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

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Introduction
1. Orient or France? Nineteenth-Century Debates
2. Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism
3. A Society for Orientalists
4. Orientalists in the Public Eye
5. Colonial Panoramania
6. Traveling Scholarships and the Academic Exotic
7. Matisse and Modernist Orientalism
8. Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts
9. Mammeri and Racim, Painters of the Maghreb
10. Colonial Museology in Algiers
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

O R I E N TA L I S T A E S T H E T I C S

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Orientalist Aesthetics A R T, C O L O N I A L I S M , A N D FRENCH NORTH AFRICA, 1880–1930

Roger Benjamin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

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 0-520-22217-2 (alk. paper) 1. Orientalism in art—France. 2. Orientalism in art—Africa, North. 3. Painting, French—19th century. 4. Painting, French—20th century. 5. Africa, North— In art. I. Title. nd1460.e95 b46 2003 758'.995—dc21

2002022627

Printed in Canada 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39-48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 8

For Kate, Sophia, and Stuart

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Contents

Acknowledgments / ix List of Illustrations / xiii Introduction / 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Orient or France? Nineteenth-Century Debates / 11 Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism / 33 A Society for Orientalists / 57 Orientalists in the Public Eye / 79 Colonial Panoramania / 105 Traveling Scholarships and the Academic Exotic / 129 Matisse and Modernist Orientalism / 159 Advancing the Indigenous Decorative Arts / 191 Mammeri and Racim, Painters of the Maghreb / 221 Colonial Museology in Algiers / 249

Conclusion / 275 Notes / 283 Selected Bibliography / 325 Index / 337

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Acknowledgments

T

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 McAuli¤e, and the late John Pigot gave initial encouragement and advice. It became a reality 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 Shi¤’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 acquaintances, including Perry and Benedict Anderson, Gill Perry, Kathy Adler, and John House. In France the Getty funds supported work at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, and an all too brief journey to Tangier, Fez, and Meknès. Robert Simon, Laurie Monahan, Barbara Comte, and Hélène Hourmat were most helpful, as were

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Michael Enright and François 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, Geneviève Lacambre, Dominique Taffin, and Jean-François Heim in Paris. I have fond memories of working with Brian McDermott of the Mathaf Gallery, of Tayeb Zahzah and Maître Si-Ali Tiar. The specialist booksellers of Paris, particularly Michèle Dhennequin, must be thanked. François 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 Çelik, and Peter Hulme. The students in my seminar 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 enriching 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 University, 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 Iain McCalman, Howard Morphy, and Caroline Turner, and those able administrators Anne-Maree O’Brien and Julie Gorrell. Anne McGrath, Hollis Clayson, David MacDougall, Lynne Thornton, and François Pouillon read chapter drafts at this time, while CCR col-

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Acknowledgments

leagues, including Christopher Pinney, Klaus Neumann, Greg Dening, and above all Nicholas Thomas o¤ered 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, I want to o¤er my commissioning editor, Deborah Kirshman, 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 translator 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

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Illustrations

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 1900 (opposite page 1)

Plates (following page 104) 1. Eugène Fromentin, Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat (La rue bab-el-Gharbi à 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 & Lefèvre) 3. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mosque at Algiers (La mosquée à 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

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5. André Suréda, A Fountain at Tlemcen (Une fontaine à Tlemcen), 1916, gouache. From L’Illustration, 1930 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) 6. Etienne Dinet, “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute) (“La quesba” [longue flûte 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 lithograph poster, 257 x 97 cm. 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 l’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 (Scène orientale or Baigneuses), ca. 1914, watercolor, wash, and pencil on paper, 36 x 47 cm. Photothèque 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, La vie de Mohammed, prophète d’Allah, Paris, 1918 (photo courtesy Gros & Delettrez, Paris) 15. Mohammed Racim, The Rais (Le raïs), 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 collection (photo: ArtGo / Marc Guermeur, Paris)

Figures 1. Eugène Giraud, Théophile Gautier Smoking His Chibouk (Théophile Gautier fumant son chibouk), 1862, watercolor, 51 x 38 cm. Bibliothèque 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 à 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, In Search of Winter Sunbeams, 1869 (photo: Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria) / 15

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5. Eugène 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. Eugène 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 singulier, 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 Gérôme, 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 9. Eugène Fromentin, photographic carte de visite, ca. 1870. Société de la Géographie, Paris. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 28 10. Gustave Guillaumet, Weaving Women at Bou-Saâda (Tisseuses à Bou-Saâda), 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’après “Les noces juives” de Delacroix), 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 à Alger), 1882, oil on canvas, 73 x 60.5 cm. Private collection / 39 14. Albert Lebourg, Algiers Street (Rue à 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 National 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. Worcester 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. Bibliothèque 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. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 60 22. Eugène Grasset, At the Place Clichy (A la Place Clichy), ca. 1895, typographic poster. From Les maîtres de l’affiche, 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

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24. Marius Perret, Souvenir of the Fouta Expedition (Souvenir de la colonne de Fouta), 1892, lithograph. From Les peintres-lithographes: Album spéciale, les Orientalistes. Bibliothèque 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 L’Illustration, 1897 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 68 26. Alfred Dehodencq, 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 Ibrahim (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: Dîner des orientalistes), March 1897, lithograph. From Les peintres-lithographes. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 73 29. Paul Leroy, symbol of the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Marque de la Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français), 1895, wood engraving (ANU Photography) / 75 30. Victor Peter, medal awarded by the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Médaille de récompense de la Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français), 1899. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1899. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 75 31. Adolphe Chudant, Algiers—Cocktail Hour (Alger—l’heure verte), ca. 1895, lithograph. From Les peintreslithographes. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 76 32. Adolphe Chudant, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters (6e Exposition des Peintres Orientalistes Français), 1899, lithograph. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1899. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 76 33. Alexandre Lunois, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters (6e Exposition des Peintres Orientalistes Français), 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 (© Photothèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris; photo: Pierrain) / 84 35. Charles Cottet, Fellah 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, 81 x 65 cm. Private collection / 88 37. Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Portrait of Pierre Loti, “Phantom of the Orient” (Portrait de Pierre Loti, “Phantôme de l’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, Sydney, 2001 / 90 39. Théodore Rivière, Salammbô and Mathô (Salammbô et Mathô), 1895, bronze. From The Paris Exhibition, 1900 (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 91 40. Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria (We Greet Thee, Mary), 1891, oil on canvas, 114 x 88 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 51.112.2. All rights reserved / 93

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41. Etienne Dinet, Imam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia” (Imam présidant la prière: “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 M’rabeth (Le fils d’un saint M’rabeth), 1900, oil on canvas, 87.6 x 92 cm. (photo: ACR Edition, Paris) / 97 43. Etienne Dinet, Sliman ben Ibrahim at the Place de la Concorde (Sliman ben Ibrahim à 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-Saâda], ca. 1925 (ANU Photography) / 101 45. Colonial precinct of the Trocadéro Palace gardens, west side, Paris, 1900. From Hachette, Paris Exposition, 1900. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 107 46. The Algerian Street—Unofficial Section, Paris, 1900. From The Paris Exhibition, 1900 (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 108 47. Joseph de la Nézière, Diorama of Fez, 1922, oil on canvas, 32 m. long. Moroccan Pavilion. From Livre d’or de l’exposition coloniale, 1922. Bibliothèque 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, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 112 49. Scellier de Gisors, Pavilion of the Dioramas (Pavillon des dioramas), Paris, 1900. From Souvenir de l’exposition coloniale de 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 113 50. Moving Stereorama, or Poème 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 Le Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 115 52. Javanese dancers with Louis Dumoulin’s painted view of Angkor Wat, in Le Tour du Monde. From Le Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 117 53. Lion Court (Cour des lions), in L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures, Trocadéro Gardens. From Le Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 119 54. The Arena (Les Arènes), in L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures, Trocadéro Gardens. From Le Panorama, 1900 (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 120 55. Installation of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français, Moroccan Pavilion, Ghent Exposition, 1913. From L’Action africaine, 1913. Bibliothèque 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) / 123 57. Abyssinia—Arrival at Harrar of M. Lagarde, envoy of the French government (Abyssinie—Arrivée à Harrar de M. Lagarde, envoyé du gouvernement français). From L’Illustration, 1897 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 133 58. Paul Bu¤et, The King of Ka¤a (Central Africa) (Le roi de Ka¤a [Afrique centrale]), pen sketch after a painting, ca. 1897. From Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1899 (photo: National Gallery of Australia) / 134

Illustrations

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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. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 142 62. Jean Bouchaud, The Villa Abd-el-Tif Overlooking Algiers, gouache. From L’Illustration, 1925 (photo: Baillieu 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’Art et les Artistes, 1914 (ANU Photography) / 149 65. Léon Carré, The Muleteer (Le muletier), 1910; oil on canvas. From L’Art et les Artistes, 1914 (ANU Photography) / 150 66. Léon Carré, Murals in Presidential Antechamber, ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 152 67. Léon Carré, Muslim Life (La vie musulmane), ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 153 68. Marius de Buzon, Return from the Market (Retour du marché), ca. 1923. Palais d’Eté, Algiers (photo: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 154 69. Charles Dufresne, North African Landscape—the Oued at Bou-Saâda (Paysage nord-africain—l’oued de Bou-Saâda), ca. 1910–12, pen and ink, 26.5 x 36 cm. © Centre Georges Pompidou (photo: P. Migéat) © ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 155 70. 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 à 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, An Ouled-Naïl, before 1906, oil on canvas. From Dinet and Ibrahim, Khadra, danseuse Ouled-Naïl, 1927 edition (photo: State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales) / 166 74. Henri Matisse, H. Matisse by Himself (H. Matisse par lui-même), 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 Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © Succession H. Matisse. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2001 / 175

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Illustrations

77. Abd el-Krim. From L’Illustration, 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 fenêtre), 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: Hélène Hourmat) / 183 81. Henri Matisse, Moroccan Café (Café marocain),1912–13. Distemper on canvas, 176 x 210 cm. The State Hermitage 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, à Alger), 1921. From L’Illustration, 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 L’Illustration, 1931 (ANU Photography) / 193 85. Gold and silver Berber jewelry from Algeria. From Revue des arts décoratifs, 1901. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 196 86. Mme Luce Ben-Aben’s indigenous embroidery workshop (Ouvroir de broderie indigène de Mme Luce Ben-Aben). From A. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 1907. Bibliothèque 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. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 199 88. Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi, A Daisy (Une marguerite), pencil. From France-Maroc, 1917. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 204 89. Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi, A Bouquet of Flowers (Un bouquet de fleurs), pencil. From France-Maroc, 1917. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 205 90. 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. Joseph de la Nézière, photo of the Exhibition of Moroccan Carpets at the Pavillon de Marsan, 1919. From France-Maroc, 1919. Bibliothèque 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 Zaïan 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 L’Illustration, 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 L’Illustration, 1930 (Photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 214

Illustrations

xix

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. Bibliothèque 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: Bibliothèque Forney, Paris) / 218 98. Azouaou Mammeri, The Fountain (La fontaine), ca. 1917, crayon drawing. From France-Maroc, 1917. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 225 99. Azouaou Mammeri, Interior of a Koranic School (Intérieur d’une école coranique), ca. 1917–18, oil on canvas, 77.5 x 92.1 cm. © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001, Gift of Jacques Cartier, 1923.223 / 227 100. 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) / 230 101. Fez from the tombs of the Merinids. From L’Illustration, 1922 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 231 102. Azouaou Mammeri, The “Monteée des Rats” at Fez (La “Montée des Rats” à Fès), ca. 1920, oil on canvas. From L’Illustration, 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 L’Illustration, 1921 (photo: Baillieu Library, Melbourne) / 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-Arts d’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 (Barbarÿsche Galeÿen), Flemish engraving, seventeenth century. From L’Illustration, 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, Aixen-Provence) / 254 113. Indigenous Chiefs Await the President of the Republic (Les grands chefs indigènes attendent le Président de la République). From Mercier, Le Centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 255

xx

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 l’Algérie, 1930 (ANU Photography) / 257 116. Regnier and Guion, architects, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Le Bulletin des Musées de France, 1930. Bibliothèque 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 l’art ancien et moderne, 1930. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 262 118. Hall of plaster casts, Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Note sur l’ethnographie, l’archéologie, 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 l’ethnographie . . . et les beaux-arts en Algérie, 1948 (ANU Photography) / 265 121. François Barry, Inauguration of the Statue of the Duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers, 1846 (L’inauguration de la statue du duc d’Orléans sur la place du Gouvernement, à Alger en 1846), n.d., oil on canvas. Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. From Le Bulletin des musées de France, 1930. Bibliothèque Nationale de France photographic plate / 267 122. Albert Marquet, The Admiralty Dock at Algiers (Le Bassin de l’Amirauté à Alger), ca. 1930, oil on canvas. From L’Illustration, 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

Illustrations

xxi

SARDINIA

S PAI N

PORTUGAL

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Córdoba Philippeville (Skikda)

Seville Granada

Bougie (Bejaïa)

Algiers Blida

Tangier

AT L A N T I C OCEAN

Tétouan RIF

Rabat

Volubilis

MO

Tlemcen

Moulay-Idriss

Fez M

Marrakech

A

T

L

A

O

U

N

T

A

I N

Bône (Annaba)

Tunis Nabeul

Sousse

Kairouan Bou-Saâda

U N TAIN S

LE

Constantine

S RÈ INS AU N TA U O M

Oran

Meknès

Casablanca

BY E R K A B Y LE GREAT NGE L E S SER K A RA RAN G E

Timgad

El Kantara

El Djem Sfax

Biskra

S

TU N ISIA Laghouat

Gabès Touggourt

M’ZAB

S

Médénine Douïreth

Ghardaïa Ouargla

MO RO C C O

S

A

H

A

R

A

D

E

S

E

R

T L I B YA

ALG E RI A

North Africa, circa 1900.

