure would make of it an enviable abode.” ”’

The villa was one of the increasingly rare substantial buildings from the Turkish era to survive in

the urban zone of Algiers (Fig. 62). Under the Turkish regime it had served as a residence to successive dignitaries, the last of them the Abd-el-Tif family.** Unoccupied and in sore need of restora-

tion, the villa nonetheless had much to commend it: its historical cachet and its site, “buried in magnificent greenery, just a few minutes from the Jardin d’Essai with its opulent fronds, so dear to

the memory of many painters.” Governor Jonnart was quick to act, and by April 1907 the villa had been requisitioned by the gov-

ernment, restored, and let out to the first two artists, recruited by a competition in Paris.°* Almost immediately the press—both local and Parisian—began to refer to it as an “Algerian Villa Medici,”

likening the institution to the building near the Spanish Steps in Rome that had housed the French school since the seventeenth century.”’ Such nomenclature suggests that French artists and commentators saw the exotic site and its program as a new rival to classical study. But there were important differences between the two villas. Jean Alazard, a specialist in Renaissance art and the future director of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, was well qualified to see them: “The Villa Medici has an administrative organization and stays faithful to powerful traditions. At the Villa

Abd-el-Tif there is no supervision . . . the residents are their own masters and, excepting the government functionary who takes care of purely material questions, the only authority is that of the more senior appointee.” ”®

Jonnart’s “bourses de voyage en Algérie” were set up so that each February in Paris a competition was held, open to painters, sculptors, printmakers, medal makers, and architects, as long as they

were French citizens under the age of thirty-five.” Initially two scholarships, each with a value of three thousand francs, were available for one year; from about 1910 they ran for two years, so that four artists occupied the Villa Abd-el-Tif at any one time. That the Paris competition and its jury

Traveling Scholarships 1745

1 2 a = 4 he ae “] er” Ni! eee Fig,

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oil on canvas, 1910. mt =: pa RRS ES oe Fane! ae altel Sa the couple decided to base themselves permanently in Algiers. Carré was opening himself to new influences: painting in the Kabylian hills around La Gouraya (on the coast near Bougie) in 1913, he

befriended Azouaou Mammeri, a French-speaking Kabyle schoolteacher and self-taught artist, to whom Carré gave valuable painting lessons (see Chapter 9). At this time Carré established a lyrical and decorative approach to pastoral subjects, exemplified in the moonrise scene, all rich greens and distant purples, that he executed as a commission for Armand Dayot of L’Art et les Artistes.

Carré by this point was already in contact with the Orientalist and Islamophile circle of Victor Barrucand (illustrating Barrucand’s Hindu drama Le Chariot de terre cuite).© Most likely through Eti-

enne Dinet, Carré was commissioned to do the first of his illustrated books for Henri Piazza of Paris (who had published Dinet’s illustrated books for a decade), Le Jardin des Caresses by Henri Toussaint, the first French translation of a collection of tenth-century Moorish love poems written in Andalusia. Painted in 1912 and exhibited to some acclaim at the Society of French Orientalist Painters in February 1913, Carré’s original illustrations for Toussaint’s book were published in chromolithographic splendor the following year.”” In Nude Dancer (La danseuse nue; see Plate 9), despite the stylization of the pale-skinned girl, a nerveless proto-flapper replete with headdress from the Ballets russes, one cannot but notice Carré’s care in developing the Islamicizing decor. Exquisite tile panels

250 Traveling Scholarships

of Turkish inspiration and rugs of mixed character (Berber in the foreground, vaguely art nouveau on the wall behind) are in evidence. The school of Islamicizing illustration exemplified by these works is discussed in Chapter 9 (on Mohammed Racim); it suffices to say here that they represent a marriage,

not yet anticipated in Alexandre’s 1905 report, of Islamic visual traditions and the activities of the Abd-el-Tifians. The selection of Algerian doursiers ceased with World War I but was renewed in 1920, when two

of the decade’s most successful Orientalists were nominated. One was the painter Jean Launois and

the other, Paul-Elie Dubois, who achieved fame with his large canvases of Touareg tribesmen. At the same time, the alumni of the villa organized a large exhibition of their work in Algiers, 4bd-el-

Tif and Its Friends. This expression of group solidarity was very favorably viewed by Barrucand,

who isolated two distinct manners of painting, one stylized, with generalized detail (like that of Cauvy), and the other based on observation and minute attention to detail. Barrucand concluded that

the Villa Abd-el-Tif “will have richly served the colony in helping broadcast its beauty. Thanks to

[it] .. . Algeria is no longer just a cellar and a grain store.” During the twenties the Abd-el-Tifians took the lion’s share of commissions to decorate public buildings and design the sculptural monuments that the French, as part of the process of colonisation intellectuelle, “intellectual colonization” (as officials called it), insisted on as the colony prospered. One major work, still remarkably intact today, stands out: the mural decorations for the former

Summer Palace of the Governor-General, today the Palace of the People of Algiers. This impressive

monument was intelligently altered and renovated in the colonial period. The government architect Darbéda made a series of additions to the eighteenth-century Moorish palace at the request of Governor-General Lutaud around 1913. The most surprising elements of Darbéda’s design are the neo-Gothic southern facade, based closely on the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice, and the grand ceremonial hall on the first floor, which Jean Alazard rightly described as neo-Byzantine in inspiration, not least

because of the extravagant use of highly colored mosaic.” The mural paintings above the windows of the main hall, on the walls of the ceremonial staircases, and in the reception chamber are the work of the most prominent School of Algiers artists of the 1920s (Fig. 66). The murals, either in true fresco, transferred canvas, or mosaic, are in an excellent state of preservation.” Fernand Antoni did a series of eighteen small panels in the upper reaches

of the vast Salle des Fétes. Both inaugural Abd-el-Tif laureates had a role in the extensive decorations, with Paul Jouve, the animal painter, designing Peacocks in the Gardens (Les paons dans les jardins),

a mosaic over one of the palace’s two ceremonial staircases. Cauvy’s lunettes of traditional Algerian métiers above the hall windows, first painted for the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (Paris, 1925), are discussed in Chapter 8. The two main muralists were Léon Carré, with his panoramic Muslim Life (La vie musulmane), and Marius de Buzon, with scenes of Kabyle

customs in a highland setting. The major Carré panel in the presidential antechamber shows a fam-

Traveling Scholarships toe

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FIGURE 70 Be |/ RU Sew > ae ee Charles Dufresne, Sy =ee> aSiee_ Ny ae lp » "| Algerian Oasis, gouache, a “is

ceasing ANG ee On Cream paper, Ca. 1912. i. aoe . quote Henri Matisse’s bronze sculpture Zo Negro Women (Deux négresses), exhibited with fanfare at the 1908 Salon d’Automne. The quotation calls attention not only to Dufresne’s reworking of the fauve figure style but also to his departure from mere observation, the better to achieve a careful balance of intersecting lines, figures, and color patches. Eschewing the intense color of both fauvist and

some Orientalist art, he holds in place the subtle tonalities of this work—a harmony of tans, olive greens, and muted blues—with one piercing note of cherry red, the veritable bull’s-eye of this superb composition. Returning to France in late 1912, Dufresne exhibited Algerian works at the 1913 Salon of the Na-

tionale and, in considerable numbers, the Salon of the French Orientalist Painters. Although some critics, like Mauclair, chastised them for their experimentalism, others, like René Jean, responded enthusiastically: “M. Dufresne, who received the Algeria scholarship in 1910, is showing a suite of

watercolors and canvases that are as eloquent as biblical tales, vibrant with warm and muted tones in which purples play, and greens and pinks dominate. In his harmonies, in his sometimes unexpected

L5G Traveling Scholarships

perspectives, the magic of an Oriental dream unfurls: human bodies of the most diverse races, various stuffs, plants of capricious form.” *”

Jean’s last sentence captures the mood of Dufresne’s subsequent painting on Oriental themes, for although he spent little time in Algeria after his scholarship, with the intervention of the war and the

burgeoning of his career thereafter, he was one of those for whom a generalized Orient became a main source of subject matter. It was the pattern of Delacroix revisited, and indeed Dufresne’s scenes

of the hunt and of battle in North Africa recall the imaginative and recollective thematics of Delacroix and Fromentin.*! Dufresne’s wartime friend Dunoyer de Segonzac encouraged his rhythmic cubist style. Even the apocalyptic animal imagery of the Blue Rider artist Franz Marc is a relevant parallel to Dufresne’s art. As a critic later remarked, “one does not find him among the fauves,

although he adopted their lively palette. One does not find him among the cubists, even though he applies their reconstruction of post-Cézannian space.” *” The Villa Abd-el-Tif was the most positive of all the initiatives studied in this chapter on travel-

ing scholarships and the history of Orientalism. It initiated careers in Orientalism, injected expertise into the Algerian arts community (by way of both teaching and government commissions), and offered goals and a focus for the local art scene. The villa extended its programs in 1925 (when several new artists’ studios were added), and it continued to function into the contemporary era: despite

the turmoil and danger of the war of independence, Abd-el-Tif scholars were named up to 1962 (even if they could not always take up their residencies).