Introduction

T

he strangest library I have ever worked in is that of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers. It is bright, airy, and well-appointed, high up in the crumbling art deco building made to celebrate one hundred years of the French occupation of Algeria. The collection is not strange: this is a serious scholarly library on European (and to a lesser extent, Islamic) art, formed between 1930 and 1962, the year when over one million French abandoned the North African colony. The library as I found it in early 1993, however, was all but deserted. The young librarian graciously allowed me to photocopy, but because of a lack of toner the machine made almost illegible prints. The breezy silence was sometimes broken by the chanting of young Islamist cadres, demonstrating on the former Champ de Manoeuvres (French military parade grounds) nearby. Like the museum and its collections, the library had changed function, all but lost its brief. A colonial cultural institution, it nowadays speaks to but a fraction of the people. Yet what treasures it contains for the seeker after Orientalist and French art! The Algerian sta¤ were rightly proud of the nineteenth-century pictures, by major French artists from Gustave Courbet to Edouard Vuillard. They were doubly proud of the national heritage represented by the rooms devoted to the miniaturist Mohammed Racim and more recent works by Algerian abstract painters. Yet the then director and her sta¤ knew little of their museum’s history. The French, I was told, had repatriated both the old records and the paintings. Although most of the pictures were later re-

1

turned to Algiers, the papers remained in France. I had seen them in the colonial archives at Aix-enProvence. The founding of the Algiers museum is the subject of the final chapter of this book. One sees the circuitous byways of knowledge by which a foreigner—in my case, an Australian trained in America and traveling via Paris—with no claims other than intellectual curiosity and moral sympathy, can construct a history of someone else ’s heritage. They are byways where first world privilege opens borders, as when I cruised through the customs barrier at Nice airport while French officials held back family groups of Algerian workers. Borders, as sites of conflict and constraint, can embody long-standing tensions. In my work on this project, my being neither French nor Algerian, nor indeed American, may have given me a clearer view of cultural traffic in the Mediterranean during an earlier era. It is a view as if from a spy satellite looking down on the region—an appropriate metaphor perhaps for the right of infinite purview that the Western way of knowing arrogates to itself. The camera eye in the satellite receives a mass of undi¤erentiated information that has to be interpreted. Channels for information have to be formed, data made to tell a story. Such a process involves selection, hypotheses, prejudices. I am mindful of the morass of information I have confronted in excavating this history of Orientalism. Forging channels and constructing stories have been the hardest parts of the exercise, given the relative dearth of scholarship on such images and texts. As the camera eye of the satellite responds to the commands of the controlling power, so my historical construction serves a set of scholarly protocols, moral or ideological biases, aesthetic aversions and preferences, even publishing imperatives. The discipline of art history has helped guide me, although I feel this book is as much an informal contribution to the sociology of art or of colonial culture as, say, a history of style. My aversions have not been to kinds of painting—my admiration for cultural studies enables me to regard the sea of Orientalist “kitsch” as material worthy of study. My preferences for the modernism of the French masters has nevertheless ensured that modernism remains a vector in this history. As for guiding moral biases, they will be too explicit for some, too feebly expressed for others. Although not in itself a contribution to Theory, this book is built on my responses to the intellectual climate of postcolonial theory, in particular the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, profound critics of colonialism. In Australia I have lived with the actuality of a settler culture coming to terms with its indigenous past and present. My own passion for both Aboriginal art and the politics of its interpretation has been the screen through which I have, semiconsciously, viewed questions about settler and indigenous cultures and political relations in North Africa. The cultural heritage I study in this book is by no means my own. Who has the greatest claim on Orientalist painting, it is hard to say. It is only marginally the heritage of the Algerians, many of whom must have but a tangential interest in the visual arts of their colonial past. At the struggling museum, closed soon after my visit because of explicit threats from the fundamentalists, there were

2

Introduction

more pressing issues than museum history. And indeed the museum, with its gross sculptures that contradict the Hadith (or deeds of the Prophet) and its lubricious subjects in painting, had never spoken to orthodox Islam. It had been built by the French, for the French and a minority of Europeanized évolués (indigenous who had “evolved” toward the colonialists’ culture) who savored the visual arts. Its renewed relevance in decolonized Algeria did not extend to the celebration of colonial origins. As for the French, they too are divided in their claims on this art, although French men and women were its main exponents. Very few French art historians or curators have visited the Algiers museum— some curators were astonished when I stated my intention of visiting. But they were the custodians of modernism, and the relation of modernism to the colonial sphere has always been uneasy. Elsewhere in France there is a lively interest in art colonial (to use the current French term), fueled by colonial nostalgia and the art market’s search for new sensations, both complex. Colonial nostalgia, the sentiment of loss experienced by French people driven by political circumstances from a country where they had struggled to make a home, has its validity. The pieds-noirs (Algerian-born French people) may be as close as one gets to the owners of the culture I am studying. But the scholarship emerging from such nostalgia can be partial to a fault.1 The new market for Orientalism involves a considerable clientele of non-Western buyers, Muslims who are coming to see in the sometimes unlovely products of French ethnographic painting indices of their own premodern past.2 My own interest in the French painting of North Africa is rooted in allegiance to the modernist tradition. All my postgraduate work in the United States dealt with Henri Matisse. Regrettably my initial master’s paper on Matisse ’s Moroccan paintings had been written with a sense of ignorance regarding the cultural context of such exoticist moments. I conceived this book a decade later to answer the question, what was Orientalist art in the time of its historical emergence? How was it thought about, written up, reviewed? Under what conditions was it produced, exhibited, collected? The answer entails a careful historical account of Orientalist art and its relations with colonial culture, one that considers the politics of representation driving postcolonial theory and retains a sense of connection to the problematics of modernism, if only to view them obliquely, in the light of histories whose existence modernist historiographers have forgotten. What does it mean to attach PierreAuguste Renoir to the Orientalist tradition, and see his impressionism as a secondary matter? To learn that some critics argued the innovations of impressionism were enabled by prior experiences of travelers to the East? How would it skew the image of Henri Matisse to see him as a fellow traveler in the caravan of colonial art tourists, whose work was made possible by the annexation of Morocco? To accept the aesthetic riddle of his seeking inspiration in Islamic art yet turn the tables on avantgardist histories and see that quest as the spin-o¤ of colonial policies of government support for Islamic artisanal traditions? It amounts to recontextualizing modernism from the periphery: considering how Renoir and Matisse looked from colonial Algiers and Tangier, on the one hand, and from the perspective of the now marginalized belle époque academicism, on the other.

Introduction

3

The many imagined claimants on such a history of Orientalism, from art-loving Saudi sheikhs to pied-noir families, from French museum professionals to American art history students, indicate that it is eminently cross-cultural. Orientalist painting is an art of the interstices, often made literally on the move. In its primary state, images made “before the motif ” in places distant from France, it visually translates cultural misunderstanding, limited or absolute, across borders. The Orientalist view or photograph retains, as it were, the skin of the scene, but little of its inwardness. Among the few traveling artists—they are a special focus of this book—who took the time to learn their way into indigenous cultures, absorbing language, religion, and customs or living with the people they painted, was Etienne Dinet, alias Nasr’Edine Dinet (to give him his Algerian name). In his case, resocializing the self made it possible to transform the meaning of Orientalist paintings, even if it provided little in the way of aesthetic revelation. On the other side of such a cross-cultural exchange is the work of the few indigenous artists who took up painting. They are rare indeed compared with the myriad Europeans, Americans, even Australians who traveled in search of subjects to the countries of the Maghreb (the Arabic word for the setting sun that designates the cultural and geographic bloc comprising the three large states of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). The future artists Racim and the landscapist Azouoau Mammeri, as children of the indigenous elite in Algeria, had little choice whether to imbibe French language and cultural knowledge alongside the mother tongue and the Koran. For them, to be socialized by Francophone culture was a way forward. In adulthood, however, their decision to pursue painting in the face of local tradition was a distinct expression of will. To reconsider Orientalist art in the hands of “oriental” subjects is to break free of the interpretative vise applied to painting by admirers of Edward Said’s great study of European literary Orientalism.3 Orientalism is no longer a one-way journey, a stream of visions frozen by European travelers and carted home for consumption, without reference to the responses of those objectified in the process. A visual technology like painting, implanted in a colonial situation, becomes available to users other than those who imported it. Like language, it can talk back to the colonizer, in strophes appreciated for their visual poetry even if their potential to restate meaning goes unperceived at the time (as in Racim’s case). The forms of painting shift and are riven in the exchange, and non-European currents—such as the Persian miniatures that are Racim’s primary reference—may be incorporated into the mix, stressing cultural fealties outside the local, agonistic range. Better tools for describing such relations are available since Homi Bhabha suggested how indigenous people in colonial situations could live their mental life, strategically mimicking the Other to retain a space for the self.4 Even if such mimicry means splitting that self, this revised estimate of colonial situations recognizes the possibilities for indigenous agency. The recognition needs to be extended from the study of individuals to colonialism as a system. Colonial systems, stretching back to the Roman imperium, can be thought of as the most ancient instance of the supracommunal struc-

4

Introduction

tures now called globalizing. The best models for analyzing them stress precisely the endless mutual inflection of participants, even in situations of unequal power. As Nicholas Thomas observes: “the dynamics of colonialism cannot be understood if it is assumed that some unitary representation is extended from the metropole and cast across passive spaces, unmediated by perceptions or encounters. Colonial projects are construed, misconstrued, adapted and enacted by actors whose subjectivities are fractured—half here, half there, sometimes disloyal, sometimes almost ‘on the side ’ of the people they patronize and dominate, and against the interests of some metropolitan office.”5 At the same time, given such a necessary correction to unidirectional, condemnatory discourses, one needs a realistic assessment of power in the colonial relation. In this book of ten chapters, just two treat the activity of indigenous artists, and one of these involves a subaltern relation of anonymous decorative artisans organized by French colonial bureaucrats. The in-between men like Dinet, Mammeri, and Racim remain remarkable exceptions. Their unusual status is the result of many things, including the cultural disinclination among Maghrebians to make figurative images and the prevalence of painting skills (since vanished) among the French middle classes. But their exceptionalism also results from the extrinsic limitations, both institutional and personal, of my project, which have to be acknowledged. The museums, archives, and libraries where I have worked were assembled largely by the French, and my linguistic skills (I do not know Arabic) mean that the overwhelming voice, when it comes to painting in North Africa, is a “French” one, as I have translated it. When other histories of such material are written, scholars with di¤erent language skills and vantage points may complete what is here only a partial movement toward reassessing indigenous agency in Orientalist art. My treatment of the visual and textual materials out of which I write has two main axes: arttheoretical and institutional. The ten chapters broadly alternate between these axes—between conditions of production and conditions of reception. The one informs the other: the cognitive and critical understanding of Orientalist painting modified the personal and governmental strategies that brought the paintings about, and vice versa. The institutional approach, it seems to me, has the virtue of dispensing with the minute intensive scrutiny of enlightened individuals that is the bane (and the joy) of conventional art history. It allows broad patterns for the Orientalist phenomenon to emerge— the role of exhibiting societies, of events like colonial expositions, of travel scholarships administered by the state, of art museums. In particular, this emphasis on institutions allows the first art-historical test of a provocative part of Said’s thesis, his Foucauldian insight that the links between colonial governance and aesthetic production were more than just benign and circumstantial, that they were constitutive in fundamental ways. My research corroborates this part of Said’s case. Not only was the French colonial presence in the Maghreb a precondition of Orientalist art there, but Orientalist precepts also harmonized with thinking about the Other in contemporary colonial theory. The danger in dealing with institutions is the loss of the human face, and in a book on art, of the

Introduction

5

aesthetic dimension. My second emphasis—on Orientalist aesthetics and artists—gives me the chance to people the account with vivid personalities and signal pictures. Some of the artists are familiar names in less-than-familiar guises (like Renoir or Matisse, each given a chapter). Others (like Mammeri or Racim) are unfamiliar names whose claim on the attention of Euro-American art lovers I want to press here. Writing chapters on individual artists compels an engagement with mainstream art history—largely the history of the avant-garde. But earlier arguments on the Orientalism of the past have been based on incomplete art-historical information. A major aim of this book is to inject further information into the discussion. I have taken pains to seek out forgotten primary texts on Orientalism—and they, like the artists themselves, are remarkably numerous. Some, by major art critics like Eugène Fromentin or Léonce Bénédite, merit close attention, for they articulate an aesthetics of Orientalism that is co-extensive with the painting. Others, such as the numberless reviews of exhibitions of Orientalist art, give a sense of the conceptual range in which the French public and critics thought about pictures made in colonies or protectorates overseas. The alternating accounts of institutions and specific identities take the reader through a series of microstudies of specific institutions, works, and actors. I intend with this approach to underscore the connectedness of colonial personalities, art world organizers, artists, and works in a historically grounded theater of colonial activity, looking both out and back from the metropole (roughly, the home country). Long-lived, energetic critics and bureaucrats, intent on carving out power bases from which to advance their personal and colonial agendas, shaped the world of French colonial culture to a significant degree. Again and again in Parisian Orientalist a¤airs one comes across these gatekeepers, such as Léonce Bénédite, art scholar and curator of the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, who shuttled between that city and Algiers; Armand Dayot, the administrator of traveling scholarships who founded the journal Art et les Artistes; or Gaston Bernheim, the famous dealer who helped run the Colonial Society of French Artists. In the Maghreb their counterparts were the more elusive Prosper Ricard, an expert in Algerian and Moroccan indigenous art; Jean Alazard, curator of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers; and Victor Barrucand, the lapsed symbolist newspaperman and patron of the writer Isabelle Eberhardt. Among the artists only Etienne Dinet had a comparable ubiquity of action in shaping the emerging field of European art in dialogue with indigenous sites and traditions. From the patterns of their influence, something like a sociology of the colonial art world emerges. Specific institutions associated with such figures are woven into the historical account. It is worth considering those institutions as collectivities generating Orientalism: large entities that (like the modern corporation or nongovernmental organization) shift men about and (unlike it) produce artworks. The first of the institutions is the Society of French Orientalist Painters, set up around 1893 by Dinet and Bénédite, its president, whose aesthetic platform was modeled partly on the ideas of the critic-

6

Introduction

painter Fromentin. The society was like a visual propaganda-development wing of the Ministry of the Colonies, which helped fund its annual Salons and, with the governments of the bigger colonies, established scholarships for young artists from the metropole to work in the French colonial empire from Morocco to Indochina. The society, first envisaged at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, thereafter contributed easel pictures and panoramic paintings to almost every universal and colonial exhibition in France. Dioramas and panoramas (see Chapter 5) mediated colonial imagery for the mass audience of the great expositions. The French Ministry of the Colonies commissioned the society’s artists and made the exotic both a paying attraction and a form of propaganda. Indeed the globe-trotting painter Louis Dumoulin proved himself a versatile showman in his grandiose panoramic installation of 1900, the Tour du Monde. Traveling scholarships have a cross-institutional character, fertilizing Orientalist art by bringing individual painters, sculptors, and architects into the broader machine of the French colonial empire. My study of the scholarships descends to the quotidian, telling how young and often insecure artists coped with life on government stipends in remote desert locations. Their expressions of enthusiasm or bewilderment are held against the visual record of their pictures, and the challenge of landscapes and peoples well beyond their previous experience. The Algerian government’s scholars at the Villa Abd-et-Tif, who were designated by Bénédite in Paris, gave a specific visual profile to colonial painting in the 1920s—the so-called School of Algiers. That group in turn had a formative impact on the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, set up in 1930 by Jean Alazard. A study like this,which aims at grounded cultural history rather than investigates visual typologies, needs temporal and geographic limits. The half century from about 1880 to 1930 that I have chosen to study involves the period when French colonial expansion was at its apogee, and when the art movements of modernism complicate the aesthetic tableau. Because many of the critical issues raised by Orientalist art were present in romantic and realist criticism between 1850 and 1880, Chapter 1 sketches that earlier critical discourse. My own account becomes more detailed at the point when standard accounts of Orientalism say the movement went into decline. I argue on the contrary that Renoir’s Algerian impressionism and Gustave Guillaumet’s and Dinet’s desert naturalism mark an entirely new phase, the least known and most interesting of all. The period after 1880 also marks the new imperialism, as France acquired colonies or protectorates—in Indochina, Tunisia, West Africa, Madagascar, and Morocco—in the years leading up to World War I. The many artists issuing from France in this period were a cultural by-product of this engine house of colonial expansion under the Third Republic. The book’s main focus is the high modernist era bounded by the exposition of 1900 and two expositions of the early 1930s that make a logical terminus: the Centenary of French Algeria in 1930 and the International Colonial Exposition at Vincennes in 1931. The National Museum of Fine Arts

Introduction

7

of Algiers was built for the little-known centenary, for the visual was crucial to centenary symbolism: paintings, posters, stamps, photographs, museum and military displays—all had a place in this grand fete of colonialism. If the signs of colonial resistance were largely suppressed in Algeria, in Paris two counter-expositions showed the anticolonial currents nascent among metropolitan and indigenous radicals. The book closes with them, but only in the 1950s did a chain reaction of political crises and wars bring about the almost complete dismemberment of the French colonial empire. I want to explain my geographic focus on North Africa in view of my remarks on colonialism as a global system. Historical ideas on Orientalism have always been closely tied to geopolitical conceptions of space. For the painter-writer Ary Renan (son of the great historian), the Orient was a “vague word defined quite clearly by the frontiers of the ancient Muslim conquests”; that is also my general rule of thumb.6 In a century of warfare France, England, and to a lesser extent Italy had replaced the Turks as the main military and trading forces in much of the Ottoman Empire. Although I accept the French sense of the term “Orient,” I focus on relations between the metropole and the western part of that Orient—the Maghreb—for several reasons. Algeria was much the oldest French possession in North Africa, and the only one that became a thoroughgoing settler colony. Its history was permanently entwined with the visual arts—from the popular woodblocks that recorded the landing of French troops at Sidi-Ferruch in 1830 and Eugène Delacroix’s monumental Women of Algiers of 1834 forward. As will be seen in Chapter 1, Algeria long remained the setting most popular for Salon pictures of Eastern subjects. A variety of conditions— travel infrastructure, relative security, francophony—abetted the raw appeal of the exotic that appeared so abundant in the mountains and oases of that country. The smaller nation of Tunisia, declared a French protectorate (governed jointly with the beys of Tunis) in 1881, also became a popular destination for artist travelers (the most celebrated of whom was the Swiss Paul Klee). Except for the part it plays in my discussion of the art nouveau designer Victor Prouvé, who went there on a traveling scholarship, Tunisia is less a focus of my account than Morocco, which succeeded Algeria as the favored destination of French artists after it was made a protectorate in 1912. For the French, Morocco, never an Ottoman possession, represented an ancient and inaccessible Moorish culture. Its symbolic status had been established by Delacroix’s watercolors and canvases, images later revised by rare visitors like Benjamin Constant and Henri Regnault. After the annexation of 1912 Matisse was among the first to arrive there in what became a veritable flood of painters. But protectorate Morocco is equally interesting for its experiments in fostering the indigenous decorative arts under the guidance of Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey. Lyautey, a career soldier and administrator with experience in Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria, and Morocco, is a crossover figure who exemplifies colonialism as a transnational system. His progressive ideas about associating the colonial government with native hierarchies, adopted in all four colonial theaters, bore fruit in his cultural policies for Morocco. He encouraged the indigenous painter Mam-