The exclusionary practices of the Villa Abd-el-Tif program remain striking today. For “practical” reasons women could not be lodged there, although in principle they could compete for the dourses.

More particularly, Algerians, whether of indigenous or pied-noir descent, could not apply. The institution remained faithful to Arséne Alexandre’s 1905 scenario and to Governor Jonnart’s ruling: it would advance the arts of painting and sculpture exclusively by implanting an aesthetic expertise de-

termined by the home country. Around 1914 pied-noir and indigenous artists could receive scholarships to study in Spain, and the Casa Velazquez was established in Madrid. (Early scholarship holders of the 1920s included Mohammed Racim and Azouaou Mammeri.) But a program equivalent in largesse to the Villa Abd-el-Tif funding Algerians to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris was

never established. The government chose to encourage cultural progress in the colony by offering traveling scholarships primarily to the talent of mainland France.

Traveling Scholarships ae a

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he activity of a modernist artist like Henri Matisse yields valuable lessons when compared

to that of exponents of the academic exotic. For at first blush the weight of evidence accumulated in the preceding chapters is enough to cast his three North African voyages—

to Biskra in 1906 and to Tangier in 1912 and 1913—as entirely within the ambit of an Orientalist practice. Interesting overlaps and excesses appear when Matisse’s North African experience and pic-

torial production are pressed against the Orientalist template. For a start he traveled, not as a novice

on a government grant, going abroad to sow the wild oats of his inexperience,' but outside that cycle of official patronage, having sidestepped it beginning in 1899, when he ceased exhibiting at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and presenting (if he had ever done so) subjects that would have qualified him for a government bourse de voyage. His self-funded travels reflected the same professional success and earning power that had enabled

the travels of other Orientalists, from Géréme and Renoir to Besnard. Matisse’s voyage to Biskra in 1906 came on the heels of good sales at the Salon des Indépendants, and by 1911, when he went to

Tangier, he had one of the highest incomes of contemporary artists, with wealthy Russian, American, and German patrons. Several of his Moroccan pictures were commissioned and thus already sold. When he returned to Paris, he did not need to submit his works to the vagaries of the annual

P50

Salons, or even to the Orientalist Painters (imagining for a moment that Bénédite might have ac-

cepted them). Instead he managed a feat neither Renoir nor Monet had accomplished with their Mediterranean canvases— displaying them as a coherent group ina one-man thematic show ata prestigious gallery. Only Albert Besnard, whose showmanship far exceeded Matisse’s, achieved the same

coup with his immensely successful Indian exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1912.’ Matisse’s North African experience was not in itself the determining moment in a nascent career.

Matisse, unlike Albert Lebourg and Victor Prouvé, was not thereby converted to a resonant highcolor palette. That had already happened during Matisse’s fauve years in France. Like Renoir, Matisse was a mature artist who responded to a new stimulus in a largely preexisting language, although

North Africa gave him, far more than Renoir, thematic inspirations that remained relevant throughout his career (as two recent exhibitions have demonstrated).’ As for Matisse’s Moroccan work itself, nothing painted in the first half-century under the aegis of exoticism was further from the appearance of humdrum French realist Orientalism, from the routine academic exoticism that still cluttered the Salons of the Société des Artistes Francais and the Orien-

talist Painters. Yet it should be no heresy to suggest that behind this radicality deep cultural continuities persist and that the conception of these Maghrebian subjects and the very discursive boundaries within which Matisse conceived his abstracting, high-color visual treatment both owe much to Orientalist traditions. It is salutary to deprive the artist of the pedestal on which modernist hagiog-

raphy has placed his North African works, splendid though they be. A postcolonial criticism must work against the historical amnesia typical of dominant accounts of the artist’s work.”

Buskra, or the Impovsstbility of Painting No longer a part of the desert, Biskra is the queen of the oases no more. She has been deposed and sullied; her jewels are paste. Now she’s a mere

figurehead for the crowds to ogle, estranged from the deep and mystic soul of the Sahara. —ISABELLE EBERHARDT, “Desert Springtime,” ca. 1902

Matisse’s first North African excursion is an event of considerable resonance for this history of Orientalism, even though—or indeed because—it occasioned no significant work. The centrality of Ma-

tisse’s destination, Biskra—an iconic site of Orientalist experience—his traveler’s impressions, and the reasons for his “failure” are all symptomatic of the Orientalist predicament. And because his much

greater output of work in Tangier six years later continued that deferred project of painting the East, the earlier experience is worth considering. Matisse, going to Africa in 1906, did something more commonplace for a French artist than trav-

260 Matisse and Modernist Ortentalism

eling to London to paint. I have already indicated how many hundreds of mainstream painters and

sculptors made the trip, but progressive artists from Matisse’s immediate generation did so in significant numbers that included Bernard, Levy-Dhurmer, René Piot, and several of Matisse’s col-

leagues formerly at the studio of Gustave Moreau: Henri Evenepoel, Raoul du Gardier, Georgette Agutte, and in due course Albert Marquet and Charles Camoin, who also painted in Tangier around 1912. Evenepoel’s 1898 journey in particular, overlooked in writing on Matisse, is a telling precedent

for the trip to Biskra.’ Knowledge of North African travels by two of Matisse’s artist heroes, Delacroix and Renoir, joined

to Evenepoel’s recent experience, counted for much when Matisse, for the first time, was in a financial position to leave France. He had other reasons to travel in 1906, in particular the National Colonial Exposition of Marseille (see Chapter 5). Matisse visited it on his way to Collioure in late spring;

his old friend the Marseillais Charles Camoin had been given the honor of exhibiting in the section of Provencal painting.® The Marseille exposition also offered a major Orientalist retrospective that

included works by Chassériau and Fromentin, as well as by painters Matisse is known to have admired: Delacroix’s Lion Devouring an Arab and a watercolor of the Moroccan sultan; Renoir’s Arab

Festival, Madame Stora in Algerian Costume, and another Algerian portrait; and, equally relevant to the fauve artist in 1906, landscapes from Martinique and Tahiti by Paul Gauguin. The exotic dance theater, moreover, attracted Matisse (he later recalled watching the Ouled-Nails) along with his colleagues Derain and Camoin and no less a personage than Auguste Rodin, who made a special trip from Paris to Marseille to continue sketching the court dancers in the troupe of Sisowath,

king of the French protectorate of Cambodia. Faced with the multitude of facsimile Orients in the Algerian pavilion and the Palace of Fine Arts, Matisse might have decided, like Gauguin in 1889, to depart immediately for North Africa, just twenty-four hours away by the steamers of the Compagnie de navigation mixte or the Société Paquet. Thus instead of traveling as usual to Collioure after visiting his in-laws at Perpignan, Matisse took

the weekly steamer service from Port-Vendres for Algiers, leaving on 10 May 1906.’ He returned to France after spending much of his stay, just over two weeks, traveling, having visited Algiers, Constantine, and Biskra. After landing at Algiers, he would have taken the train to join the East Alger-

ian Line, which stretched from Philippeville (today’s Skikda) on the Mediterranean coast south to Biskra in the near Sahara. The line passed through the spectacular hilltop city of Constantine in the coastal highlands, from which Matisse sent a typically brief and emphatic postcard to Derain: “Nice place! But the heat! I shall have to get the hell out of here without having managed to do anything!”®

Chassériau had painted in Constantine sixty years before, and an encounter on the train that Matisse describes (probably with a young Kabyle notable) sounds like an encounter with the resplendent caliph

in Chassériau’s famous Versailles portrait: “I lunched opposite a magnificent Arab, a sort of Arab prince, fair-skinned with wavy hair and fine blue eyes, and a remarkable purity of expression.””