8

Introduction

meri and placed heritage issues, such as “reviving” the extensive Moroccan arts industries, in the hands of French artists working alongside indigenous craftsmen and -women. Orientalist artist bureaucrats like Dumoulin or Joseph de la Nézière (whom Lyautey hired) were similarly creatures of global colonialism. But their peregrinations to Indochina, Japan, or Senegal are beyond the scope of this book. This study, unlike Gwendolyn Wright’s admirable work on French urbanism in Morocco, Madagascar, and Indochina, is not a deliberately comparative project.7 French painting in other colonial theaters must await further study. I hope instead to gain strength from my spatial focus on the axis from Paris to Algiers, with lines of cross-reference to Tangier and Tunis, Granada and Marseille. The North African component of this ancient Mediterranean littoral was a byway of Roman, Punic, and Berber cultures in antiquity and of Arab, Berber, and European cultures in modern times. Part of the French covetousness of the nearby Orient drew on perceptions of the imaginative and historical richness of the Maghreb as a location for culture. It is a commonplace that the national imagining of France was defined in part by what (or whom) it excluded—those people who were outreRhin or outre-Manche, or Belgian or Spanish. The Maghreb is curious in that the French imperial will required its integration into the idea of the French nation. The easy way, conceptually, was to adopt a hierarchical model of inferior colonial dependencies that enriched, but did not impinge on, the metropole. Much Orientalist painting of Maghrebian people and places observes that separation. The more difficult and interesting (if equally problematic) option was to rethink the French nation as encompassing and embracing North Africa, culturally and politically. The antique Latin connection— Frenchmen asserting that they were the new Romans come to reclaim their inheritance—went some distance but violently negated the Arab and Berber presence. The concept of cross-cultural fusion with current North African culture remains fascinating. That idea advanced further in art and letters than in politics. It animates the most interesting moments of Orientalism—when French painters “went native,” Algerians “went modern,” and European avant-gardists and conservatives alike opened up to the promptings of aesthetic traditions not their own. Political history called a violent halt to the process on the ground, but in the rarefied realm of the aesthetic, the rather beautiful idea of such a merging has by no means had its day.

Introduction

9

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1 Orient or France?

Nineteenth-Century Debates

Romantic Critics before a Desert Street I myself am su¤ering to some extent from a nostalgia which drags me towards the sun; for I find an intoxicating mist arising from these luminous canvases, which soon condenses into desires and regrets. I catch myself envying the lot of those men who are lying outstretched amid their azure shades, and whose eyes, neither waking nor sleeping, express, if anything at all, only love of repose and a feeling of blissful happiness inspired by an immensity of light. – c h a r l e s b a u d e l a i r e , “The Salon of 1859” (translated by Jonathan Mayne)

Few writers did more to suggest a psychology for European exoticism than Charles Baudelaire. The desire for expatriation is strong in his contemplation of an oil painting, nostalgia for a sun so absent in a wet Paris spring, envy for the lot of men understood as creatures entirely given over to their senses. Baudelaire looks to the East as a place to repair the deficiencies of life in modern France, a

11

mentality continued in his poems of longing for distant climes. In his “Parfum exotique,” “La chevelure,” and the celebrated “Invitation au voyage” from his book Les fleurs du mal of 1857, imaginative escape is conjured by meditations on the poet’s Creole lover, Jeanne Duval. Images of ports and ships, of half-glimpsed tropical foliage, abundant fruit, and warm seas arose as he contemplated the body of his sleeping mistress and her origins elsewhere.1 They entered the French imaginary in a powerful way, suggesting subjects for many a painter, sculptor, and later writer on Orientalist art. The picture that inspired Baudelaire’s reverie in the epigraph to this chapter was Eugène Fromentin’s Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat (La rue bab-el-Gharbi à Laghouat) (1859; see Plate 1). Fromentin had a way of presenting the physical intensity of color, the direct fall of African light on sun-warmed buildings so that viewers of the painting, in the filtered light of the Paris Salon, were momentarily transported down there, to a land of altered existence. Théophile Gautier also stopped in front of this painting. A leading romantic novelist, travel writer, and poet whom Baudelaire admired, Gautier was probably the most influential art critic of the Second Empire (Fig. 1).2 In a characteristic witticism he confronts regimented European modernity with haphazard African life: “The Street at Laghouat will never please lovers of progress, who demand for each town in the world the same footpaths, tarmac, street alignment, gas lamps, and enamel house numbers.” The street itself is “as jumbled as the bed of a dry watercourse,” while in the deep shadow cast by the wall of crumbling mud brick, the critic discerns a row of “practical philosophers,” lying as inert as “cadavers enveloped in their shrouds.” 3 These words resound today, first, for predicting French colonial urbanism and, second, for alluding to the sack of Laghouat by the French army some years before the painting was made. Not that Gautier, though a seasoned traveler, necessarily knew of the oasis town’s tragic history. Early in a series of journeys to Spain, Turkey, Egypt, and Russia, he spent three months in Algeria in 1845, fifteen years after the French capture of Algiers, the corsair capital, and just two after the first long war of colonial pacification, which crushed the Emir Abd-el-Kader’s jihad, or holy war. The siege and sack of Laghouat did not take place until 1852, as a response to one of the sporadic rebellions in the region. Gautier’s early visit to Algiers had alerted him to an aspect of French colonization that he was one of the earliest writers to regret: the modernization of the ancient corsair city (captured in elegiac mode by Emile Lessore and William Wyld, Fig. 2). Although echoing his friend Gérard de Nerval, perpetually disappointed as he traveled through the Near East encountering peoples and visiting sites that failed to live up to his expectations,4 Gautier varies the theme. His disenchantments resulted from the depredations of Europeans. Orientalist paintings—like those of William Wyld, who had painted View of Bab-Azoun Street (Vue de la rue Bab-Azoun) in 1833—were the visual documents that allowed Gautier to judge the depressing march of civilization: “Having seen [Bab-Azoun Street] recently, I can say that it has not gained from our civilizing presence. . . . So varied, so picturesque, so interesting in former times, [it] will soon be nothing more than a prolongation of the Rue de Rivoli. . . . That abominably fine road, which cannot stretch past the Louvre, has jumped the Mediterranean and toppled

12

Orient or France?

figure 1 Eugène Giraud, Théophile Gautier Smoking His Chibouk, watercolor, 1862.

the elegant Moorish buildings so as to continue its frightful arcades.” 5 As if in a prelude to the arguments over Baron Haussmann’s demolition of old quarters of Paris to make way for the great boulevards in the 1860s, Gautier in 1849 regretted the passing of old Algiers. The most glaring act of destruction there was the razing of the Turkish Palace of the Deys to open up the vast Place du Gouvernement (soon ringed with Haussmannesque buildings).6 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 Pêcherie, with its stately domes and soaring minaret. The motley crowd—French soldiers, civilian men and

Orient or France?

13

figure 2 Emile Lessore and William Wyld, View of Algiers, Seen from the Faubourg Bab-Azoun, lithograph, 1835.

figure 3 Adrien Dauzats, The Place du Gouvernement at Algiers, oil on canvas, 1849.

14

figure 4 Riding Camels, wood engraving, 1869.

women, Turks, biskris (members of the guild of porters, originally from the town of Biskra), Bedouin (nomadic Arabs), and Berbers in full costume—gives a sense of the polyglot city ignored by most artists. In 1846 in his account of the city, Alger extra-muros, Gautier lamented the incongruity of the new French buildings (encroaching at far left in Dauzat’s painting) and the loss of historic buildings like the forbidding fortress Bab-Azoun.7 Thus in viewing the Street at Laghouat Gautier rejoices in what o¤ends those “lovers of progress” the French colonists, who were settling the temperate hinterlands of Algeria. Gautier did not oppose modernization as such: he lauded the new steam technologies that powered the passenger boats, enabling rapid scheduled crossings of the Mediterranean. “Steam-power, so often belittled as bourgeois and prosaic, has carried o¤ [artists] with the spin of a propeller or a wheel, with more speed than the legendary hippogri¤. Today the Sahara is dotted with as many landscapists’ parasols as the Forest of Fontainebleau in days gone by.”8 European modernity, preceded (as Gautier conceded) by military conquest, had done much to enlarge the horizons of art by giving artists new subjects. But the march of modernity itself in the Algerian colony was generally not a valid subject for serious art (Fig. 4). The romantic critic expected paintings to image otherness—architectural, ethnographic, or climatic. Insofar as Gautier and the traveling Salon artists he applauded were tourists, that requirement of the cultural tour has changed little in a century and a half. In the Fromentin painting, the shadow where the sleeping Arabs lie is, metaphorically, the shadow of a violent past of which the artist was well aware. Fromentin was the first major artist to sojourn in Algeria for extended periods after the war with Abd-el-Kader. Most of Dauzats’s or Horace Vernet’s paintings in the earlier 1840s had been commissioned to celebrate the campaigns of the duc d’Or-

Orient or France?

15

figure 5 Eugène Delacroix, Arabs Traveling, oil on canvas, 1855.

léans, the duc d’Aumale, and Field Marshal Bugeaud—Vernet produced huge military canvases of a kind execrated by Baudelaire.9 Fromentin, traveling as a private individual, instead imaged a more peaceable Algeria, its landscapes and above all its Bedouin people of the plains. But France ’s pacification was provisional: there was intermittent military action in the Saharan zone and, later in the century, in the populous mountains of Kabylia and the Aurès, in particular the great Kabyle Insurrection of 1871 and its aftershocks. The Siege of Laghouat of 1852 was such an action, with bloody repression following the taking of the town. Like most of the French campaigns it was depicted in now largely forgotten military paintings.10 In his travel book Un été dans le Sahara Fromentin noted the devastation of the desert town, put to the sword by the French just months before his arrival there in 1853. Fromentin gave no sense that he thought the French were wrong in their massacre of inhabitants, carried out with the collusion of tribes “friendly” to the French. To do so would have been impolitic, given his own reliance on the French military presence for his security. Traveling with a small armed entourage, he could have journeyed to the Sahara only with the permission of the military officers of the Bureaux arabes who administered the Algerian territories. In his apparently timeless image of Laghouat peace

16

Orient or France?

is restored, and the age-old afternoon siesta resumes, allowing a concentration on such aesthetic issues as the opposition between the intensely blue sky and the parched mud-coated desert buildings. Fromentin’s material vision made the romanticized Moroccan landscapes of Delacroix (Fig. 5) seem dated and presaged the early impressionists’ experiments with light in the next decade.11

Fromentin and the Aesthetics of Travel

Between his debut in 1847 and his painting Bab-el-Gharbi Street at Laghouat of 1859 Fromentin became the figure around whom debates on the merits of the Orientalist genre crystallized. While his paintings gave rise to passionate discussions, his writings on Algeria essayed an aesthetic of Orientalist practice. By the time his novel Dominique was published in 1862, Fromentin had established a unique reputation, being recognized equally as a writer and a painter. He is best remembered by art historians for Les maîtres d’autrefois (1876), a work on the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish schools that Meyer Schapiro called “a masterpiece of criticism which may be read beside Baudelaire’s.”12 Of his two travel books, Un été dans le Sahara (1857; Sahara hereafter) and Une année dans le Sahel (1859; Sahel hereafter),13 the first received eloquent reviews from George Sand and from Gautier, who quipped that Fromentin as a writer “has become a master without ever being a student.”14 Fromentin’s role as a theorist of Orientalism has yet to be given its due. If the studies of Léonce Bénédite at the turn of the twentieth century are any guide, Fromentin was the most influential voice on this issue in the nineteenth century. Delacroix, who preceded him as a painter and writer who traveled to North Africa, o¤ered no systematic discussion of the problems of painting in the East. Whereas Fromentin published two travel narratives that are as complete as novels, Delacroix attempted nothing more than private letters home, fascinating though they are, and artist’s notes published posthumously as part of his Journal. In his pages on what he calls “la peinture orientale” Fromentin systematically explores the parameters of the category. He had journeyed to Algiers and Blida in the spring of 1846 with Armand du Mesnil, returning to make his Salon debut with two Algerian landscapes. He went back to Algeria for the 1847–48 winter, traveling farther south with the painter and early photographer Auguste Salzmann to the near Saharan oasis of Biskra (about which see Chapter 7).15 His last and longest stay, of 1852–53—in the company of his wife, Marie Cavallet de Beaumont, who remained in the temperate Sahel while Fromentin ventured south to Laghouat—became the basis for his Sahara. He wrote Sahel, however, five years after leaving Algeria, in the form of letters backdated to the time of his travels to give immediacy to his text. Elisabeth Cardonne emphasizes Sahel as “the fruit of a profound work of memory, which draws the data of experience into mental compositions of exceptional acuity”—a mnemonic feat much admired by the Goncourts and others.16 Although Fromentin traveled to Algeria primarily to paint, he recounts very little of that activity in his books,

Orient or France?