Matisse and Modernist Ortentalism 162

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es vy, —=~=_kee bs fy was= 2 ee NS oe FIGURE 72 ' .aom .=— S 3“>, ——f=| ha au bp ¢ tp.a . , . . a jel Se —_ = — y ™ Henri Matisse, ‘A > ie : ead a FF ao a . A ; =o : Y = >. — ‘ Sz 7 E iy — ~ < ,- y43' 4 ee En1906. Ses Rae canvas, She ee +oy eS= See eres =ogfesao “tt> Sel a eS a.te ~~Sg ~ae Me a“ Se

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iM" | Mol ee hen fe | Doha wee |bi[ie Tid : wf 3a, ;| A! ! 4 M4 ; ' Si|“y ; hy, re i re Vana iy & \ i a ; : TA \ SM hue:Py, FIGURE 76. .years Li be r rn j | . ey) a S'S) Tee ¢ | ie: f ‘1 a Henri Matisse, | ih 1f hai Maw = y¥oe ‘ ‘; ''aXQ ( eg) ‘Pel we Ne The Standing Riffian, a“=on : \r ma ee ‘ ye F | N - oil on canvas, 1912. limited claims of realism, and the unique space of decorative painting. Nevertheless, his Moroccan paintings and drawings do respect a traveler’s visual experience. Most of the pictures are more empirically grounded than Matisse’s Parisian works of the same period, and in later years Matisse’s trav-

els to Morocco ratified for him his more imaginative reworkings of Orientalist subjects. In an interview of 1929, the artist justified painting the odalisques of his Nice period (a masquerade of French models in studio costumes) by referring to that earlier experience: “I know that they [odalisques] exist. I was in Morocco. I have seen them.” Among Matisse’s most “documentary” Moroccan works are two paintings of Riffian tribesmen, The Standing Riffian (Le Rifain debout, Fig. 76) and the large Seated Riffian (Le Rifain assis). Both

draw on the rhetoric of authentic experience. (Their veracity of costume is shown in recently pub-

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism ETS

lished comparative photographs, including a hand-tinted postcard the artist sent to his son.)” It was difficult for painters to obtain male as well as female sitters, partly because of the injunction against

depiction and the fear some Muslims had of attracting the evil eye by allowing themselves to be painted. (Hilda Rix left graphic descriptions of the hunt for sitters who would acquiesce to having their portraits made.)

Men of the Rif

The Riffian tribesman Matisse persuaded or paid to sit was not a Tangerine townsman but rather a figure whose presence in the city resonates with the political problems between France and Morocco.

For centuries Tangier had been the object of rival ambitions: Spanish, then English, and most recently French administrations had dominated the strategically placed city. Germany disputed the French ascendancy in Morocco after 1900, siding with the sultan to counter French interests. French diplomacy received a major setback when Kaiser Wilhelm made an impromptu visit by ship to Tangier in 1905 and issued a proclamation supporting Moroccan sovereignty. The Franco-German rivalry

reached a crisis point in early 1911 when a German gunboat entered the southern port of Agadir. While the French and Germans renegotiated their positions, sections of the Moroccan populace, in particular the Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains whose affiliation to the makhzen (or government forces) of the sultan was perennially uncertain, were effectively at war with France. The establish-

ment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in March 1912 was only partial and largely excluded the Atlas, which was only gradually “pacified.” °* Newspapers contemporary with Matisse’s visit in early 1912 reported that French military columns in the Moroccan countryside were engaged in “mop-

ping up” tribesmen described as rebels. That operation explains why Matisse hardly stirred from the

international port of Tangier—at the time he traveled a French civilian could venture beyond the northern tip of Morocco only at some risk.”’ Matisse lacked the martial air of certain members of the Society of French Orientalist Painters or the Colonial Society of French Artists. He was an unadventurous bourgeois approaching middle age.

(His wife, Amélie, accompanied him on his first trip.) The only side trip Matisse undertook was the daylong mule ride to nearby Tétouan, a spectacular city in the Spanish zone of Morocco, in the foothills

of the Rif mountains. The painter and architect Howard Ince preferred it to Tangier: “Tetuan, a day’s

journey to the east, is a larger and in every way more interesting town. There tradition is more jealously guarded.””* The trip, a standard diversion for serious winter tourists, was described in glowing terms by Hilda Rix, who traveled to Tétouan with the distinguished African American artist from

Philadelphia, Henry Ossawa Tanner. Most of the Rifflans in Tangier were merchants or workers from the impenetrable mountains that formed an autonomous political zone south and east of Tangier and Tétouan. In Matisse’s time the

176 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

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er. tad be) Abd el-Krim (at left), 1922. region was dominated by Sharif Raisuli, whom he called a “well-known bandit” in a color postcard to his son: “I am sending you a chap from the village of Raisuli . . . who robbed travelers in the Tangier region some years ago. To quiet him down, the sultan gave him a province to govern. In that way

he has become an official thief who bleeds those under him.”” As late as 1924 a French text could describe the Riffians as a people “stubbornly unsubmissive that has conserved its Berber idiom and pretends never to have been vanquished by the Arabs. Spain has not yet been able to quell it.”® Mil-

itary campaigns and political maneuverings by Field Marshal Lyautey and his Moroccan allies grad-

ually brought neighboring chunks of country into occupied Morocco. The Riffians, though nominally in Spanish territory, continued to symbolize Moroccan resistance to colonial domination. The

nationalist leader Abd el-Krim (Fig. 77) inflicted a defeat on the Spanish in 1921 at Anoual. From 1925, having disposed of Raisuli, Abd el-Krim directed the broader war of the Rif against French Morocco, taking his jihad, or holy war, to the gates of a well-protected Fez. Only in 1926 did much greater combined forces from Spain, led by General Franco, and France, led by the future Vichy gen-

eral Nogués, force Abd el-Krim’s surrender and exile. From this perspective then, Matisse’s Riffians painted in 1912-13 might be said to symbolize an

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undefeated Morocco, a vestige of the precolonial past that retained a distinctive ethnic and political actuality, indeed an air of potential threat. The visual typing of Matisse’s subject is conventional: the

standing portrait of a soldier in his finery was itself a standard image in Orientalist painting from Alexandre Gabriel Decamps’s Arnaut guards to the meticulous Bashi-Bazouks of Géréme, and more

recently the harem guards of Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte de Nouy and Ludwig Deutsch. Matisse and his patron, the Socialist politician Marcel Sembat (who published an article on the artist in April

1913), discussed the Riffian’s sartorial splendor and martial ferocity (even though he appears unarmed). The painter told his teenage daughter, Marguerite, that he had begun “the portrait of a Rifflan,

a magnificent mountaineer type, savage as a jackal.”°' Ina similar vein Sembat saw in him a reflection of the “splendid barbarians” of the Song of Roland:

“And the Riffian! How splendid he is, this great devil of a Riffian, with his angular face and his ferocious build! How can you look at this splendid barbarian without thinking of the warriors of days gone by? The Moors in the Song of Roland had this fierce expression!” This text, so nonchalant in referring to a “barbarian” and noting the literary parallel to the medieval lay of the Franco-Saracenic

Zs Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

wars, surprises in conceding nothing to Sembat’s own radical position on colonialism. Sembat, as a specialist on French foreign affairs in the Chamber of Deputies (he was deputy for Montmartre, the

artists’ quarter) and as a member of the parliamentary Socialists, had a history of opposing French colonial aggression (Fig. 78). So in 1907 he and Edouard Vaillant had tried in vain to debate bloody French reprisals against the Beni-Snassen, a Berber people east of the Rif Mountains who had skirmished with the French across the border in Algeria. In 1910 Sembat spoke in favor of self-government

and eventual independence in French Indochina. During the Moroccan crisis of Agadir in 1911 he

was one of the Socialists who reluctantly voted to ratify the pact in which Germany recognized France’s Moroccan interests, in return for French concessions in West Africa. At the time Sembat declared he would vote for the treaty only “as a promise of future reconciliation” in the face of the

threat of war, which “must prevail over all the scruples that would counsel us to reject the treaty through aversion for colonial enterprises.” Finally, in an address to a Socialist Party congress contemporary with Matisse’s first weeks in Tangier, Sembat condemned the French “aggression against

Morocco” as an “unhappy example of piracy.” Yet one year later Sembat waxed eloquent before Matisse’s picture of the Riffian, an artifact of French culture made possible by the history of that very aggression. This is not a case of Sembat’s

disingenuousness, but rather of the conception of cultural activity as distinct from and somehow above political operations. Sembat the collector of Matisse—he and his wife, Georgette Agutte, had commissioned the Seated Moroccan Woman and purchased the View of Tangier (Vue de Tanger), now

both in the Grenoble museum—separated matters of art from the world of politics, at least where colonial topics were concerned.“ In a similar vein, one could argue that Matisse took steps to prevent viewers from reverting to the anecdotal when they read the two paintings of Rifflans. Such a reading might bring with it too many troubling reflections on the historical actuality of his sitter. Matisse does not specify location, and,

more important, he uses color and facture to abstract the image. In the smaller bust, the cognitive work of making the unexpected mottlings of green, tan, and gray that constitute the surface of the Riffian’s head cohere into a readable face overrides the image’s psychological presence. Similarly the tension between the loosely brushed panels of apple green and the decorative silk fringes of the man’s djellaba provides visual activity in itself. The material plenitude of paint forestalls the admiration for

the materiality of costume elicited by the works of Géréme or Deutsch. This modernist procedure may be related to Matisse’s reworking of the symbolist precept that re-

jects literal description of an object in favor of gradually evoking it in graphic or literary equivalents. In the hands of a modernist painter of the immediate prewar years, the work’s “aestheticist” impulse licenses painterly means independent of any material reference, a process at its most extreme

in the Moroccan triptych painted for Ivan Morozov.” This is the second phase of the argument concerning Orientalist painting in the hands of a mod-