17

moving about the country, once he has left Algiers, less as a purposeful traveler than a flâneur of the open spaces whose aims are not revealed. Key passages, however, address the problems of painting the Orient. The most important of them, in Sahel, begins: “The Orient . . . has the fault of being unknown and new, and of evoking at first a feeling foreign to art—dangerous to it—that I would like to forbid: a feeling of curiosity.” Curiosity in this now dated sense is the attraction of the new and peculiar and involves a quickening aroused by novelty that might seem trivial in the grand scheme of art. For the Orient, Fromentin continues, “is exceptional, and history shows us that nothing beautiful or durable has been made with exceptions. It escapes general laws, the only ones worth following. . . . Even when it is very beautiful, it retains a certain modicum . . . of exaggeration, of violence that renders it excessive. This is an order of beauty that, having no precedents in either ancient literature or art, strikes us initially as bizarre.”17 Fromentin’s skepticism about the project of painting the East is surprising. He gains his conviction from measuring the task against a familiar system: the academic tradition he had imbibed in the painting studio of Louis Cabat. He responds to scenes that “escape general laws” and “have no precedent in either ancient literature or art” with an alarm similar to that of classicist and neoclassicist critics confronting an excess of brute, vulgar detail (whether in the paintings of Caravaggio in the seventeenth century or in the realism of Fromentin’s contemporary Courbet). The task of painting, in this academic tradition, was not merely to copy nature in all its unselected, chaotic form, but to assimilate the visible to ideas of the beautiful, le beau idéal, by selectively adjusting natural elements.18 Classicist criticism rates academic precedent and the active forming of material above any truth inassimilable to the tradition it represented. Fromentin nevertheless had the resources to go beyond academic tradition, and in treating the new class of subject, he generated a critique of “documentary” painting of the exotic. In the 1850s Fromentin had argued forcefully against an ethnographic approach to painting. He thought it dangerous to present to the European viewer aspects of life in the Orient so bizarre as to be inassimilable to the art of painting. Displaying something without precedent in the history of European representation would risk revealing “de périlleuses nouveautés”—dangerous novelties (a phrase later taken up by Léonce Bénédite). As Fromentin argued, the public might come to expect of painters information proper to travel diaries, “pictures composed like an inventory, [so that] the taste for ethnography will end up being confused with the feeling for beauty.” 19 Fromentin called the manifestations of the taste for ethnography documents, meaning “the visual signal for a country . . . the exact type of its inhabitants . . . their foreign and strange costumes, their attitudes, their postures, their customs, their duties, which are not ours.” 20 Clearly, Fromentin had little tolerance for the scientific image making that for well over a century had been part of the task of exploration in the Pacific and elsewhere. In that attitude he di¤ered from Gautier, who proclaimed that the old national schools of Europe must be succeeded by a universal school, in which all types

18

Orient or France?

of humanity will be represented, the “monotony of the European type” being varied by “the exotic charms of Hindu beauty, Arab beauty, Turkish beauty, Chinese beauty.” 21 The disciplines of ethnography and ethnology, understood as writing or describing the characteristics of peoples, had first emerged as a science in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century. French and British voyages of exploration in the Pacific and even Russian scientific expeditions sta¤ed by German scholars to newly conquered Siberian territories typically impelled such study.22 By the 1820s and 1830s in France ethnologists began to integrate diverse racial, geographic, linguistic, and historical elements, so that the first Ethnological Society, founded in Paris in 1839, dedicated itself to pursuing “the physical organization, the intellectual and moral character, the languages and historical traditions” of specific peoples.23 The concept of ethnography was widely di¤used enough for Gautier and Fromentin to take it up in the late 1850s, and Jean-Léon Gérôme to be labeled a producer of “ethnographic canvases” on account of his “remarkable aptitude for seizing and rendering the typical characteristics of diverse peoples.” 24 The broad sense of “ethnography” was gradually displaced, and by the turn of the century it was considered descriptive, “the scientific mapping out of di¤erent racial regions, nations and tribes.” 25 As Patricia Lorcin has shown, Algeria was the great French testing ground for ethnographic data and theories of race.26 Fromentin’s books make up for the avoidance of ethnographic detail in his paintings. His travelogues contain copious descriptions of the North African scene, the landscape and vegetation, the towns, the oases and their activity, and the people he met and occasionally befriended. In Sahel he gives a detailed picture of Mustapha, the hamlet where he lived just outside the walls of Algiers, and includes vignettes of his favorite corner café in the Algiers Casbah (the “Carrefour de Fromentin”). Further sites include that focus of women’s public social life, the cemetery of Bab-Azoun. Such texts correspond to an iconography of Algerian subjects selected by Orientalist painters and lithographers like Wyld and Théodore Frère but largely neglected in Fromentin’s own painting. His awareness of the local discomfort with the painter’s prying eyes led him to suggest a protocol he largely followed, one that appears radical in the context of later Orientalist practice: “It might have been possible for me to enter the mosque, but I did not try. To penetrate further into Arab life than is permitted seems to me misplaced curiosity. This people must be seen from the distance at which it chooses to reveal itself: men close up, women from afar. To describe a women’s apartment or to paint the ceremonies of the Arabs’ religion is in my opinion graver than fraud: it is to commit, in the matter of art, an error of point of view.” 27 Fromentin’s own art looked, not to the iconography of town and city, but to the great open spaces of Bedouin nomadic life. He painted distant views of their encampments under rolling clouds and innumerable scenes of horsemanship and the hunt on the open plains of the Sahel (Fig. 6). While squarely in the tradition of Delacroix’s and Théodore Chassériau’s more violent mounted duels and lion hunts (Fig. 7), such images correspond closely to the milieu evoked in the second half of Sahel.

Orient or France?

19

figure 6 Eugène Fromentin, Arab Falconer, oil on canvas, 1863.

20

figure 7 Théodore Chassériau, Arab Chiefs Challenging Each Other to Single Combat under the Ramparts of a City, oil on 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 ).28 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.)29 But the broader problem 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.”30 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?

21

mentin pushed the biblical analogies further than most.31 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.”32 In theology the correlate of this argument was Ernst Renan’s Vie de Jésus Christ of 1861, a controversial ethnographic reconstruction of Christ’s life that had the e¤ect 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.” 33 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 southern Mediterranean peoples—Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, and Spanish, who, with the Provençals, 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 categorize 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 separateness 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 Aurès. They lived in villages and farmed, unlike the nomadic Arabs, and thus had developed characteristics and social institutions 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.34 Fromentin’s observations contradict the conclusions of the Kabyle myth while preserving its structure 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 Sahel he spends pages defining

22

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.” 35

The Realist 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 workers 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.36 They were joined, for di¤ering 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—religion, 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 di¤erence 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 e¤ectively declared Orientalism dead and buried.37 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 o¤ 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 e¤ects that we, as men of the Occident, are unable to judge, as these e¤ects find no harmony in ourselves.” 38 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 painting 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.39 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

Orient or France?

the sight of cows in a meadow edged with poplars.” 40 That affirmation of place and European identity is almost xenophobic. In describing some archetypal Barbizon landscape replete with cows, meadows, 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 unanimously 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.41 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.42 Castagnary sought reason to find the painters he called Orientalists (such as Léon Belly and Narcisse Berchère) 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.” 43 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-huitième dynastie). Jean-Léon Gérôme, an exponent of the neo-Greek taste, was one of the most prominent contemporary Orientalists who traveled regularly (Fig. 8). Castagnary was scathing about Gérôme’s selling o¤ the studies he had made during his voyage to the Orient: “His Almeh 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.”44 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.45 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?

25

figure 8 Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Almeh (Arab Girl in a Doorway), oil on canvas, 1873.

stream by giving up his scholarship and residency at the Villa Medici (the base in Rome for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, often called the Rome School) to travel to Granada. There, in the company of his friend Benjamin Constant, he made a series of magnificent watercolor studies of the Alhambra Palace. The two men then set up a studio at Tangier (on the Moroccan coast opposite Gibraltar), where Regnault intended to undertake a series of ambitious canvases on life under the Moorish caliphs of Granada. Few were painted: Regnault’s Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada (Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade) is by far the most famous. The little-known Execution of a Janissary (L’Exécution d’un janissaire), its setting modern Egypt under Sultan Mahmoud II (who suppressed that elite armed force in 1826), was also produced in Tangier.46 Regnault, returning to France in a patriotic fervor in 1870, was killed by a stray bullet while on defensive patrol against the besieging Prussian army on the outskirts of Paris.

26

Orient or France?

Castagnary admired Regnault, although he mistrusted the bravura of the General Prim and considered the Salomé (which he failed to categorize as an Orientalist work at the Salon of 1870) as an exercise in painting colored accessories. Castagnary was doubtless aware of the Summary Execution, which, after the restoration of order, spread the shock waves of its theatrical violence through the Musée du Luxembourg (as through the Musée d’Orsay today). Regnault’s more intimate masterpieces, including the watercolors Hassan and Namouna (Hassan et Namouna) (named for a tale from the Thousand and One Nights; see Plate 2) and Haoua (named for the tragic heroine of Fromentin’s Sahel ), had been painted in a Parisian studio during the Siege of Paris. They were shown in a posthumous exhibition of Regnault’s work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1872 and praised by an aged Gautier.47 After the successive catastrophes of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1871, Castagnary, a staunch republican, was able to return to his reviewing. From 1873 to 1879 he came to occupy an increasingly significant position as a political commentator and official, and in 1887 (the year before his death) he was named to the peak administrative position of director of fine arts.48 The year 1876 marked the final battle of his campaign against Orientalism. He orchestrated all his previous critiques into an expanded text that culminated in the coup de grâce of declaring the movement dead and buried. He wrote the most cogent historiography of the movement yet to appear, detailing its initial development, stimulated by the Greek War of Independence, and its progression during the war for Algeria, when “Horace Vernet began gluing the pages of this almost daily epic to the walls of Versailles.” With the Arabs suppressed, French landscapists could risk going onto the plains. “This is the brilliant epoch of Fromentin,” he wrote, “with his fantasias, his falconry hunts, his nervous, swift little horses.” 49 But for Castagnary interest in the exotic waned with the rise of the naturalist movement, and then a self-protective introspection, brought about, he argues, by the defeats of the Franco-Prussian War. He viewed the Orientalist personnel as largely defunct: the landscapist CharlesEmile de Tournemine was dead, Belly had stopped painting, and Fromentin was “powerless to renew himself.” Among the newcomers only Gustave Guillaumet provided “figures not lacking in grandeur.” But the real hope was the late Regnault, who could have been a useful recruit. His stay in Spain and Tangier, his grandiose imagination, the verve and the brilliance of his execution might have done more for the doctrine than twenty years of camels and desert. . . . Men like him cannot be replaced. The two students he leaves behind [Benjamin Constant and Georges Clairin] are not worthy successors. . . . It is not their fault after all, if the lessons of 1870 bear fruit . . . and each Frenchman feels he is becoming more French. Let us abandon this movement, and let history be its judge. In a few years’ time we will be able to set up a stone, and engrave upon it this consoling word: Orientalism was once alive in French painting.50

Orient or France?

27

figure 9 Eugène Fromentin, photographic carte de visite, ca. 1870.

That trenchant text was one of a number that make 1875– 76 a crucial time in the debates on Orientalism. As if to replenish his flagging creativity, Fromentin returned to writing about art in 1875, publishing his Maîtres d’autrefois (Fig. 9). His doubts about the repetitive imagery of his own Orientalism reached new heights in 1876, the year of his failed candidacy at the Académie Française and subsequent premature death. Strangely enough, he took the opportunity to comment sympathetically on his own recent paintings from Egypt, publishing an unsigned Salon review in the Revue suisse. In it Fromentin generally praises academic values and condemns the Orientalist genre, rehearsing passages from his own Sahel (a book he names).51

28

Orient or France?

Les maîtres d’autrefois proved a flashpoint for further debate. A lengthy promenade through the museums of Belgium and Holland, it is written with a sense of the relevance of the old masters to issues of debate in recent French art. Fromentin’s chapter on how Dutch art influenced modern French landscape contains a little-known but significant text on exoticism. In it Fromentin o¤ers fresh sociological insights into why people adventure beyond Europe, citing “a need to break free proper to all people crowded in one spot.” He also recognizes the impact of scientific research and the usefulness of expeditions to remote parts of the globe. But the result, he concludes in an almost shocking recantation, “is a cosmopolitan painting, novel rather than original, not very French, which in our history (if history bothers with it) will represent only a moment of curiosity, of uncertainty, of malaise. To be frank, it is only a change of air tried out by people in poor health.” 52 There is thus a bizarre discursive concurrence between Fromentin the critic and the realists of 1876, at least regarding Orientalism. But Fromentin’s negative view of the contemporary avant-garde provoked the ire of two pro-realist critics, Louis Duranty, in his famous pamphlet La nouvelle peinture, and Emile Zola in a Salon review.53 Neither could forgive the older writer’s broadsides against “the new painting,” that is, art of both realist and impressionist complexion, from Courbet to Manet and Monet. Although Fromentin acknowledged the gifts of visual acuity and sensibility among such artists, he contested the impersonal and literal nature of their representations and the excessive brightness and crudity of their color, writing famously, “Open air, di¤used light, and real sunshine have today assumed greater importance in painting than ever before, which, quite frankly, they do not deserve. . . . Painting today is never bright enough, never sharp enough, never explicit enough, never crude enough.” 54 Fromentin instead defended the chiaroscuro and moody bituminous color used by the romantics (and before them the Dutch) as the best vehicles for expressive temperament. Irritated by those words, Duranty attacks their author, dangerously influential, he claims, among students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: “This same person—who believes that the faithful depiction of the costumes, faces, and customs of our contemporaries is a mark of mediocrity—devotes his own e¤orts to depicting the costumes, faces, and customs of—whom? Contemporary Arabs. Why does he persist in hindering the colonization of Algeria? No one knows. And why should contemporary Arabs seem to him the only ones worthy of the preoccupation of the painter? Indeed, no one knows that either.” 55 Duranty’s acid remark on Fromentin’s “hindering the colonization of Algeria” can only mean that by picturing the Arabs in their apparently uncolonized state, as lords of the open plains, Fromentin denies the actual French presence and works against French policies of assimilation. In 1876 those policies included the expropriation of Arab and Berber land, the introduction of French education, bans on the rights of the indigenous to bear arms, to vote, and so on. The liberalizing promises (including the possibility of greater self-determination) o¤ered to the indigenous during Napoléon III’s voyage of enquiry through Algeria in 1865 had come to naught. Instead, following the deadly famines of the late 1860s and the disturbances of the Franco-Prussian War, the Kabyle In-

Orient or France?

29

figure 10 Gustave Guillaumet, Weaving Women at Bou-Saâda, oil on canvas, ca. 1885.

surrection of 1871 reversed such prospects. A stronger alliance between military, Catholic, and commercial colonial interests in Algeria meant the tightening of the colonial fist throughout Algeria.56 Strangely for a leftist, Duranty appears to approve the colonization of Algeria; it is not clear, however, whether Fromentin’s heroizing of the Arabs in their precolonial state would have helped or hindered the Arab cause, if indeed it had any e¤ect at all.57 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, “limited in the south by Algeria, in the east by mythology, in the west by ancient history . . . the confused painting 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 biskris; 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.58

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).59 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 e¤ort 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 generation 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.

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2 Renoir and Impressionist

Orientalism

Renoir in Algeria In spite of the ban on trips abroad that realism gravely declared . . . Orientalist painters are legion today. What is the use of laughable prohibitions? Shouldn’t everyone be given the liberty to wander as they please, wherever their vocation calls them, and doesn’t the artist, if he has any originality, remain himself before all horizons, in every clime? – r o ge r m a r x , “The Salons of 1895,” part 4, Gazette des Beaux-Arts

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s little-known Orientalist venture is the perfect embodiment of the attitude Roger Marx expresses in the epigraph to this section, proof of the modernist idea that temperament supervenes in the interpreting of local conditions. Marx, a symbolist critic, supporter of Gauguin, and former realist, argued that if temperament was innate and portable, it could be applied in exotic climes as well as any others.1 Gauguin is the best-known exponent of such exoticism among the finde-siècle avant-garde, but Renoir preceded him, albeit on a more comfortable and modest scale. Generally Renoir seems disconnected from Orientalism. Hardly an exoticist, he is feted rather for

33

his paintings of the French countryside and French women. It would be fair to presume a gulf between the impressionist avant-garde, with its leftish commitment to the painting of modern life and experimental techniques, and academic painters, whether toughened adventurers wooed by the ethnographic scene in far countries or armchair travelers concocting dubious fantasies at home, who practiced a conservative Orientalism. Thus Paul Cézanne ’s comment on Félix Ziem’s lack of attachment to any homeland: “Now there ’s another who was not born anywhere particular. All these buggers who go to the Orient, to Venice, to Algeria, in search of the sun, don’t they have houses on the fields of their fathers?” 2 Renoir, heedless of such peer-group admonitions, obeying a desire to emulate Delacroix (and recover from pneumonia), made two painting trips to Algeria, in 1881 and 1882. Some two dozen canvases, not well known but some of them very fine, were the result. Devotees of Orientalism like Léonce Bénédite, who began to reorganize and revitalize the movement around 1890, lost no time in claiming Renoir as one of their own and exhibiting his Algerian works. It is their authority that entitles me to call Renoir an Orientalist. The first section of this chapter assesses Renoir’s Algerian paintings and the second fleshes out perturbations in the history of modernism that occur if one crosses Orientalism with the question of style history. Renoir’s paradoxical Orientalism had two phases, which correspond to the division between studio works painted in France and works inspired by observation in a colonial setting. Renoir was adept at both, although the colonial works are the focus here.3 In 1875, when the anti-Orientalist tide was in full flood, Renoir turned from his subjects of Parisian contemporary life to paint an exact copy of Delacroix’s Orientalist masterpiece of 1841, The Jewish Wedding (La noce juive, Fig. 11). Part fulfillment of a commission for the industrialist Jean Dollfuss and part act of homage, Renoir’s copy followed the works of sumptuous studio Orientalism he had executed around 1870 in a distinctly Delacroxian vein: the famous Odalisque (National Gallery of Art, Washington), the Madame Stora in Algerian Costume (Mme Stora en costume algérienne, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and Parisians in Algerian Costume (Parisiennes en costume algérienne, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo), which even then must have seemed a pastiche of Delacroix’s great Women of Algiers (Femmes d’Alger) of 1834. The term “pastiche” is appropriate here: Renoir seems to have been acutely aware of the masquerades of studio Orientalism, in which costumed Europeans often substituted for Eastern men and women. Delacroix had used such models in making his Women of Algiers, which reconstructed a scene he had witnessed in Algiers shortly before. Renoir, however, who had not yet traveled to the East, emphasizes that his models are Parisians, and thus his work could be seen as naturalist demythologizing of the Orientalist genre. That is not the case with the Jewish Wedding copy, which shows Renoir in the grip of art-historical memory and exoticist yearnings, thus calling into question images of him as a doctrinaire impressionist workman, painting the countryside and people of France.