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 179

ernist like Matisse: such painting, more abstracting and allusive than its nineteenth-century counterparts, whether academic (Gérome) or independent (Renoir), potentially alters a work’s political implications. If the realist language of traditional Orientalist painting relates to the spirit of the colonialist venture, descriptive and appropriative,® modernist aestheticization might mollify that spirit: by suspending the anecdotal realism of nineteenth-century painting, it reorganizes troubling subject matter into a supposedly neutral abstraction. The process is most fully developed in two works of the Moroccan triptych, On the Terrace (see Fig. 75) and The Casbah Gate (La porte de la Casbah; see Plate 11). Both appear to relate closely to outdoor scenes (whether or not they were executed outdoors) in that both give specific information about the fall of light. That is the legacy of the highly attuned, single-minded perceptualism Matisse manifested in Algeria and brought to his visits to Tangier. He commented on both of his Tangerine

sojourns in letters home about the weather and its effect on his painting: the torrential rains on his arrival prevented his working outside, then brought the compensation of the luxuriant vegetation, and so on. A symptomatic letter to Charles Camoin (who was to paint with him in Tangier) reads: “Until now the weather has been very beautiful, and I am profiting from it. I have begun a Moorish

woman on a terrace... but a lot of wind and an irritating model worked against me. . . . I have to do a painting that is decorative, and I think that it will be that, but not to the extent I would like.” The artist’s dependence upon weather conditions merges here with a symptomatically modernist issue of abstraction: what Matisse calls the decorative character of his work. To construct an aesthetically controlled unity of line and color with the elements in the scene before him for Matisse meant

attaining the decorative. That it required abstracting the features of the sitter was no hindrance to the painter, who remarked in an interview in 1912, “I seldom paint portraits, and if I do, only ina decorative manner. I can see them in no other way.””” The portrait that best exemplifies this decorative approach is On the Terrace, which Matisse exhibited as the centerpiece of the Moroccan triptych at Bernheim-Jeune. Zorah, belying the distress-

ing circumstance that explains her lack of a veil—her presence in the bordello—kneels smiling at the center of a composition of brilliant aerated blues and greens. Both she and the objects around her—a floating pair of ornamental babouches and some goldfish in a bowl (a prop also associated with Matisse’s Parisian paintings of the period)—coalesce with the background. The crumbly pallor of the terrace and its pervasive blue air seem abstract in the extreme, yet the triangle of cream paint in the top corner pulls the viewer back into observed reality, reading as a slab of white light traversing the terrace wall. The abstraction here or in the still more schematic and ethereal Casbah Gate seems to be generated by an analogy between Casbah architecture, with its vertical planes and whitewashed surfaces,

and the surface of the canvas to be painted, rectilinear and severe. Indeed for other modernist Orientalists, notably Paul Klee, the rapport between North African buildings and pictorial architecture

180 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

was the occasion for deliberate experimental play.’' For both artists the knowledge of cubism was close at hand—Matisse’s two pictures could be likened to an attenuated cubism of continuous, rather

than disjunctive, lines.

Casbah

Matisse’s visual experiment was most extreme in Tangier’s zone of architectural antiquity: the Casbah. It is possible to read in the preferences and exclusions of Matisse’s works his inscription of certain relations of power between the French colonizers and the Moroccan people. The townscape of

Tangier was a contested space, where buildings, streets, gardens, and market precincts became tokens in a microgeography of power. Painting beyond the Hotel Villa de France at the edge of the European zone involved pragmatic decisions. Significantly, Matisse avoided the commercial zones. The Grand Socco beyond the English church, an open-air market maintained by country people, was recommended to artists for its ethnographic interest: traditional costumes, colorful goods, and novel transactions.’” It was the almost exclusive outdoor subject of Hilda Rix. The market was safe enough

for a woman willing to brave the occasional antagonism (and frequent curiosity) her work and presence aroused—the hotel and European police were never far away. The Petit Socco, on the far side of the Medina gate, was “the daily rendezvous of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism.”” It sheltered the English, French, and Spanish post offices, the last visible in a postcard Matisse sent to Gertrude Stein

in Paris with the facetious inscription “I am sending you the most Parisian quarter of Tangier.” ”* Matisse’s words emphasize that he chose to paint the /east European aspects of Tangier. As in Biskra, Matisse was uninterested in colonial modernity. Like most Orientalist painters he effaced in

his works the material and social depredations of the colonial process.” The preservationist imagination required traditional Moorish architecture (and recognized Moroccan ethnic “types” like the Riffian). The study of such architecture meant painting in the Casbah, which Loti had already noted as superior to casbahs in Algeria. In all the cities of the Maghreb, the casbahs are the indigenous strong-

holds, centers of tacit and at times active resistance to the European colonial presence. The Casbah of Algiers was always a fearsome place for Europeans—Evenepoel and his artist friends armed them-

selves with revolvers to visit it. André Suréda interpreted it as sinister in a suite of nocturnal images contemporary with Matisse’s work: his lithographic series Evenings in the Casbah (Soirées dans la Cas-

bah). Narrow passageways are rendered threatening by the inky darkness of late evening, by shrouded, huddling figures. Suréda’s titles convey the spirit of the series: The Murdered Man (L’homme assassiné), Fear (La peur)."®

The Tangerine Casbah lacks the mythic quality and notoriety of the Algerine. It is smaller and has a longer-standing accommodation with Europeans. But Tangier’s Casbah and Medina complex is nevertheless a tough residential quarter and a symbolic center of Moroccan life. Even today little

Matisse and Modernist Ortentalism 782

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sign of European presence is discernible, and one has a tangible sense of intruding if one is a nonArabic-speaking foreigner. One enters the Casbah with caution, and preferably with a companion. Matisse, clearly determined, made many quick pen drawings and based four canvases on his perambulations about the Casbah.”’ The striking absence of figures in those works is best explained by the artist’s discretion in view of Islamic scruples against painting human beings and animals. Many Europeans painting in Morocco focused on liturgical architecture: the often humble saints’ tombs, or

marabouts; the grander theological colleges, or medersas; and mosques—all exemplifying for the French the highest expression of a now moribund Moorish architectural and decorative genius. Following his Andalusian experience, Matisse too focused on religious buildings, constrained, like other

Europeans, by his exclusion from them. Rare was the building whose exterior could fit into a single architectural view. European painters interested in casbah architecture thus home in on the fragment,

the rare decorated form that distinguishes the stucco walls from northern Mediterranean vernacular

182 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

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3 = me Bab el Tangier, eo — Zao =Assa, 1991. buildings. In most cases that fragment, a site of revealed difference, is the opening between inside and outside: portal, doorway, window—from the monumental Bab Mansour at Meknés, as painted by Delacroix and Benjamin Constant, to the lowly grills concealing the dweller in a domestic harem.

Matisse emphasized the horseshoe arch as a visual marker for Islam, fixing on the same motif as dozens of Orientalist painters before him in what is the greatest of the Moroccan pictures, The Casbah Gate (see Plate 11). In terms of the geography of power in Tangier Casbah Gate presents an appar-

ent reversal of his perspective from the Hotel Villa de France, site of the Landscape Viewed from a Window (Paysage vu d ‘une fenétre, Fig. 79). A recent photo shows that the artist, in framing The Cas-

bah Gate, was seated just inside the Casbah, looking back through a double-arched portal across the

Medina to the European zone beyond (Fig. 80). Of course it is not the true “insider’s” view of the Casbah that one of the rare Maghrebian painters of the day, like Azouaou Mammeri, might have painted.

Although Matisse made pencil drawings of other Casbah and Medina doorways, there are no stud-

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism Les

ies for Casbah Gate. The numerous corrections retained on the canvas convey the artist’s physical engagement with the pigments used in the image. The predominance of blue is deliberate, to match that of Landscape Viewed from a Window and On the Terrace. Again in Matisse the contrast of white

stucco and pervasive blue produces a sense of light. (A blue-tinted wash is in fact often used to paint stucco walls in the Casbah.) The more radical expedient of painting a carpet of cherry red across the portal floor (the white disk is a stone manhole cover) uses the energy of the contrast of color to trans-

late the directional fall of light. The crouching figure on the left (a portal guard or an artisan) is virtually effaced by the blast of color, an emblem of how, in the colonial situation, the problematic of light focuses on aesthetic problems to the exclusion of all else. Landscape Viewed from a Window, in contrast, was painted on the edge of the new town. It can be

read as a metaphor for the spectatorial position of a foreign tourist, looking out from the opulence of a colonial hotel, with its reassuring flowerpots, and surveying in complete security, across the roof

of the English church, the sky, sea, and the sand-colored Casbah, where Matisse’s aspirations for painting the Orient primarily lay. The blue window partly obeyed a topographic impulse (a defining

feature of much Orientalist painting), but ventured more by deliberate artifice—the blue paint that connects the room’s interior to the landscape, assuredly not blue, links the work to Matisse’s signa-

ture open windows that bespeak the self-enclosed, as much as the outward-looking, nature of his experimentation. The largest and most ambitious of the Casbah pictures, the Moroccan Café (Fig. 81) is the closest of all the Matisses to traditional Orientalist thematics. The leitmotif of the café scene was fixed early

on in Fromentin’s descriptions of Algiers and in the pictures of Decamps, whose Turkish Café was reviewed by Gautier: “There is a white wall with stone pillars, and the eye looks between them into

a cool transparent shade, in which the Turks are smoking opium in an attitude of such exotic idleness that the most active of men must envy them.” ”* Here the European self-image of constructive action is contrasted with stereotypical ideas about the idleness of Muslim man, who won his social,

musical, and hashish-inspired café pleasures at the cost of cloistering subjected Muslim women in the home. The café scene typically inscribes a double-edged European trope: the superiority of the European, who nonetheless envies the Oriental. Such a precept may help explain the steady popularity at the Salons of the Orientalist Painters of Moorish and Turkish cafés as subjects—whether painted

in Tangier, Algiers, Tunis, or Istanbul.

If Matisse’s theme typifies French responses to North African society, it differs in the pictorial conception of the image. In Moroccan Café Matisse explores a development he had introduced into the syntax of modernism with paintings like Harmony in Red (Le dessert: Harmonie rouge) of 1909 or Dance (La danse) and Music (La musique) of 1910: indicating space by unified fields of color. Matisse’s handling of pictorial form in Moroccan Café is most radical in the undifferentiated green field

that collapses perspective other than that implied by the seated figures’ diminishing size. (Yet that

184 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

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(It was like Count Anteoni’s Biskra garden in Hichens’s Garden of Allah, which Europeans, but not the indigenous, were encouraged to visit.) Matisse’s letters home indicate that the Villa Brooks garden had sections of lawn and flower beds containing European varieties. Matisse seems to have avoided

these European sections of the garden, however, to focus on tall trees entwined with green flowering vines and on fleshy ground plants like palms, aloes, and acanthus. Those features were enough, short of jungles, to indicate an African location. (And they were thus consistent with Matisse’s preference for indigenous architecture.) The painter later recalled that the Villa Brooks garden “was immense, with meadows as far as the eye can see. I worked in a part which was planted with very large trees, whose foliage spread very high. The ground was covered with acanthus. I had never seen acan-

i88 Matisse and Modernist Ortentalism

thus. I knew acanthus only from the drawings of Corinthian capitals I had made at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. I found the acanthus magnificent, much more interesting, green, than those at school!” *” These recollections evoke the Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape (Les acanthes, paysage marocain) can-

vas, one of Matisse’s greatest landscapes (see Plate 12). The classical associations of the acanthus are

consistent with French thinking about North Africa as part of the former Carthaginian and Roman empires, still evidenced by the extensive ruins at Volubilis in Morocco, Tipasain Algeria, and El Djem

in Tunisia. (Colonial rhetoricians like Louis Bertrand were happy that France had reclaimed from the Arabs these territories of the original “Latin” people.) Such cultural memories were endemic to classically educated French artists traveling in North Africa: Moroccans in burnouses had reminded Delacroix of Roman senators; live acanthus reminded Matisse of Corinthian columns. In his Acanthus Matisse uses the artifice of intense purple tonalities to evoke the sensuous exuberance of the luxuriant vegetation he had seen. The painting is nevertheless tightly disciplined: the acan-

thus shrubs in the foreground establish a horizontal emphasis, while the verticals of the tree trunks hold air and earth together. Matisse is at pains to communicate the fall of light in the exotic garden: the palm shrub in the right foreground is in shadow, while its neighbor basks in sunlight. If the dappled ivy leaves and bright patches of bark evoke the precision of impressionist observation, the umbrellas of yellow and orange foliage in the pink distance recall the willfully colored trees of Matisse’s 1906 Bonheur de vivre.

The arabesque legacy of Bonheur de vivre is more apparent, however, in Moroccan Garden (Jardin

marocain, Fig. 83). In it the strange puffed forms of the foliage, hillside, and curvilinear pathways, which seem divorced from any observable reality, recall the conventionalized landscapes of Mughal

illuminated miniatures (if not, indeed, the landscapes of Chinese scroll painting). Despite the apparent spontaneity of Matisse’s brushwork, an infrared photograph reveals that the image conforms to a meticulously drawn layout in pencil that detailed individual leaves and periwinkle blooms.*’ The

arabesque sense of design, curving tree trunks and pathways bound together, was already evident at that formative stage.

It could be argued that features like arabesque linearity and repeated patterns have a wide currency in Matisse’s art and cannot be attributed definitively to Eastern representational devices. Matisse

is an artist who digested and assimilated sources with uncommon completeness so that they appear as indefinable inflections of the master style. (The same problem attaches to Matisse’s primitivism.) Perhaps for that reason Pierre Schneider, in his 1990 essay “The Moroccan Hinge,” offered the term “orientality” to define how Matisse, under the stylistic influence of Islamic art, advances the decorative and abstracting elements in his painting. Matisse, for Schneider, “changed the character of al-

lusions to oriental art made in the West: he discarded the picturesque in favor of the pictorial or, if you wish, orientalism in favor of orientality.”* So Schneider contrasts the orientality of Matisse with “orientalism,” a term he never actually defines

Matisse and Modernist Orientalism 789

but uses to designate picturesque and anecdotal nineteenth-century painting in the tradition of Pros-

per Marilhat and Gérome. Thus he introduces a new version of the dichotomy (first suggested by early-twentieth-century critics like Apollinaire), common in the modernist historiography of art, between avant-gardist painting—which eschews the descriptive and anecdotal to cultivate the aesthetic problems of “pure painting” —and literary painting, primarily academic art that elaborates a narrative and calls for the traditional techniques of illusionism, including the mastery of anatomical representation and archaeologically exact costume. In light of what I have argued it no longer seems possible to maintain that separation. Matisse’s links with the conventions of anecdotal and picturesque Orientalist painting are too profound for his Moroccan oeuvre to be excluded from its ranks. To neglect those links—a standard procedure of art

historians committed to the modernist version of their aesthetic heritage—is to avoid the contradictory historical situation of avant-garde art. Although the abstraction typical of Matisse’s modernist Orientalism modifies what his stock themes signify, it does not divorce the works from the com-

plications attendant on European artists painting in colonial North Africa. The great modernist painters like Matisse are by no means sovereign agents detached from the flow of history, whose works

share nothing with either middle-brow academic paintings or the popular postcards and picture albums that helped make North Africa more available to French colonial interests. To insist on that detachment is to give aesthetic activity a utopian reading, to believe that art can proceed without mount-

ing up any debt in the political sphere.