34

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

figure 11 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Copy after Delacroix’s “Jewish Wedding,” oil on canvas, 1875.

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.4

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 Orientalism

35

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.5 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 Côte 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 o¤-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 e¤ectively engaging in winter tourism in Algeria (to translate the French term hivernage). 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 a book 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 littérature d’escale, or “port-of-call” literature.6 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 temperate 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 o¤ 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-

36

Renoir 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 (Fête arabe, Alger: La Casbah). Exhibited at the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1895 as La mosquée à Alger and described as “a picturesque milling of Arab multitudes on uneven ground,” 7 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 Dehodencq). 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 natural 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.” 8 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 returns 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 Algiers 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 à 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-

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

37

figure 12 The Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, Algiers, ca. 1929.

giers mosques, a seventeenth-century structure that houses the remains of the theologian Sidi Abder-Rahman Et Tsalibi (1347–1471), the popular patron saint of Algiers, for whom it is named.9 It still stands prominent today among the buildings of the upper Casbah (Fig. 12). Renoir’s picture, accurate in many of its details, partly obscures the antique tombstones among which Algerian women and children came to talk and socialize. The site was one favored by French painters, photographers, and (after 1904) publishers of picture postcards. Renoir is typical in giving no sense of its proximity to the bustling modernity of the Algiers port. After 1904 the crenelated ramparts visible at the upper left of Renoir’s skyline would be replaced by the new French-built medersa (a theological college), designed in the Moorish style.

38

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

figure 13 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Stairway in Algiers,oil on canvas, 1882.

A charcoal study of this mosque by Renoir’s impressionist predecessor Albert Lebourg reveals what is antipicturesque in Renoir’s treatment: unlike Lebourg or, later, photographers, he truncates the square tower of the minaret with its short flagpole,10 making the composition more compact and allowing focus (if that is the word, given Renoir’s impressionistic imprecision) on elements like the bands of colored ceramic tiles on the minaret and window frames. The colors, from the rich greens of the vegetation to explosions of yellow sunlight across the building’s white walls, have an intensity unmatched in any previous Orientalist painting. Renoir painted his second architectural view, the Stairway in Algiers (Escalier à Alger, Fig. 13), elsewhere in the precinct of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman. The curious composition, looking straight up a

Renoir and Impressionist Orientalism

39

figure 14 Albert Lebourg, Algiers Street, 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 Algiers 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 sta¤age: 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 di¤ers 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

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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.” 11 Lebourg precedes Renoir in importing a modernist vision into North African painting, not only in time, but also in the abstracting e¤ect 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 comparable 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.” 12 Renoir, in contrast, brought a new coloristic intensity to the North African scene with his already well established blond, highcolor 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 colors 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.” 13 It was precisely the atmosphere and human spectacle of this Mediterranean zone that Fromentin had evoked in his book centered on Algiers, A 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.”14 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 française, where imported Australian eucalypti were proving a success alongside 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.

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41

Renoir was particularly interested in the subtropical vegetation that grew in profusion in the Mediterranean 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 Renoir’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.” 15 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 flowers.” 16 The fascination of the famous botanical garden consisted in this variety of specimens grown to maximum proportions, an exotic picturesque. Renoir’s Jardin d’Essai in 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 exhibited 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.” 17 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 à 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-

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damentally informed by di¤erences 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 [ baragouin] and they are very fickle [très lâcheuses]. I’m scared to death of starting something again and not finishing it. It’s too bad, there are some pretty ones but they don’t want to pose.” 18 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 [qui trompera le plus]. But I hope that this time I will manage to bring you back some figures. . . . I’ve seen some incredibly picturesque children. Will I get them? I’ll do whatever is needed for it.” 19 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! ” 20 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-yearold 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.” 21 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 haute 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

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figure 15 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume, oil on canvas, 1882.

44

in the girl’s costume with its froth of cream chi¤ons, orange silks, and diaphanous embroidered golds established by a layering of translucent glazes—are appealing, but it is difficult to fix the iconography of the image. It appears to be an elaborate studio portrait, yet according to the artist was painted “in an Arab house.” Although there are red-haired, fair-skinned Kabyles in Algeria, Renoir’s assurance that the model was European casts the whole image as a conceit of cultural cross-dressing, a play on the genre of Orientalism reminiscent of his 1872 Parisians in Algerian Costume. A similar undecidability is apparent in four or five other studio portraits whose titles proclaim them studies of indigenous Algerian females. If the sitter in the Algerian Girl (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) was not French, she may have been from the Jewish community or of Berber or Arab background without Renoir’s having managed to characterize her as such; instead, he assimilated her to the peachesand-cream complexion and chubby physiognomy he used for Parisiennes, simply darkening her eyebrows and hair a little. Ethnic identity is fluid, and in Renoir’s studio portraiture neither looks nor dress can firmly establish it. If most Orientalists fix on markers of identity with a numbing stereotypy, Renoir treated them as singularly inexact. His approach might almost be called anti-ethnographic. One could consider the lack of ethnic fixity an allegory of the heterogeneity, if not “hybridity,” of the population of Algiers. Renoir’s Algiers paintings metaphorically embody the emerging mix of the many ethnicities populating Algiers in the 1880s. In late-nineteenth-century French racialist theory, there was even a name for a specific new Latin people that was to repopulate the colony, the néo-Français. It was to be a race born of Mediterranean settler stock—Provençals, Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, Spanish, and northern French—who would combine physical vigor and bodily perfection with an aptitude for work and a firm moral sense. Those qualities would di¤erentiate them from the indigenous, so often seen in settler texts as indolent and unreliable; thus the néo-Francais was not to be based on intermarriage with indigenous people such as the Kabyles, Turks, or Kouloughlis who inhabited Algiers.22 To the extent that Renoir’s pictures embrace notions of indigeneity, they also escape any such systematic racialist program. In a clutch of minor works Renoir attempted to seize the human image on the streets of Algiers with an apparent openness to the diversity of the inhabitants. His future collaborator the painter Albert André evoked Algiers’ “streets, in the shade of which he made friends with the working-class women and children. He lived with them, looked at them through his own eyes, and did not paint them en orientaliste.” 23 André, though idealizing, gives a sense of what Renoir may have hoped to achieve in this series. The key to it is given by two surviving sheets of indigenous heads and figures (the better-known sheet was presented to the Algiers museum by Durand-Ruel in 1930; Fig. 16). In it the peripheral heads of young women in haiks and sketchy busts of babies are reunited in a central Raphaelesque maternity group, but with an exotic or biblical inflection. The second sheet clarifies Renoir’s working method on the streets of Algiers, as sketches of a mother-child pair resulted in a more complete Algerian Woman and Child (Algérienne et son enfant; Collection Samir Traboulsi,

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figure 16 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Algerian Figures, oil on canvas, 1882.

Geneva). Scaling up from sketch to small “tableau” and adding a grassy backdrop, Renoir was attentive to the ethnic marker of dark complexion, even the suggestion of a Berber tattoo between the eyebrows of the mother. The unadorned costumes serve as a sartorial indicator of class. Once again, this woman’s blurred features suggest that Renoir was unable to approach her closely. Character and accuracy are more evident in the small Ali, the Young Arab (Ali, le jeune Arabe; Collection Mrs. Sidney Brody, Los Angeles), its subject described by Jean Alazard as a “nonchalant yaouled (street urchin)” with a “mocking smile.”24 Renoir studied the face of the boy ( yaouled is a derogatory Arabic word for “boy”), a member of a class that dealt freely with the French and would pose for ready cash, first in a small sketch and then in a full-length version, a work surprisingly fine in such details as the boy’s slim brown feet beneath his billowing pantaloons. He is the only male painted as an individual in the Algerian series except in the surprising Arab on a Camel (Arabe au chameau; location unknown), showing a barefoot Bedouin on a dromedary painted with a skill to put most professional Orientalists to shame.

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figure 17 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Old Arab Woman, oil on canvas, 1882.

The figure in only one painting by Renoir seems devoid of idealization: his Old Arab Woman (Vieille femme arabe, Fig. 17), which exists in both a sketch and a final version. This older woman must have agreed to pose long enough for Renoir to study her features and bearing with care. The portrait seems sympathetic to the sitter and projects psychological depth. According to Jean Renoir, his highly class-conscious father was often contemptuous of the wealthy. (“Being a beggar is no disgrace, but buying or selling shares in the Suez Canal Company is,” he said.) In Algiers Renoir was

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struck by a “feeling of equality among Moslems” that he attributed to their membership in a single religious group: “On several occasions he had noticed a well-to-do Moslem talking with a ragged individual. ‘Harun-el-Rashid conversing with a beggar: he knows that in the sight of Allah he is not a bit more important.’” 25 That comment and this painting go beyond the socialist sympathies of French naturalist writers and painters to interpret the mentality of people from other cultures, with di¤erent beliefs. But Renoir, unlike Paul Leroy or Etienne Dinet, never proceeded far with that project. With two brief trips—a stay totaling three months—Renoir never pretended to that achievement. He remained a peintre d’escale. Here are the limits of his Orientalism: for him, as for many other French artists, it was a temporary enrichment of his field of action rather than a permanent commitment. As Alazard said, once Renoir had left Algeria, he reverted to French subjects. The actuality of the Orient purged him of the earlier studio imaginings Delacroix had inspired, and he returned to the subjects prescribed by the anti-Orientalist critics of the 1870s: the French nation, contemporary French life. In one bright burst of Oriental pictures Renoir had embraced the freedom to travel espoused by critics from Gautier to Roger Marx. But he remained a naturalist of immediate horizons, requiring the model before him to make sense of the task of painting.

Impressionism/Orientalism: Criticism and the Problem of Light The Orient . . . inverts everything. . . . It is the land par excellence of grand vanishing lines, of the bright and the immobile, of inflamed landscapes under a blue sky, that is to say, brighter than the sky, which constantly leads . . . to reversed paintings: no center, because light flows all around; no moving shadows, because the sky is cloudless. – e uge` n e f r o m e n t i n , Une année dans le Sahel, 1859

Fromentin was the most articulate nineteenth-century artist to comment on problems of light and color, the key aesthetic challenge raised by painting the Orient and a visual preoccupation that continues to this day. It remains a platitude that travelers across the latitudes, and even travelers between neighboring countries, seek to define what is special about the light and color of the places they visit. It would be pointless to deny the experiential di¤erences such travelers notice—physical conditions like the position of the sun in di¤erent latitudes and hemispheres or the humidity in the atmosphere of the desert as against that of riverine or maritime locations may indeed induce measurably di¤erent perceptions of light and color. An awareness of such di¤erences in the discourses of exploration, travel, and painting is never-

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theless historically specific to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment texts.26 On the one hand, the problematic of light and color is a specifically pictorial matter, posed by those who measure their local experiences of making a watercolor or oil painting (or even a photograph) against a similar experience in an exotic locale: it is a function of the “picturesque.” On the other hand, invoking this problematic is a way to classify new experiences, to say something about a climate encountered for the first time. As such it bears the unmistakable imprint of the empirical sciences of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century and the mode of aesthetic description called naturalism. As I argued in the case of Renoir, it is at the heart of the colonizing aesthetic because the preoccupation with light and color is a signal way to address colonized places without referring to the situation of the inhabitants, to the political actuality that has made possible the observer’s or artist’s presence. That is, the light-color problematic is a key element in the depersonalized aestheticizing of the Orient. For many artists from Fromentin to Matisse, the problem of painting the East was to discover how to represent a place resistant to representation because it lies outside the bounds of the normally picturable. As criticism and theory developed around impressionist painting, analyses of perceptions of light and color and their translation in the medium of paint attained a new sophistication. The inclusion of Algerian pictures in three of the eight impressionist exhibitions held in Paris between 1874 and 1886 can serve to open this analysis of the crossover between impressionism and Orientalism. The key player was not Renoir, who showed just two Algerian pictures in 1882, but Lebourg, whose display of two groups of Algerian canvases in 1879 and 1880 made his reputation.27 Jean de Tarade was all enthusiasm for them: “The air circulates in waves through his landscapes, his seascapes; the color is transparent, the tones fine and delicate, [although] some of them are brushed in a very violent fashion.” 28 Lebourg communicated sensations of light and color by focusing on the visual ensemble rather than the details of the exotic scene. His free technique caused complaints in 1880, one critic calling his Algiers Admiralty (Amirauté d’Alger) “crazy painting,” another lampooning his little strokes of uniform dimensions as parquetry, not painting.29 (Figure 18, while not the picture exhibited in the group show, is comparable.) Yet the dominant view was that these works were more solid than those by the big impressionist names. Most writers ignored Lebourg’s Orientalist subject matter (and contradictions between realism and colonial exoticism) to focus on impressionist technical questions. Renoir’s initial showings of Algerian canvases at the 1882 impressionist exhibition had a similar reception. Overshadowed in a large consignment of pictures that included the already celebrated Luncheon at Bougival (Un déjeuner à Bougival), Renoir’s Field of Banana Trees and Jardin d’Essai at Algiers generated little comment beyond the cartoon by Draner already mentioned,30 and the epithet “feverish” arising from the painter’s rendering of brilliant sunlight in them. Only in retrospect, as the historiographical construction of both Orientalism and impressionism was undertaken toward the turn of the century, could authors like Roger Marx and Léonce Bénédite

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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 Mediterranean 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.”31 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.” 32 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

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figure 19 Nadar Studio, Léonce Bénédite, ca. 1900.

wished to give Orientalists historical priority over impressionists in investigating light. In a later monograph he asserted the historical significance of Lebourg’s anticipation of Monet’s series.33 Bénédite even argued that the young émigré artist from Rouen had no prior familiarity with the Parisian impressionists, highlighting instead the role of the Lyonnais Jean Seignemartin in aiding the liberation of Lebourg’s palette. For Bénédite it was Seignemartin, an aesthetic descendant of Delacroix and another refugee to Algeria for health reasons (he died of pneumonia in 1876), who inspired Lebourg to throw o¤ the bituminous grounds of academic landscape, “to paint on the virgin canvas and to apply pure whites. The beautiful sky of Algeria did the rest. The scales fell from his eyes.” 34 A rhetorician capable of claiming that the Algerian sky itself modified the history of painting deserves closer investigation. In a range of articles on Orientalism written from 1888 on, whether Bénédite wrote as a salonnier, or reviewer of annual Salons; as the curator of the Luxembourg; or as the author of catalogue prefaces for the Society of French Orientalist Painters, the problem of light animates his Orientalist discourse, the most significant compiled in the era. In Bénédite ’s writing impressionism is always contentious: he never fully accepted the movement, and although he recognized its historical importance, he regarded some of its major practitioners as too deliberately mired in notoriety to be given unqualified credit.