790 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism

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he interest Matisse evinced in Islamic art about 1910 was by no means the product of an isolated aesthetic revelation. The institutional ground for his receptivity had long been pre-

pared in both colonial and metropolitan spheres. By the time he left Tangier in 1913, the Algerian and new Moroccan governments were embarked on linked campaigns to “revive” local dec-

orative arts traditions. Those campaigns were a response to the growing dismay at the damage the European presence had done to such arts, coupled with an awareness of their economic potential and

their value as a likely source of inspiration for French decorative artists. Matisse, with greater depth than anyone else, incorporated the aesthetic suggestions born of such art into a new version of modernism, as we have seen. In doing so, he was making an aesthetic move called for as early as 1893, with the Muslim Art Exhibition (see Chapter 3) that had taken place when he was studying painting in Paris. The Muslim Art Exhibition, which established a context for the public appreciation of Islamic art,

came about because of a disaster of colonial negligence and rapacity in Algeria.' In 1846 the French government was planning an Algerian museum in Paris, to be stocked largely from the booty of mil-

itary operations (euphemistically referred to as razzias, or raids) carried out against Abd-el-Kader

1G 2

and subsequent leaders of the Algerian resistance. The Paris museum was never realized, and the historical collections of arms, carpets, and decorative arts assembled by successive French administra-

tions had become the property of the municipality of Algiers, in a time when the hostility of settlers toward indigenous Algerians was hardening. In 1888 the city, in a gesture of contempt for its indigenous heritage, sold off this neglected part of its long-established permanent exhibition through a group of antique dealers in the Casbah, at derisory prices. The sale set offa scandal and a ministerial inquiry

directed from Paris. The archaeologist Georges Marye was appointed to sequester for the state what

little remained, and the recovered property was included in the embryonic National Museum of African Antiquities and Muslim Art established in Algiers in December 1892. A key motive for the massive exhibition of 1893 in Paris was to garner gifts for this new Mustapha Museum, so named for the building, in neo-Moorish style, that was finally opened on the heights of Mustapha in April 1897.”

Governor Jonnart and Assoctationtst Policy

Such a turn toward Islamic tradition illustrates a change in the French colonial tradition itself. New

ideas about colonial governance were inspiring a cultural sympathy for indigenous peoples among the upper echelons of colonial administration, in North Africa and elsewhere. Paul Cambon, the Algerian governor-general who oversaw the building of the Mustapha Museum, was an early, if cautious, figure in this change. Cambon, a friend of Pierre Loti’s, had previously been resident-general in the Protectorate of Tunisia, which was administered more progressively than Algeria. I read such gestures as founding the Mustapha Museum and supporting Islamic art in Paris as analogous to the

emerging colonial politics of association—the theory that reducing disturbances in the local culture preserves some semblance of a functioning society—which runs counter to the cultural violence attending traditional hard colonial policies of assimilation to French exemplars.’ Assimilationist policy had aimed to redirect the habits of colonized peoples—legal, economic, linguistic, and cultural—toward French models. It was a colonialism of forcible change, exemplified in North Africa

by the Algerian experience. The theory of association, inspired by British practice in India, instead posited government by a cooperative alliance between indigenous authorities and the colonists, one that would maintain local structures of power, so as to minimize social disruption, yet would serve the colonizing power as ultimate master.’ The strikingly different course of colonialism in Algeria and Morocco shows the imprint of these political alternatives. French Algeria was a long experiment in the policies of assimilation and Morocco, the most salient example of government by association in the French colonial empire. After setting up their Protectorate of Morocco in 1912, the French took far greater pains than they had in

Algeria to maintain the political and cultural integrity of the society they now controlled. The political basis of the colonial presence also differed: in Morocco a French resident-general, General (later

192 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

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Marshal) Hubert Lyautey (Fig. 84), shared rule with the sultan and his government forces (the makhzen). Algeria, in contrast, which had been in French hands for almost eighty years, was ruled directly from Paris, with six of its own (nonindigenous) elected members in the French Chamber of Deputies and a governor-general appointed by the metropole. As the propaganda had it, Algeria was

part of France, a continuation of France across the Mediterranean. Indeed parts of the physical and cultural fabric of French Algeria had been made over in European style. Architecture gives the quickest illustration of the point. The archaeologist Georges Marcais

lamented in 1906 that the French, since their arrival in 1830, had destroyed significant parts of the Roman archaeological heritage. (He gave as an example the dismantling by military engineers in 1845

of a functioning Roman amphitheater.) Suggesting that the French approach to Islamic monuments was more destructive still, Margais noted that “the Algiers of the Corsairs [had been] cut up, the cap-

ital of the deys refashioned on the model of a Marseille suburb.”? Even more forcefully, the English traveler Elisabeth Crouse reported in 1907 that since 1830 four hundred mosques around the country had been destroyed or converted to other uses.°

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 293

Such expressions of colonial regret and concern for preservation were surely encouraged by the mentality of the governor-general who replaced Cambon in 1900: Charles-Celéstin Jonnart. He held the post for a decade, exiting briefly in 1901—3, then governing until the arrival of Lutaud in rgrt.’

As we have seen, Jonnart was also reappointed by Georges Clémenceau for a year in 1918—19 to reestablish order after World War I. Early in his administration Algiers enjoyed a modest cultural renaissance, evident in the new buildings using a neo-Moorish vocabulary, the establishment of the Villa Abd-el-Tif, efforts to reorganize the indigenous arts industries, and the encouragement of the

Comité du Vieil Alger. That heritage body for old Algiers (see Chapter 9) was a cross between a local-history society of almost Pickwickian picturesqueness and today’s heritage activist groups pitted against commercial development. Jonnart had gained familiarity with Algeria during a decade spent as secretary to Governor-General Tirman in the 1880s. His belief that culture marked a colony’s maturity is evident in a speech of 1900

in which he claimed that Algeria, having confronted the “ordeals of pacification,” was now ready to construct a new image of itself: “Algeria is a second France, it is full-grown, it does not wish to be merely a land of merchants preoccupied with the price of wine, sheep, and cereals. . . . It is France,

and as a consequence should . . . be the prolongation of the image of ‘la douce patrie’ that has remained the queen of taste, of letters and the arts.”* Although he said nothing here of indigenous culture, Jonnart came to be regarded as an Arabophile by many colonists and as a friend by parts of the

indigenous community. The historian Ali Merad attests to Jonnart’s good standing with that community, citing his efforts to improve social services for Muslims and to encourage higher education (for example, by founding new medersas, or Islamic colleges, in Algiers and Tlemcen in 1904 and 1905), which assured his popularity among Muslim Algerians.’ Jonnart’s goal, in the polarized political situation of Algeria, appears to have been to reconcile the settler and indigenous communities through the policies of association. Jonnart’s directive that new public monuments and schools should be designed using Moorish ar-

chitectural forms—rather than the previously standard neoclassical or neobaroque styles—reflects that cultural and political sympathy. Although earlier buildings (such as the Mustapha Museum devised by Cambon) had employed such a language, concessions to local vernacular were rare before the rise of what Francois Béguin calls the architecture of arabisances, which he defines as the “Arabization of architectural forms imported from Europe” in an intellectual climate “associating these

operations of hybridization to certain forms of sympathy for the Arab world.”'' The new architectural regime was so distinctive that the residents of Algiers began to refer to a Jonnart style.’ Prominent examples of the style included the new prefecture on the waterfront, the medersa built in 1904 just above the old Mosque of Sidi Abd-Er-Rahman (that popular site for painters), the offices of the newspaper La Dépéche algérienne, and the massive Central Post Office in downtown Algiers.”

Marcais described the program as taking inspiration “directly from preexisting Muslim architecture,

194 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

reproducing the dispositions of the plan and the exterior forms of Turkish edifices.” The function of the medersa, to take one example, was to prepare one hundred students from the indigenous elite

for the magistracy, administration, and interpreting. Designed by the government architect Henri Petit, it “modified the silhouette of the Mosquée de la Pécherie with great success,” while its gateway and interior ornamentation, inspired by medieval Maghrebian models, had to be adapted to the Turkish floor plan.'* Such a heterodox mix of sources betrays confusion about the value of differing Islamic

traditions among early exponents of arabisances. It is not surprising that younger French architects, particularly those active in Lyautey’s Morocco, criticized the concentration on lavish exterior decor

in such buildings." Comparable attitudes toward indigenous heritage were evident in Jonnart’s provisions for the in-

digenous arts industries. Jonnart was receptive to the Islamic decorative art espoused by Georges Marye and his successor at the Mustapha Museum, the archaeologist Stéphane Gsell. Soon after taking office Jonnart commissioned the Parisian specialist Marius Vachon to survey the arts industries. Vachon, employed previously to study decorative arts reform in European nations from Great Britain to Bosnia-Herzegovina, published articles in the prestigious Revue des arts décoratifs, illustrated with engravings of traditional Algerian silver jewelry (Fig. 85), that show his keen awareness of the threats

to such industries from counterfeit metalwork imported in bulk from Germany or contraband carpets carried over the Tunisian and Moroccan borders. According to Vachon sixty-five hundred workers were involved in the Algerian textile industries (excluding the family workers who were the back-

bone of the cottage industry). Against the economists who predicted the death of such handicrafts with mechanization, Vachon asserted the vital potential of this Algerian workforce, these “thousands

of artists, artisans, and workers of the Other France who .. . merit our esteem and have a right to

our protection.” ' Arsene Alexandre’s second, more sustained, inquiry resulted, we saw in Chapter 6, in the found-

ing of the Villa Abd-el-Tif, although his main focus had been resuscitating the indigenous arts industries. Alexandre, seeing considerable artistic aptitude in indigenous Algerians, asked how best to harness it. Education was a key issue for the critic, who weighed traditional forms of apprenticeship against the more professional teaching of drawing and design according to French models. Convinced

that drawing was the “basis of everything,” Alexandre hoped with the right instruction to liberate the natural talent of indigenous artists from the tendency to “perpetually retrace traditional models” as well as the “templates /ponczfs/that guide the hand and dispense with all mental initiative.”"” The critic, however, dismissed as sterile the academic instruction of the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-