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Bénédite ’s conflicted attitude is apparent in his handling of the notorious Caillebotte bequest. In that case the historical importance of the critic-curator, personally in charge of contemporary art acquisitions for the French state for almost thirty years, is evident. The painter and collector Gustave Caillebotte had made a large gift of impressionist pictures to the French state early in Bénédite’s tenure as curator of the Luxembourg Museum.35 Initially Bénédite welcomed the gift and showed an intelligent insight into impressionism’s aesthetic goals when he first wrote to announce the bequest in 1894. By 1897, when the much-reduced gift was finally displayed in the Luxembourg under his auspices, Bénédite somewhat wearily set out a standard account of “that little school which has made itself the subject of so much talk.” 36 Outside the context of the Caillebotte bequest he published virtually nothing on impressionism, nor did he purchase many further impressionist (let alone postimpressionist) works for the Luxembourg over the next three decades. Bénédite ’s texts develop an alternative historiography, giving the Orientalist movement priority in certain discoveries in the painting of light. Rather than credit the practitioners of impressionism with chromatic and luminary innovations, as twentieth-century art history customarily does, he o¤ered an alternative. In it the key figure is Léon Belly, the painter of the Pilgrims Going to Mecca (Les pélerins se rendant à la Mecque; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). From as early as 1853, Bénédite claimed in a text on the Caillebotte gift, Belly had “resolved with a singular originality the delicate pictorial problems of the di¤usion of light, the bleaching of tones.” 37 Jean-François Millet and Belly were just as much technical precursors of the impressionists as Camille Corot and Courbet, he argued, with Belly the “veritable initiator of the Orientalist school that marched with the impressionists in the ultimate development of the scientific and naturalist evolution.” 38 The issue is complex, for an impressionist view of how light functions in pictorial art conditions Bénédite ’s retrospective case. The critic was plainly influenced by the way studio talk and writing about impressionism had sharpened the language by which phenomena of light and color might be discussed. Take, for example, a passage on Bénédite ’s favorite Orientalist, Etienne Dinet. In it Bénédite ’s terms of reference are comparable to those of Théodore Duret, Gustave Ge¤roy, or even a neo-impressionist critic like Félix Fénéon insistent on scientificity: “[Dinet] pushed to the utmost degree . . . the observation and notation of luminous phenomena, either in their most intense direct e¤ects, or in their subtlest indirect action. . . . He tackled . . . the methodical, reasoned—one could almost say scientific—study of all the great physical questions of lighting the body in space under the rays of the sun, along with . . . the interposing of the atmosphere, and their corollaries, the bleaching out of tones in the sunlight or the coloration of shadows.” 39 Here Bénédite uses certain elements of an impressionist discourse (colored shadows or indirect light) but not others (the exaltation of the “fugitive e¤ects” of light). And he claims for Dinet filiation with orthodox predecessors (Théodore Rousseau and Corot, Charles-François Daubigny and Millet) rather than the impressionists.40 A Fromentinian view of the “exceptional” conditions of vision in the East also runs through

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Bénédite ’s writing, especially that on Gustave Guillaumet, whom Bénédite credited with an unprecedented acuity in questions of representation. Like Fromentin, Guillaumet was an artist with the writer’s skill to record his impressions of Africa in his admirable text Tableaux algériens.41 He spent long seasons, not, like Belly in the “grayish” light of the Nile Basin, but in the brilliance of Saharan Algeria.42 There Guillaumet could represent what Bénédite (appropriating the impressionist term) called the “envelope of beings and things in this palpitating atmosphere that . . . bathes the dryness of lines as if in an imperceptible and vibrant fluid.” 43 One comes nearest to seeing such an “envelope” in Guillaumet’s early Desert: The Sahara (Le Désert: Le Sahara), one of the starkest of all Orientalist images of the desert.44 In reducing landscape to two spheres, earth and sky, delimited by a perfectly flat horizon, it is above all an essay in light. The painter works to confuse the division between earth and sky, with graduating horizontal bands of earth, each taking on more of the light reflected from the late afternoon sky, until earth and sky merge visually. Guillaumet wrote of his own work in more conservative terms than Bénédite. At the beginning of Tableaux algériens, he invokes a conceptual plan to record the traditional, progressive times of the day rather than, like the impressionists, discern atomized fugitive moments. “In the limpid and cloudless atmosphere,” he wrote, “one sees the glow of a fiery disk that slowly sinks toward the horizon. The sun, at the end of its race, o¤ers one supreme farewell to the earth; the summits of the mountains, half bathed in shadow, are embraced and empurpled.” 45 Guillaumet did not employ the language of the impressionists, even if his younger interpreter Bénédite appeared convinced of its pertinence in his case. The envelope or “moving fluid sheet” of air that was superheated (and thus di¤erent from the French skies known to the impressionists) was perhaps the defining optical experience of the East for Bénédite. It is not readily apparent in the meticulous paintings of Guillaumet, although it might perhaps be discerned in his Seghia, Biskra of 1884 (La Séguia, Biskra, Fig. 20). In this landscape of beaten earth, bleached chalk walls, and green shoots of new growth, the horizon behind the young woman with the amphora conveys indeterminacy: “a band of pale emerald green softened by the distance, a palm grove outlined against a sky that is cloudless, yet almost white with warm vapors.” 46 But Bénédite’s idea of the envelope of “impressionable” air seems, not surprisingly, better fitted to Renoir’s work. In his Algiers Mosque for example, it would allow one to attribute the vagueness of lines, the “palpitating atmosphere” of the image, to Renoir’s handling of superheated air—if it were not also the artist’s standard practice in his French landscapes. Indeed it seems fair to argue that liberated academic Orientalist artists—from the colorist Albert Besnard (who painted Algeria in 1893–94) to Etienne Dinet (whose work became increasingly colorful)—had a common debt to impressionism, the influence of which was pervasive, one way or another, by 1890. That was the view taken by Roger Marx, who contradicted Bénédite when consid-

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figure 20 Gustave Guillaumet, The Seghia, Biskra, oil on canvas, 1884.

ering the birth of direct observation among young Salon Orientalists of that time: “It is certain that they could not have evolved without Manet, as well as Monet and Sisley, whose powdery sunlit landscapes opened the eyes of more than one traveler. . . . Don’t these studies by Dinet, Marius Perret, and Meunier apply the principles of the same [impressionist] school to the representation of Algeria, where the scintillating whites of the terraces under a vibrant light are opposed to the blues of overheated skies?” 47 At best Bénédite took the middle ground, seeing the discoveries of impressionists and Orientalists as equivalent, but arguing that foreign location gave the Orientalists greater aesthetic plausibility when placing their work before the French public. Thus Belly was seldom attacked, and his “courageous” work, labeled Orientalist, “enabled the acceptance of dangerous novelties without his seeming to be a revolutionary.” 48 Belly appears as the hardworking innovator, the impressionists as revolutionaries less deserving of trust. That was apparently the opinion in Bénédite ’s discussion circle with the Orientalist painters Leroy, Dinet, and Perret.49 It is thus difficult to disentangle art history from self-interested lobbying. Bénédite ’s view may be a form of special pleading, giving preference to his pet interest (Orientalism, current and historical) over a movement (impressionism) that he subtly denigrated. The elusive link remains Auguste Renoir

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and his Algerian pictures. Because Bénédite never discussed them in his texts on Orientalism, he never posited their challenge to his own version of history. Yet those works were familiar and well used by Bénédite: they were shown regularly, no doubt with the artist’s consent, in Bénédite ’s new Salon dedicated to the Orientalist movement, which Renoir supported to the extent of becoming an honorary member. From 1893 to 1900 Renoir showed a total of nine Algerian canvases at the Society of French Orientalist Painters. The critics who reviewed them declared their brilliant tonal e¤ects proof of impressionism’s aesthetic superiority. A “radiant pair of canvases,” Antoine de la Rochefoucauld called Seated Algerian Woman and Young Arab Boy: “Masterpieces quite alone in this place, . . . their sparkling tonalities bring the neighboring potboilers crashing down.” 50 In this chapter I have posited a relation between a major figure, Renoir, and precisely such academic “potboilers.” To consider Renoir as an Orientalist has required uncovering the body of his Algerian pictures, not considered as a group since 1930. The paintings themselves disclose links with the iconography of the North African colony, in sites well established for their cultural and touristic interest. But when Renoir painted at the Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman or in the Jardin d’Essai of Algiers, he did so with an intensity and visual acuity that transcend anything found in the touristic or pedestrian topographical view. His impressionist work in an exotic site forces a critical reconsideration of the aesthetics of the Eastern scene, from the legacy of Fromentin to the quasi-scientific program of Bénédite. Renoir’s contributions to the genre of Europeans in indigenous costume are among the most lavish that exist. But in a sense his more original figural work is on the terrain of academic naturalism itself: the “ethnic type,” the indigenous character. Renoir did not care for the paraphernalia of ethnographic art, the chilling specification. In avoiding these, the best of his small canvases achieve a human immediacy and openness that were valuable at a time when racial description could be the handmaiden of repressive colonial policy.

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3 A Society for Orientalists

Léonce Bénédite and the Colonial Context

The advent of a society for Orientalist painters marks a dramatic shift in the consciousness of practitioners near the end of the nineteenth century. Few were now content to work as individuals, traveling alone to the East and showing their works amid the visual competition of the annual Salon. Collegiality, the sense of belonging to a communal movement, had ceased to be the preserve of avantgarde groups like the impressionists. Artists’ societies, special-interest exhibiting bodies with their own aesthetic agendas, proliferated in fin-de-siècle France. Such societies, from the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors to the Society of Painter-Lithographers, typify the sociology of art in the modern era.1 Studying them has the potential to rewrite the canon of significant movements, to reread the aesthetico-biographic standard of art history in this period. In this chapter, then, I study Orientalist painting a third way: through the institution, rather than in the work of individual masters or via the filter of art criticism. This approach makes more explicit the circuits of production by which Orientalist art came into being, was exhibited and reviewed, and was absorbed into French colonial culture. The Society of French Orientalist Painters (society or Orientalist Painters for short) can be understood as a collectivity authoring Orientalism. One focus

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of this chapter is the collectivity as such, the society’s structures and strategies considered as working toward the consolidation of the organization. The society sought to establish its institutional power in a network of art world and colonial relations.2 Another focus is the Orientalism the society itself discloses—after all, in defining itself as a group of Orientalist painters, it provided robust clues to the discourse of Orientalism as a historical actuality. The society was born of an existing category of French Salon criticism—the “art orientaliste” of Castagnary and his contemporaries—and curatorial initiatives that were profoundly historicist in conception. The latter-day Orientalism that I examine in this book was conditioned both by a sense of belated arrival at the project of exoticism, after a century of e¤ort by artist travelers, and by the strong desire to renew the genre with France at the apogee of its colonial expansion.3 It is often impossible to separate the history of institutions from the persons who constructed them.4 The Society of French Orientalist Painters is inseparable from Léonce Bénédite, its founder, who served as president until his death in 1925. Chapter 2 recounted Bénédite ’s establishment of an aesthetics for Orientalist art based on light (and the model of impressionism). Well before setting up the society he had staked his claim, lecturing at the Central Union of the Decorative Arts in the later 1880s on eighteenth-century chinoiserie and the influence of the Orient on French fashion, hoping to attract French artisans to the example of Islamic art in particular.5 When Gustave Guillaumet died in 1887, Bénédite wrote an obituary essay situating him at the end of a tradition of Orientalist painting in the French school. And in 1890, reviewing the official Salon (it had split into two that year) for the leading conservative journal L’Artiste, Bénédite looked exclusively at the Orientalist painting on view.6 His writing performed the critical task of defining the category of Orientalist art, whether historical or contemporary. Thus textual models of an Orientalist movement preceded its curatorial realization in exhibitions. Books on the Orient had been essential in forming Bénédite ’s own early fascination for life outside France. In a rare autobiographical moment Bénédite recalled the “mysterious and inexplicable attraction” he had felt since childhood for the “fairyland” of Africa and the Muslim world. He immersed himself in the tales of Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights and of the Bible, “always for me a living book.” His attitude toward the schoolbook discipline of geography was imaginative and sensuous as he recalled his love for the “sonorous names” of the African and Asian capitals learned in the classroom, where French children in the later nineteenth century encountered texts on the East, religious, cartographic, or colonial. One of Bénédite ’s experiences was urgently personal, however: “In the evenings in my provincial town, I would go out under the stars to seek the intoxicating perfume of the seraglio incense that the Tunisian Jews or the Moors from Algiers, coi¤ed in tarbouches [cylindrical red Turkish hats] or multicolored turbans, burned in front of their shops in the nocturnal illumination of the fair. Evidently I too was predestined for Orientalism.” 7 Brought up in the Mediterranean city of Nîmes (once a Roman town), Bénédite encountered North

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African merchants less as a matter of romantic “predestination” than as part of the reality of commerce in imperial France. Colonial subjects had already begun a limited immigration to the metropolitan state, implanting their culture on the fringes of French society. Such an East was on France ’s doorstep and Bénédite could write that “a trip of forty-eight hours suffices to throw us headlong into the most profound distancing of space and time.” 8 As an adult Bénédite made that trip many times, taking an exhibition to Tunisia in 1897, visiting Dinet at Bou-Saâda in 1905, returning to open the Algiers Municipal Museum in 1908, traveling with the painter Charles Cottet in 1911. Bénédite probably also knew Cairo, because his brother, the Egyptologist Georges Bénédite (who remodeled JeanFrançois Champollion’s display of Egyptian art at the Louvre in the 1890s), traveled there frequently. Orientalism often ran in families. After training in history and law, Léonce too sought a career in the museum world, and indeed married into it, wedding the daughter of the distinguished Louvre curator Georges Lafenestre in the 1880s. Bénédite was an assistant curator at the Château de Versailles from 1882 and from 1886 at the Luxembourg, where he was appointed acting curator in 1892 on the death of Etienne Arago and curator in 1895. At the Luxembourg he spent three decades acquiring works for the state, organizing exhibitions, representing the French museums overseas, and publishing a long series of monographs on later-nineteenth-century artists. Given the aesthetic preferences revealed by the Caillebotte a¤air, it is not surprising that none of these artists belonged to the avant-garde.9 Bénédite today, if remembered at all, is said to have been a “bad curator,” no doubt because he failed to purchase works by the future icons of modern art Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso—dispersed to the great collections of Russia, Germany, and the United States during his tenure. At the Luxembourg Bénédite had the power base to substantiate his ideas on a movement he felt the current French colonial expansion made significant. By his own account, the Algerian pavilion at the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris planted the idea for a grouping of Orientalist artists. The exposition connection is significant in several ways. Although the 1889 exposition is best remembered for its monument to futuristic technology, the Ei¤el Tower, its colonial component was greater than any previous assemblage. The Trocadéro Gardens housed dozens of colonial pavilions, presenting in microcosm the expanding colonial empire of France, which had recently added the Tunisian protectorate and nascent colonies in Indochina and Madagascar. French architects designed the official pavilion buildings to imitate the “indigenous” structures of each colony in a facsimile architecture built of lightweight materials over demountable frames. Other exotic milieux were commercial enterprises, like the Cairo Street, built using fragments of Cairene buildings condemned to make way for colonial modernity.10 The nearby zone of native villages brought home to the bourgeoisie the actuality of indigenous lives in French possessions overseas. The Kanaka Village studied by Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard was sta¤ed by indigenous people brought from across the world to perform quotidian tasks; its bamboo huts, sculptural ensembles, photographic displays, and government pam-

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figure 21 G. Fraipont, Algerian Exposition: The Interior Courtyard, wood engraving, Paris Exposition, 1889.

phlets were instrumental in Gauguin’s desire to immigrate to Tahiti: exoticist art resulted from government propaganda.11 Fittingly, the Moorish palace, which served as the pavilion of Algeria, richest of the French colonies, contained the germ of the Society of French Orientalist Painters (Fig. 21). Beyond the souk with its weapons and leather goods, beyond the displays of carpet weaving and the halls of colonial products packed with wine casks, billets of cork, and alabaster columns, lay the little Salon of Algerian Fine Art, which featured the pictorial e¤orts of French artists and amateurs resident in the sixty-year-old colony, bolstered by the works of Paris-based professionals like Gustave Guillaumet, Dinet, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Charles Landelle, and Paul Leroy. In the exhibition were “quantities of pictures, figure studies, and Algerian landscapes . . . sketches done before nature on mornings of travel, works caressed by artists . . . surprised to find the Orient so little romantic in its strangeness.” 12 The official catalogue intoned, “Today Algeria, as a worthy daughter of France, shows that she honors the arts. . . . Algeria has inspired masterpieces of painting—Delacroix, Fromentin, and Guillaumet have immortalized the magic of her infinite horizons, her colors improbably intense for anyone who has not seen the ‘Pays du Soleil.’” 13 Painting becomes visual evidence of the strangeness and di¤erence of a distant land that could nevertheless be a home to the French and their proudest cultural achievements. This Algerian exhibition of 1889 galvanized those who were to found the Society of French Orientalist Painters. Armand Point, the well-known symbolist, who had been born in Algeria and had begun his career painting desert landscapes,14 selected the works shown. He favored the postroman-

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tic generation of austere naturalists inspired by Guillaumet: the group of Dinet, Leroy, Perret, and Paul Bu¤et that had been championed in the pages of L’Artiste by their friend Bénédite. Once named curator of the Luxembourg in 1892, Bénédite mounted the First Retrospective and Current Exhibition of French Orientalist Painters. It opened in 1893 at the Palace of Industry.15 Its success was such that the actual Society of French Orientalist Painters was established the following year. Bénédite aimed, with the financial support of the minister of public instruction and fine arts and the Musées nationaux, to situate Orientalism in the history of French painting.16 His curatorial strategy was twofold: to display the Orientalist heritage and to marshal its contemporary expressions. The memory of the 1889 exhibitions demonstrating the genius of the French school profoundly marked the retrospective section. Curated with an acute historical awareness by Roger Marx and Manet’s friend Antonin Proust, the Centennial and Decennial of French Art (1789–1878 and 1878–1888) had provided an overview of the French school’s achievement from Jacques-Louis David’s time to the present.17 Similarly, Bénédite ’s manifesto would prove that the Orientalists themselves formed a bona fide school, whose genealogy Bénédite would establish with a string of great names. To that end he assembled two hundred works for the retrospective, from Ingres to Guillaumet, concentrating on the major nineteenth-century Orientalists like Delacroix (twenty works, most of them Moroccan watercolors lent by the Louvre), Chassériau (seventeen Algerian canvases), and Belly (twenty-one oils from Egypt), with rarer pieces by masters like Anne-Louis Girodet, Ingres, and Regnault who had been occasional Orientalists. Bénédite ’s position on Orientalism is interesting in part for its knitting of art-historical concepts into the broad frame of French colonialism. Nostalgia informed most of the things he wrote. He understood the “lure” of the exotic, for example, as the desire for access to knowledge about distant civilizations: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the European fascination for Far Eastern decorative arts had been spiced by the mystery of the cultures that produced them. Similarly, for Bénédite the Orientalists of the boudoir and opera of the rococo period necessarily had to imagine a great deal in developing their “dubious” imagery.18 Bénédite knew that older literary texts (such as the baron de Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes) had been a more common source for painters than direct experience of the cultures evoked. Even Delacroix, before traveling to become a “proper” Orientalist, had painted from antique literature and contemporary news reports. Like Gautier before him, Bénédite recognized that the exotic impelled young artists to travel. The terms of the exotic had changed, however, after a century of colonial expansion and technological development: “The Orientalist Painters correspond, for their part, to this need for the unknown, this thirst for far-o¤ things, this taste for exoticism that grips us in our Occident where there is nothing left to learn, at the dawn of a day when every part of our world—almost entirely explored, organized, administered—will soon be as familiar to us as the crossroads of some great and unique city.”

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In prefiguring the global village, Bénédite saw the link between exoticism and European economic structures, from the old colonial trading companies supporting chinoiserie to the more pervasive administrations of modern settler colonialism. He accepted the political impulses that drove the European colonial machine, writing frankly of the renewed greed and intense rivalry arising “since the impenetrable mystery of Africa has been torn aside by so many intrepid explorers and since old Europe has hastened, in a sudden burst of covetousness (élan de convoitise), to the final partition of unknown worlds.” 19 For Bénédite the “scramble for Africa” required a knowledge of colonized places.20 In the literary and visual arts it demanded a language di¤erent from that of romanticism, which had seemed to thrive on a lack of knowledge about the Other. The political expansion of his day, Bénédite reasoned, was better served by the language of naturalism, of observation and the direct experience of di¤erent climes and their peoples. That empirical approach, combined with a new consciousness of historical roots, was the rallying point for the fifty contemporary Orientalists Bénédite assembled in 1893, from art world lions like Albert Besnard to unknowns who had received scholarships to study in the colonies. Their two hundred and fifty paintings were proof of the vitality of the contemporary “Ecole Orientaliste” (as he called it), for which (as Gautier had written) the East had indeed supplanted Italy as the land of inspiration. The new generation filled the psychological need to bring “sensations of torrid light and melancholic grandeur” to “our blasé and dulled senses.” 21 The duty of painters capturing the sartorial and ethnographic fascination of patriarchal Arab life in “Muslim France,” Bénédite claimed, was to document and, where possible, protect it from the vicissitudes of a harsh colonialism. Such words exemplify the self-conscious platform an art society can engender. The spirit of cultural reconciliation put briefly on an official footing during Napoléon III’s visit to Algeria in 1865 bore fruit in the 1890s. The Orientalist Painters sought not just to foster French art in the colonies but also to bring the richness of colonized cultures to the attention of the metropolitan public. The 1893 Orientalist exhibition was in fact grafted to a far larger venture: the Muslim Art Exhibition, the first major display of Islamic art ever held in France.22 The five thousand artifacts in the Palais de l’Industrie came from diverse collections: from explorers like Gabriel Bonvalot, Islamic notables like Hakky Bey, aristocrats like the baron de Rothschild, and Orientalist painters like Gérôme. Commercial interests were also enlisted for the exhibition: Paul Argand, whose Magasins de la Place Clichy o¤ered four hundred rugs for sale through the catalogue, was a lender to the exhibition (Fig. 22). Samuel Bing, the great entrepreneur associated with japonisme and art nouveau, also participated. A highlight of the exhibition was the collection of twenty-two Persian and Indian miniatures belonging to Louis Gonse, japoniste and director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.23 The entrepreneurial idea for the exhibition is apparent in a letter from its organizing president, Eugène Etienne, seeking funds: “The aim is to provide historical study, criticism, and art with documents that have never been assembled

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figure 22 Eugène Grasset, A la Place Clichy, typographic poster, ca. 1895.

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figure 23 Frédéric Régamey, The Colonial Delegates, November 1892, oil on canvas, 1892.

before, and also to divert for France ’s profit a flow of ideas and business more or less monopolized by our neighbors the English and the Germans. Our industry, our commerce, our metropolitan or colonial arts could receive great benefits from this entirely new initiative.” 24 In this politician’s view the arts are players in rivalries between the European powers: scholarly knowledge of the Islamic arts, a field dominated by France ’s opponents, is closely linked to the success of commerce and manufacturing.25 Similarly the curator Georges Marye wished to familiarize the French public with previously disdained Islamic art, in hopes that it might become as popular as Japanese art. Such a reversal of taste, he wrote, would be one “from which the two great Muslim provinces subject to the domination of France [Algeria and Tunisia] must benefit.” Such was the tenor of language in the heyday of France ’s new imperialism. Marye hoped to protect North African cul-

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ture from the depredations of “the Algerian colonists, whose hatred for the native and contempt for art have been deleterious to the colony” (phrases deleted in the published version).26 His exhibition was designed to redress the situation by stimulating the North African manufacturing industries’ study of ancient models. At the same time, he believed metropolitan French manufacturing would benefit from the study of the handwork tradition and the beauty of masterpieces of Islamic art (a thesis I examine in Chapter 8). Such arguments help explain the considerable support given the Muslim Art Exhibition by elite French procolonial politicians. The aging Jules Ferry, a former prime minister whose policies had spurred France ’s aggressive colonial expansion during the 1880s (especially the conquest of Tonkin and of Madagascar) was its honorary founder-president. Its president, Eugène Etienne, led the colonial faction in the French government and was a major force behind the French push to create an “Afrique française” that would include Morocco. In the canvas The Colonial Delegates, November 1892 (Les délégués aux colonies, novembre 1892) by Frédéric Régamey, the veteran painter of Japan and the Far East (Fig. 23), Etienne is second from the left. Busts of King Louis XIV and Field Marshal Bugeaud (victor and early governor in Algeria) preside over the bewhiskered civilian decision makers, seen directing the course of world events from their office in Paris. In the background, rising before a painted allegory of France distributing law and art to the Arabs and the Indochinese, is a full-length statue of Joseph-François Dupleix, governor of French India in the eighteenth century, when France ’s territorial expansion reached its initial apogee. At the feet of the colonial parliamentarians lie the artifacts of exotic cultures—Polynesian weapons and West African sculptures—presented as the booty of colonial triumphs. More discreetly o¤ to the side in an alcove, stu¤ed tropical birds record the benefits of scientific collection in the French empire.27 The contemporary Muslim Art Exhibition also served the colonial project by trumpeting the success of France ’s campaigns of colonial expansion in North Africa and, more subtly, valorizing the culture and traditions of France ’s Islamic possessions. In that context, the role of the Orientalist Painters displayed in rooms adjoining the Islamic art was to visualize both those climes and the cultures that had brought the artifacts into use.

Internal Strategies of Consolidation

The exhibition of Orientalist painting and traditional Islamic art together established the ideological ambience of the Society of French Orientalist Painters and helped fix its key internal strategies. In discussing these, I focus on the collectivity of the Orientalist Painters, reading the society’s structures and strategies as working to consolidate the institution and secure its place in the art world. Consolidation typifies the dynamic forming many artists’ societies, whatever their specific platforms. The Union of Women Painters and Sculptors had a commitment to furthering women’s art,28

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just as the Orientalist Painters had one to promoting the public awareness of the colonies. If the Society of French Orientalist Painters was unusual, that was because it had so many official attachments and its platform was so evidently tied to the politics of the colonial movement. The actual founding of the society took place in 1894 with the drawing up of statutes and the appointment of an executive and a committee of patrons. The statutes make clear that the aims extended beyond the exhibition of art: “First Article. The Society . . . aims to promote artistic studies inspired by the countries and civilizations of the Orient and Extreme-Orient by any means at its disposal: annual exhibitions, retrospective exhibitions, publications, lectures, missions, encouragements to artists, to local societies, to museums, and so forth.” It engages, furthermore, to improve knowledge of the lands and indigenous races of those parts of the world, to give critical direction to the study of their ancient arts, and to contribute to the restoration of their local industries.29 It is possible the society modeled its aims, social benefit and scholarly di¤usion, on those of the International Congress of Orientalists, a body of philologists and archaeologists that since 1873 had shaped the broader discursive field of Orientalism (as Said has elucidated it). Bénédite ’s brother Georges, the Egyptologist, was one of those Orientalists “proper.” 30 The comparable gathering of material by the Orientalist Painters resulted, not in scholarly exposés, but in the sober exhibition of canvases of empirical bent, underwritten by documentary experience gained in situ. Fourteen artists formed the executive committee of the “closed little society, recruited with care and tightly knit.” 31 The core group were the Orientalists from the Algerian pavilion and their friends—a technically conservative group by modernist standards. As in the case of Renoir, however, there were exceptions. Charles Cottet was the only committee member with a body of work recognized in more progressive circles of the time. Cottet was a friend of Vuillard’s and Félix Vallotton’s and had exhibited at Vollard’s gallery and that of Le Barc de Boutteville. With Lucien Simon (a friend of Dinet’s), Cottet led the Bande Noire group of painters that tried, with some success, to “change the style and subject matter of academic painting by introducing intimiste and realist themes.” 32 On trips to Egypt in the 1890s he had developed an exotic variant on the mournful crepuscular paintings of Breton fisherfolk for which he was famous (see Chapter 4). Cottet, Dinet, and the other Orientalist committee members helped the president mount the annual Salon, selecting works and determining the composition of the society’s ever-expanding list of officers and associates. By 1900 the artists in honorary positions included Gérôme and Benjamin Constant (both distinguished older Orientalists holding chairs at the Institut de France) and well-known figures like Besnard, Fernand Cormon, Renoir, James Tissot (famous for his series on the life of Christ), and Georges Rochegrosse (who had taken up permanent residence in Algiers). More than the artists, the society’s patrons indicated Orientalism’s colonial context. Following the model of the Muslim Art Exhibition (from which it inherited some key patrons) the society strategically sought prestige and material aid for the institutional cause. The right patronage was crucial

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in establishing the network of power relations that supported such cultural institutions. After 1900 senior Beaux-Arts and museum people like Roger Marx and Georges Lafenestre sat cheek by jowl with personages from the official world of colonial relations, like Paul Doumer, former governorgeneral of Indochina, or Deputy Georges Leygues, an influential colonial politician who became minister of the colonies. From the outset an important patron of the Orientalist Painters was the head of the Comité Dupleix, named for the eighteenth-century French colonial administrator and soldier. A pressure group that promoted France’s colonial interests in the government and in commerce, the committee was led by Gabriel Bonvalot, a noted explorer, whose accounts of journeys to Central Asia, Siberia, and Tonkin were widely read.33 Bonvalot’s alliance with the Orientalist Painters symbolizes the colonial experience as one involving active exploration and dangerous encounters communicated in visual or written reportage, for Bénédite explicitly likened the Orientalist Painters’ role to that of the Comité Dupleix. Both aimed “to open up our vast new territories, to people them, to make them known and liked, to generate goodwill for the indigenous races, to familiarize us more each day with these new provinces of France.” 34 This “patriotic duty” (as Bénédite called it) could take at least two forms: the general consciousness-raising represented by the exhibition in Paris of a mass of painted images of the French colonies, and the more explicit propagande par l’image (to use one of his favorite phrases— at this time the word “propaganda” lacked the odium that attaches to it in the post-totalitarian world) of society members who traveled in the colonies on official missions, attached to military expeditions or voyages of exploration (Fig. 24). The best example of such a member is Maurice Potter. A committed Orientalist and former student of Dinet who exhibited regularly at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, Potter had worked in Laghouat and Bou-Saâda. At the Orientalist Painters in the 1890s he exhibited not only observed scenes but also illustrations to Flaubert’s Salammbô. He went to East Africa as the artist attached to the 1897 expedition of Gabriel Bonvalot (Fig. 25), which followed on the heels of one led by Ambassador Léonce Lagarde, recently returned from Abyssinia with another of the Orientalist Painters, Paul Bu¤et.35 Bonvalot was eventually to meet up with France ’s Colonel Marchand during his march on Fashoda in competition with a British expedition, in what rated as one of the most difficult episodes in the European dismemberment of Africa.36 As a member of Bonvalot’s group, which included a Russian colonel and three other Frenchmen, Potter sketched the landscape, prepared birds and insect specimens for scientific collection, and was frequently ill. He died on the Abyssinian Plateau, speared in the side by a local when the column was passing through long grass. But such events did nothing to stem the missionary zeal of the Orientalist Painters. Quite the contrary: in his obituary remarks of 1900, Bénédite exalted the heroic visual reportage of Potter and other society artists who had traveled in remote Africa and Indochina with the cash and good wishes of the minister of the colonies.37

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figure 24 Marius Perret, Souvenir of the Fouta Expedition, lithograph, 1892.

figure 25 The Bonvalot Mission in Abyssinia, with Maurice Potter second from left, Gabriel Bonvalot center, 1897.