Arts. Nature was the great teacher for Alexandre, and he urged the governor-general to promote drawing classes outdoors, either before the live model or before the uniquely abundant plant life of North Africa. The cultural disinclination of Muslims to make pictures before nature never once en-

tered Alexandre’s discourse. On the contrary, he stressed the place of vegetative motifs in Islamic

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 195

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art and went so far as to suggest a mixed-race drawing school at the Jardin d’Essai, where students could observe “the differences between the two geniuses, the two temperaments, with a view to an Algerian art properly so called, that dreamed-of art, maybe impossible to realize, where everything

that is luxurious and sumptuous in the oriental temperament will unite with all that is clarity and rhythm in the temperament of the European.” '* This moment of idealism, this wish for a seamless cultural synthesis between colonizer and colonized fades elsewhere, as Alexandre sketches more paternalistic arrangements oriented toward separate development. Workshop schools, or ouvroirs, for girls, where handicrafts had a prominent role, were sympto-

matic. The most important, in view of its antiquity and descriptions of it by several commentators

196 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

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aan "thea a sMme Ben-Aben’s as) P . =Pee Pi. iyet —te Ae|NS 4 o —_ , ata ‘ aoLuce ean f oe ws F Pay ee < Oe ied Ee. peters an pete — ay ee embroidery Bree Se PR ee. appa Age, Oe eee cselies Algiers, ca.workshop, 1907. besides Alexandre, was the ouvroir of Mme Luce Ben-Aben, a prominent member of the Comité du Vieil Alger (Fig. 86).!” As early as 1845 Ben-Aben’s great-grandmother Mme Luce had set up the first French-run workshop for embroidery made by indigenous girls. Her almost proto-feminist aim was to “assure a new source of revenue for the poor classes and to help lift up the Muslim woman, to draw her from her inaction, to give her a nobler and more useful role in her family.” *” Indeed the philanthropic aspect of Luce Ben-Aben’s modern operation was much remarked, but the issue is com-

plex: late-twentieth-century Westerners might equate the ouvroir with child labor, notwithstanding salubrious conditions or the widespread tradition in North Africa and the Middle East of employing female children for rug making. The photograph of the Ben-Aben house in the Casbah shows small

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts LOG

unveiled girls at their embroidery frames under the watchful eye of a fully veiled woman. The children are seated on rugs in the tiled, arcaded court of the Ben-Abens’ villa, “saved from the pickaxe of the demolition teams” on the Rue Marengo near the medersa.”! Since the early nineteenth century European textile industries such as shawl making at Paisley or Lyon had been premised on the imitation of Eastern (Kashmiri) models, like a good deal of later tex-

tile design.” The first Mme Luce had translated the study of material exemplars to Algeria, collecting fine examples of various Maghrebian laces and embroideries. Those antiques had always served as models in the family workshop.” In the Algerian situation the revival—or “reinvention” —of tradition in indigenous hands was the aim: the Luce family practice went on to become a key policy plat-

form in the French Maghreb. Around 1905 Jonnart’s team was beginning to assemble pattern books for carpets and embroidery and old recipes for textile dyes. The administration moved haphazardly to disseminate these, partly through ouvrozrs and schools for girls and partly through the workshops

for indigenous boys annexed to the communal schools, run by Jeanmaire, rector of the Academy (later University) of Algiers.

The indigenous view of these matters is hard to trace in French texts. The complex system of Algerian workshops that produced Berber jewelry, copper ware, embossed leatherwork, lace, carpets, and inlaid furniture (the last the specialty of the Racim family in the Algiers Casbah) was not

even described in most of the French texts. French views of the contemporary (as opposed to admired historical) arts resound with charges of vaguely perceived “decadence” that could be reversed only by French intervention. But Vachon recognized a strong indigenous push for reform, based on memories of a school for Kabyle artists set up in 1864 at Fort-l’Empereur that had folded in the rebellions of 1871. For Vachon “the indigenous people themselves, through their cazds [leaders] . . .

demand, more than the colonists, the immediate organization of professional teaching for the colony’s arts industries.” * Jonnart’s most substantive response was to establish an umbrella organization, the Office of In-

digenous Arts, by 1908. Its activity in Algiers was coordinated by Prosper Ricard, the prolific au-

thor of French guides to North African architecture, decorative art, and cultural geography written during the 1920s (when he was based in Morocco). Ricard, an exemplary cultural broker of the

modern colonial era, was employed by successive North African governments. In his many books he is an indigenophile, writing with easygoing authority on Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Ricard

was a pivotal figure in the developing careers of both Mohammed Racim and Azouaou Mammeri (see Chapter 9). Apparently Algerian-born, he was a graduate of the Ecole normale de Bouzaréah

(just inland from Algiers), an important institution for training teachers of both French and indigenous schoolchildren. In about 1908 Ricard, then an inspector of indigenous education, was hired to run the Cabinet de dessin for the new Office of Indigenous Arts in Algiers. Its task was to document traditional artwork

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from around the country—primarily architectural details and fine-quality handicrafts—by photographs and drawings. These were re-presented as models and distributed to workshops and ouwvroirs

around the country. The teenage Mohammed Racim was one of the talented indigenous draftsmen Ricard employed as a copyist,” a position subordinate to that of French artists also working for the office who had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Their job was to design master copies for deco-

rative work to be executed in the native workshops. One exponent of such designs was Edouard Herzig, a painter of unremarkable academic scenes of oriental life in Kabylia. More interesting, Herzig

doubled as a specialist in the design of arabesque patterns and illuminated pages (for example, a Moorish-style carpet, illustrated in Alexandre’s report [Fig. 87]). He became particularly active in

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 299

the 1920s, when the Algerian arts industries achieved a firmer footing. But French writers like C. Bayet

at the time protested Herzig’s patronizing role in teaching the Arabs their own art.”°

Tyautey § Morocco

Compared with the Moroccan situation, to which I now turn, that of Algeria—the details of heritage and the indigenous arts—seems but vaguely glimpsed. A great deal more is known about ResidentGeneral Lyautey, his motivations and his policies, than about Governor Jonnart, a surprisingly obscure

figure in colonial histories. Lyautey has long enjoyed the reputation of being a reformist colonial governor of genius during his tenure (1912-25). Yet the “genius” did not act alone: I believe that many of his cultural initiatives in Morocco elaborated on ideas sketched by Jonnart and his staff in the preceding decade.

Lyautey’s initiatives, more explicitly than Jonnart’s, reflect the associationist theory of relations between colonizer and colonized. In Lyautey’s case one can specify precisely when it appeared on his

intellectual horizon. It was partly a function of the split between the French military elite, who ran the Bureaux arabes and sought an accommodation with the indigenous people, and the colonists, who were far less tolerant of their interests. As an intellectually cultivated young officer posted to the Constantine region of Algeria from 1879 to 1882, Hubert Lyautey professed to despise the settlers and to

be fascinated by the Arabs, whose language he learned and whose religion he studied.” His political ideas were further shaped during his years as a rapidly rising army officer in Indochina (1894) and then in Madagascar (1896—1903), both in the service of General Joseph Gallieni. It was Gallieni who first applied the theory of colonial governance by association, drawing inspiration from the ideas

of the governor of Tonkin, J.-L. de Lanessan. Under Gallieni, Lyautey had supervised the arming of Indochinese villagers, enabling them to defend themselves against indigenous “brigands” (that is,

forces opposed to French rule) and thus help secure the country. In Indochina parts of the machinery of Mandarin administration, taxation, and the legal system were left standing, a model being selectively adopted in the Protectorate of Tunisia and being expounded theoretically by authors such as Joseph Chailly-Bert.* Lyautey became closely affiliated with the members of the powerful Committee for French Africa in the French government, led by Eugéne Etienne. A brilliant officer, Lyautey had been poached from

Madagascar by Governor Jonnart to lead the French military activities at Ain Sefra in southern Algeria in 1903. The two men by then shared an associationist ideology as well as a vision for a unified

French North Africa that might in the future include Morocco. In the end, Lyautey’s reward for supervising a decade of French attrition of Moroccan sovereignty from his power base in southern Algeria was the high command, as resident-general, once the Protectorate of Morocco was declared.” Since its inception, Lyautey’s administration in Morocco has been the subject of largely approv-

200 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

ing scrutiny, a tradition begun by the skillful propagandist himself through the favorable writings of journalists and officials, many of them, directly or indirectly, his own appointees. In the cultural sphere,

scholars like Janet Abu-Lughod, Paul Rabinow, and Gwendolyn Wright have scrutinized Moroccan

urban planning and architecture.” Lyautey’s intense personal interest in urban planning led him to appoint young architects like Henri Prost, whose modernist experiments in Morocco could scarcely

be matched in the first world at the time. I briefly sketch these initiatives for their relevance to the decorative arts, particularly the legal controls and systematic administration they brought to heritage and arts issues.

Urban planning in Lyautey’s Morocco was at once retrospective (focusing on architectural her-

itage) and prospective (looking to new building). Architectural matters were regulated by a Directorate of Public Instruction, Fine Arts, and Antiquities, established in its initial form just eight months after the foundation of the French protectorate in March 1912 (the time of Matisse’s arrival in Tangier). Its first director, appointed by Lyautey, was the artist Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, then traveling in Morocco. De Lunel and the inspectors he hired produced an extensive classification of buildings and town precincts as monuments historiques (using legal instruments based on, but in some

ways exceeding, those of the eponymous French government service). The regulations, drafted by Guillaume de Tarde, made it illegal to pull down classified buildings, setting a heavy fine as penalty.’*!

The aim was to preserve the existing Moroccan built fabric from the worst physical depredations of colonialism seen in Algeria (an approach applauded in 1913 by the Comité du Vieil Alger).** The

work of the inspectors included making renderings of monuments, producing copious photographic records, and restoring key icons like the Tour Hassan in Rabat. Paul Rabinow summarizes both the

process and its implications for the future: “By strict restoration of the individual buildings and of the site itself, the French turned these ‘artistic vestiges of a shining civilization’ into monuments. The groundwork was laid for tourism, the museumification of Moroccan culture and a new historical consciousness.” ”

The prospective part of the protectorate’s activity was a massive building program that set up entire small cities, nouvelles villes, for the European communities and those prosperous members of Moroccan society who could afford to live in them. The French new towns were located initially on the coast, in the then small port of Casablanca and in Rabat, an ancient city and one of the four imperial capitals. Lyautey based his government in Rabat, where he also undertook the most extensive urban transformations. Later in the decade new towns were added to the remaining imperial cities of Fez, Meknés, and Marrakech, separated from the ancient precincts by a cordon sanitaire still evident today. Although the intent of the separate-cities approach has been debated—was it urban apartheid or a recognition of Moroccan cultural integrity? **—its effect in preserving these ancient cities cannot be disputed. The controls applied to new building were increasingly strict. As early as 1914 a dahir (an official

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 22

regulation prepared by the French administration but countersigned by the sultan) to control new building types was in place. Lyautey, presuming relations would improve if the Moroccan people continued to feel “at home” in their physical environment, not only guaranteed the protection of historical monuments, but also ruled far more strictly than Jonnart that all new administrative buildings

be built in sympathy with the “local style.” From the earliest days of the protectorate, architects like Prost and Albert Laprade practiced an arabisances that Béguin and Wright have argued showed

more discipline and originality than the ornamental excesses and facadism of the Jonnart style in Algeria. The combination of historic preservation and neo-Moorish fabrication also informed the Moroccan decorative arts. According to a French academic tradition extending back to the Roman architect Vi-

truvius, ornament and decoration were subsidiary to the construction of buildings proper. Prost took

a utilitarian and hierarchical attitude toward the impressive handicraft traditions of Morocco: “We are the architects, and Morocco furnishes us with artisans. The Frenchman establishes the structure of the edifice, considering its function, and the indigenous decorative art will truly be his collaborator.” Prost’s remark makes it clear that the motive for salvaging Moroccan handicrafts was not mere aesthetic passion. The industries concerned—-small ceramic tiles (ze/igs), carpet weaving, leatherwork

(the famous maroguinerie still popular in France today), clothing manufacture, silver- and copperware industries, Berber jewelry, and inlaid furniture—had very considerable financial potential, even

aside from the new building. Lyautey’s procedure in organizing this complex manufacturing field resembled that of Jonnart in Algeria to the extent that Lyautey must have used Jonnart’s methods as a blueprint. Lyautey and his staff surely knew the Alexandre report (published in Z‘4khdbar by Barrucand soon after the death of Isabelle Eberhardt, Lyautey’s and Barrucand’s mutual friend). In Morocco, however, theory and ex-

periment were converted into practice in a highly organized, legalistic fashion modeled on provisions for architectural heritage.

Like Jonnart, Lyautey commissioned a report on the traditional arts, written just one year after the French came to power. Jean Gallotti documented declining production rates and the breakup of

the traditional organization of these industries.*’ He attributed that state of affairs to competition from an increasing volume of European imports, seen as inferior to Moroccan products. For three or four decades Morocco had been subject to economic incursions by rival European powers seeking markets for their own clothing and arts industries, in particular “English cotton goods, silks from

Lyon, sheets from France and Germany, Swiss and Italian floral cloth, machine-made carpets from Manchester, glassware from Bohemia,” and Italian ceramic tiles rivaling the traditional zedigs.** Cou-

pled with this “inundation of the Moroccan markets,” Gallotti claimed, was a loss of traditional ex-

pertise, with concomitant loss of quality and hence a further shrinking of markets—despite such great decorative projects as the building of the Bahia, the new palace of Ba~-Ahmed, grand vizier at Marrakech, at the turn of the century.

202 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts

To redress the situation, Lyautey arranged a transfer of expertise from Algeria to the new protectorate. Helped by the poaching of the intercolonial specialist Prosper Ricard (who joined Tranchant de Lunel and the Orientalist painter Joseph de la Néziére in the Moroccan Office of Indigenous Arts Industries after 1914), proposals to reform the arts industries were quite sophisticated from the outset. For example, Alfred de Tarde, a young French sociologist who was a lieutenant in Lyautey’s

army and the founding editor of the official illustrated journal France-Maroc from 1917,” launched that journal’s extensive arts coverage with an imaginary dialogue entitled “A Renewal of the Moroc-

can Arts.” Two Frenchmen debate whether Moroccan art is terminally decadent or can be revived. One argues that the secrets of decorating the great Merinid monuments—wooden fretwork screens,

beehive plasterwork, fine ceramic tiles, and so on—have been lost forever: “All one finds here are gross imitators who endlessly copy models from the old days. Their dexterity has been spoiled, and

they must confine themselves to the simplest models. We are witnessing the slow dissolution of a race. But it is precisely this miraculous immobilization of the past that attracts me.” Such theories of cultural degeneration were endemic to settler colonies and their intellectual rationales well into the twentieth century. De Tarde, however, saw things otherwise, arguing that the traditional arts are merely

dormant in a country still full of potential. One needs to consider how the people live to detect the

vitality of their art: “It dominates their daily lives, from the richest city dweller to the humblest Bedouin living in his tent: it is visible in the most minute detail of his dress or his furniture, in the carpet he treads underfoot . . . in the worked leather of his saddle. .. . In fact sty/e here marks the least productions of the least artisans.” *” De Tarde traces that vitality of style to the social continuity of Moorish life, popular art, and religious tradition. Not admitting that the French presence might have disrupted that cultural mix forever, the author seeks to prove his case with the drawings of an eleven-year-old boy in one of the bicultural FrancoArabic schools set up recently in Fez (Figs. 88, 89). The student, a certain Bennani-abd-el-Hadi “dis-

covered” by Prosper Ricard, is asked by his teacher to draw flowers, on one occasion a bouquet of four blooms in a vase, on another a humble daisy. The boy first copies the daisy in “correct” European perspective, but he soon tires of that exercise and instead reinterprets it on the same sheet as a

delicate, curling arabesque (see Fig. 88). His second motif, the bouquet of flowers, is more elaborate, becoming a decorative composition of cursive arabesques extending in perfect symmetry from top to bottom of the schoolbook page, on which the teacher’s note “T.B.” (trés bien) is evident (see Fig. 89). De Tarde delights in such confirmation of his idea of cultural conditioning: This child /ooks at a bouquet, and he sees a work of art in accordance with the great ornamental traditions in which he is born and raised. That is why this little drawing reiterates, for me, the whole theory of Moorish

art... . One finds in it the distancing of the real, the progressive elimination of the concrete required by Arab art.

Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts 203

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