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But ministerial patronage was not enough to legitimize the Orientalist Painters in the eyes of the art world. The society needed an appropriate aesthetic environment for the presentation of works— a proper annual Salon, to establish the society’s profile in the Parisian cultural calendar. The Orientalist Painters opened early each February from 1895 on, well before the official Salons, making theirs one of the first exhibitions of the new year and improving the likelihood of its being reviewed. The society’s exhibitions ran, with only occasional interruptions, right up to World War II.38 As curator of the Luxembourg, Bénédite would have had little trouble negotiating a congenial exhibition space, but his choice is nevertheless surprising: the prestigious commercial Galeries DurandRuel. Durand-Ruel was the dealer who had made his fortune as the supporter of Monet and the impressionist painters (while also managing a stock of earlier progressives like Corot and Delacroix). Renoir was represented by Durand-Ruel, as we have seen. The society recognized the ratifying power of a modernist who aestheticized the Orient. It not only courted Renoir in the 1890s but, as we shall see, recuperated Gauguin after his death and even promoted cubist renditions of colonial themes after 1910. The Orientalist Painters’ mainstay, however, consisted of more academic works, represented in the extreme by those of Gérôme himself. One of the most institutionally powerful of all French painters, a self-made millionaire who had debuted at the Salon as long ago as 1847, Gérôme could not be ignored by Bénédite (who nevertheless, considering his work outmoded, excluded him from his histories of Orientalism).39 Gérôme’s sometimes lascivious Orientalist paintings, along with works on his favorite theme of daily life in the ancient world, had established his reputation. Until 1900 he exhibited several works each year at the Orientalist Painters, primarily studies made in the Islamic monuments of Cairo and, in 1896 and 1897, the curious chryselephantine sculptures he took up in the last decade of his life. The society, in affiliating itself with such prominent official artists, among other things, ensured patronage from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. Another of the society’s strategies of internal consolidation was to maintain historical perspective on the Orientalist movement. Not until the 1906 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille was there another survey of older Orientalist art like Bénédite ’s of 1893. Upon moving to Durand-Ruel, Bénédite instituted a series of retrospectives of single exemplary Orientalists that provided a finer grain to his imaging of the Orientalist aesthetic. The four artists Bénédite chose were both less familiar to the public than canonical Orientalists like Delacroix or Fromentin and closer to contemporary concerns—such was Bénédite ’s didacticism in a series of exhibitions meant to encourage young artists to paint in the East. Thus in 1895 there were two dozen works by Alfred Dehodencq, the tumultuous figure painter who had worked in Morocco. He massed his figures up the canvas in baroque plenitude and specialized in violent crowd scenes, like his Execution of the Jewish Woman (Le massacre de la Juive, Fig. 26). At first glance this image reverberates with Gospel iconography, recalling the parable of the woman

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figure 26 Alfred Dehodencq, Execution of the Jewish Woman, oil on canvas, n.d.

taken in adultery. But in transposing the scene to the sultanate of Morocco (Dehodencq was a longterm resident of Tangier prior to his suicide) and omitting a Christ-like protector for the terrified kneeling woman, Dehodencq 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 presumably showing the atrocious torture of cutting and binding the hands in salt—a detailed account of

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which is the most indelible image in the contemporary travelogue by Pierre Loti, Au 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.40 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 Château de Versailles and some of the small scenes of battling tribesmen now in the Louvre.41 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 di¤erent 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 to a

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figure 27 Etienne Dinet, Portrait of Sliman ben Ibrahim, oil on cardboard, ca. 1902.

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. Gérôme’s death in 1904 at the age of eightytwo led to a memorial exhibition of seventeen works. Later retrospectives showed works by the ethnographic sculptor Charles Cordier and by Constant-Georges Gasté, who died while painting in India in 1910.42 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 o¤ered distinct ceremonial advantages: these, after all, were the “banquet years” of which Roger Shattuck wrote so exuberantly.43 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 Rivière, so ingenious and so vibrant, and at the end by magnificent baskets of exotic fruits. Several toasts were

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figure 28 Paul Leroy, The Chourbah: The Orientalists’ Dinner, lithograph, 1897.

proposed . . . one, in Arabic, by Sliman ben Ibrahim, had a particular success.” 44 Sliman ben Ibrahim, lifelong friend of Etienne Dinet’s, who collaborated with the artist from 1890 and shared his house at Bou-Saâda from 1903, regularly visited Paris and assisted in the Orientalist Painters’ activities (Fig. 27).45 Sliman became the society’s unique correspondant indigène—a token figure in an otherwise all-white men’s group who would have witnessed at their gatherings all the bewhiskered banter of a nineteenth-century smoker at a private gentlemen’s club. The decor for the Dîner des Orientalistes was scrupulously planned. Members like Leroy, Dinet, and Alexandre Lunois produced lithographic designs for the menus in successive years, each with a figure of an indigenous woman or child opposite the sequence of dishes listed in Arabic script (Fig. 28); both Leroy and Dinet had studied Arabic from the 1880s. The banquet tables were regularly ornamented with the “lively little figurines of Théodore Rivière and the terra-cotta animals from Nabeul [in Tunisia] that are so decorative.” 46 On such an occasion in 1899 the Orientalists were joined by several distinguished guests, Minister for the Colonies André Lebon, Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts Rambaud, and Director of Fine Arts Henri Roujon. Once these gentlemen had been softened up by the North African

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meal and decor, by the toasts, and by Bénédite ’s eloquent address, the business of patronage began in earnest. According to Bénédite ’s account, Lebon assured those present of his full support for the society’s work at the forthcoming Universal Exposition, “because the activity of the Orientalists profits the vast, far-flung empires that he [Lebon] governs.” That was not just lip service: on the spot, the minister rose and (responding to “the regret expressed by M. Charles Lemire, the former French governor in Indochina, that our comrades limited themselves too exclusively to lands of Muslim civilization”) granted Orientalist Painters six free voyages to a French colony in Indochina or North Africa.47 For his part, the minister of fine arts welcomed a suggestion that there be an annual competition between the indigenous artisans of Algeria and Tunisia. Clearly in the late 1890s the society’s interest in the arts of the colonized—at least the North African colonies nearer at hand—was vigorous. This group of Frenchmen appropriated for its emblem or logo (designed by Paul Leroy and printed on all its catalogues, posters, and menus) the sickle moon of Islam, the star of David (or the seal of Solomon), and a black Hand of Fatma (Fig. 29). The surely ambiguous image bespeaks the Frenchmen’s position as outsiders who nevertheless dreamed of cultural synthesis.48 More conventional was the medal the society designed, struck, and awarded over a period of many years—a gesture modeled on the standard reward for merit at the official Salons (Fig. 30). Its most interesting recipient was the Algerian miniaturist Mohammed Racim, in 1923. One side featured a European palette and paintbrushes superimposed over a date palm and a backdrop of an Egyptian sphinx, classical ruins, and a rising sun; the other was the society’s special emblem. Ever mindful of new avenues for publicizing the art of the Orientalists, Bénédite, this time wearing the hat of president of the Society of Painter-Lithographers, organized a special cumulative edition of the album of original lithographic prints published by L’Artiste three times a year (now a rare collector’s item).49 This Album spéciale des Peintres Orientalistes was published in 1898 with some forty prints accumulated over the half-decade by members presenting North African images similar to those developed in their painting. For example Alexandre Lunois, a professional painter and printmaker well known at the turn of the century for his extravagantly colored and expertly drawn lithographs and posters of Spanish scenes—Gypsy dancers, guitarists, and bullfights doubtless known to the adolescent Picasso—contributed a group of sensitively crafted images of young Algerian women in domestic interiors. The oil painter Leroy sent in a meticulous crayon sketch of camels at the market in Tolga and scenes of Ouled-Naïl women. Dinet submitted, among other subjects, a black-crayon lithograph of a night scene—a men’s ritual dance before a bonfire in the open desert. The Album spéciale is an accurate cross-section of the iconography that typified the work of the Orientalist Painters. Among the most interesting prints is Algiers—Cocktail Hour (Alger—l’heure verte) by Adolphe Chudant (Fig. 31). Chudant was one of the few Orientalist painters to act on the plea of organizers of the 1893 Muslim Art Exhibition, that French artists and designers learn from their Islamic counterparts. Primarily a landscapist, he had made a special study of the Nabeul potteries in Tunisia, paint-

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figure 29 Paul Leroy, symbol of the Society of French Orientalist Painters, wood engraving, 1895.

figure 30 Victor Peter, medal awarded by the Society of French Orientalist Painters, 1899.

ing canvases of the potters at work—an interest sparked by his visit in 1897 to coordinate a group show of Orientalist Painters at the Institut de Carthage in Tunis. Algiers—Cocktail Hour juxtaposes ancient roof terraces against an image of modern shipping in the port of Algiers. The scene is set in a lithographed frame decorated with diaper work derived from Maghrebian ceramic tile patterns. Chudant, who had early training as an architect, maintained a keen interest in the decorative arts and decorative painting.50 His design for one of the now rare posters advertising the Orientalist Painters’ Salon develops such decorative ideas on a larger and more emphatic scale (Fig. 32). Despite its distinct art nouveau flavor (somewhat reminiscent of works by Alphonse Mucha), Chudant’s image of a mosaic and ceramic panel incorporates references to the decorative arts of North Africa, where

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figure 31 Adolphe Chudant, Algiers—Cocktail Hour, lithograph, ca. 1895.

figure 32 Adolphe Chudant, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters, lithograph, 1899.

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he had traveled extensively. The patterns of Berber kilims, of classical floor mosaics of the kind preserved at El Djem in Tunisia, and of Moorish foliate ornamentation are all visible in this curious transcultural compilation. The graphic arts output of the society—the Album spéciale, banquet menus, and posters—in addition to constituting a visual record of Orientalism in the 1890s, should be seen in the larger context of the institutional formation that gave its artist members a sense of aesthetic and moral cohesiveness. Whether it also achieved cohesiveness in the mind of the public, however, can be judged only in the record of the annual Salons, the Orientalist Painters’ yearly encounter with the Parisian art critics—and the Salon goers whom they represented.

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4 Orientalists

in the Public Eye

T

he question of the Orient is no less vast, sweeping, dense, and tentacular in painting than in politics.”1 So wrote the veteran observer of Orientalist art Arsène Alexandre of the last great Salon of the Orientalists held before World War I. Alexandre ’s gloss on the clash of values in the thousand works on display, by analogy with the Eastern question in politics, is more colorful than convincing. Orientalists might depict a vast sweep of peoples and places, but their work did not have a comparable diversity of style or message. Critiques of imperial expansion, frequent in French politics, had no real counterpart in painting. One could argue that all Orientalist art by Europeans tacitly endorsed the colonial order, or at least instrumentalized it—there was virtually no anticolonial painting before the historical reconstructions of Mohammed Racim in the 1920s. As we have seen, preservationist convictions led many European artists to produce nostalgic images of Eastern places and cultures as pristine. Painting failed to represent the scenes that anticolonial literature in France might lead us to expect—of the social disruption or architectural vandalism brought by the French colonists. Such imagery was abundant in the lithographic cartoons of the satirical publication L’Assiette au beurre around 1900,2 but it was not the province of the “high” art of painting, which remained resistant to determinate political interpretations.

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figure 33 Alexandre Lunois, Sixth Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters, oil on canvas, 1899.

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Anticolonial politics in France, however, had already impinged on the criticism of Orientalist art in the nineteenth century and continued to do so into the high modern period. In that arena the complex play of opinion is less ambiguous, though disapproval of the project of Orientalism can translate into negative judgments of the work on apparently aesthetic grounds. A full spectrum of critical opinion is available in the dozens of reviews of the Orientalist Salons in specialist journals and daily newspapers. I have consulted some fifty reviews in two dozen publications for this discussion—a number indicating both interest in the Orientalists and the vitality of the publications, mainstream as well as avant-garde, reviewing art exhibitions. The scheduling of the Orientalists’ Salons early in February established a regular, reliable time slot for critics and public alike. Posters like those of Alexandre Lunois were made to publicize the exhibition (Fig. 33). It took place each year well before the major spring Salons and seemed to some critics a welcome relief from the midwinter gloom and bad weather of Paris: “What a shame that a little of the southern sun retained in the frames of Misses Mortstadt, Karpelès, or Ravlin . . . does not fall upon the visitor in this icy half-light!” 3 What appears a trivial motif of criticism continued to underline one reason for painting the exotic: l’hivernage, or winter tourism. The modern tourist, then as today, left Paris for southern climes to seek relief from the cold, as the seasonal rhythms of work allowed. As in the case of Renoir, pneumonia and tuberculosis, common pulmonary maladies at the time that were aggravated by smoggy urban winters, provided another incentive for the wellto-do to flee south.4 Orientalist paintings in the exhibitions (like color posters of palm-lined beaches today) opened up images of a therapeutic, prophylactic space, ripe for imaginative occupancy and purchase. The enticement of the exotic was not the only reason the society’s exhibitions were welcomed by the mainstream art press. The repeated praise of Léonce Bénédite ’s “happy initiative” makes it clear that his institutional prestige guaranteed coverage, particularly in the semiofficial weeklies of art world information and reviews, the Chronique des arts et de la curiosité and the Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne. The Chronique des arts gave the most detailed coverage of the Orientalist Painters’ activities, announcing their exhibitions in advance, reviewing them at length, and expounding the curatorial program with such sympathy that Bénédite (himself a regular contributor) must have maintained close contact with the editors-in-chief, Louis Gonse (to 1902) and Roger Marx (1902 to 1913). The Chronique’s support is also unsurprising given the assistance the society received from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and the Ministry of the Colonies. Thus when the society exported an exhibit of Orientalists to Tunisia in 1897, the Chronique trumpeted the “avowed colonial propaganda” undertaken by the “artists, explorers, and functionaries who compose its committee.” 5 A similar equanimity greeted the program in the Bulletin de l’art and journals like Larousse ’s weekly Revue encyclopédique or the liberal daily Gil Blas. The procolonial tenor

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of such discussions extended to defining the Orientalist artist: “Orientalists are a particular species of painter. In them, the artist is doubled with an explorer. They yearn for wide-open spaces, because these not only provide subjects for painting but also satisfy a great need for action. Orientalists get bored in Paris. They return there from time to time to kiss their relations, care for their fever, and buy up paint tubes, and they quickly set o¤ again.” 6 This picture of pith-helmet pompiers (academic artists) accords with what we know of the hardier painter travelers of the society, whose excursions to the colonies became more frequent and more far-reaching as government funding became available to them.

From Cliché to Clichy

Given the opposition to the colonial project among writers with left-leaning and socialist beliefs, cynical responses to the Orientalist Painters inevitably appeared in the art press. In the tradition of those critics of Orientalism Castagnary and Duranty, some of the most interesting writing about the society was negative. The salonniers of La Plume, La Revue blanche, Le Mercure de France, and Gil Blas—young poets, novelists, and critics more than art world functionaries or scholars—found reason to scorn an art closer to academic realism than to the movements they supported, from symbolist to cubist.7 A symptomatic voice was that of Thadée Natanson, founder-editor of the Revue blanche: “At this exhibition of an Orient that is always the same in its four or five expressions of an exotic decor—tiresome and tired out, more superficial than energetic, more gaudy than luminous, indeed tawdry—there are some adorable Persian miniatures. They’ve brought together the works of Orientalists—an ugly word, and what does it mean? Can a painter be an Orientalist? . . . They’ve announced that the society presided over by M. Bénédite is going o¤ to exhibit in the Orient. That will be revenge for you.” 8 Natanson is wittily malicious: the word “Orientalist” is an absurdity, the paintings are garish and banal. Among the works on view, only the aesthetic products of the Orient itself, the “adorable Persian miniatures,” are valid artistically. The repetitious character of Orientalist painting is something many critics had cause to regret. Baudelaire, half a century earlier, had expanded the idea of the visually conventional into two critical categories, the chic and the poncif. He associated both of them with the sometime Orientalist and military painter Horace Vernet.9 The chic for Baudelaire signified the disappearance of a sense of nature and the model and a reliance on memorized formulas that, when applied to gestures and expressions, quickly became banal. The many new little Salons ran the risk of the poncif by bringing together works of similar theme. For a critic like André Fontainas, who at Le Mercure de France was one of Cézanne ’s most vocal supporters, the poncif seemed endemic to painting by the Orientalist Painters: “Nowhere better than at the annual exhibitions of the Orientalists is the odium of a conventional, banal, and monotonous picturesque revealed.” This exotic poncif di¤ered little from the

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regional: “It is as easy to do the oriental as to do the Breton, and these days both recipes are within anyone ’s reach.” 10 Fontainas refers here to a movement counted as exotic in mainland France: Bretonism, the depiction of peasants and fisherfolk by French and foreign painters working at the artists’ colonies of Brittany. A commonplace from the 1880s, Gauguin’s School of Pont-Aven is only the best-known manifestation of the movement.11 Charles Cottet, Dinet’s famous friend, exemplified the parallel between Bretonism and Orientalism. Cottet was the popular painter of the difficult lives of the fishermen and the women of the Brittany coast, which he rendered in broad-brushed forms and lugubrious colors suited to Breton desolation and bereavement. Typical Cottet images include monumental figures of women draped in gray, waiting anxiously for their men to return from sea, burials in cli¤-top cemeteries, and Brittany harbors at twilight (Fig. 34). Cottet combined such sentimentality with skillful plays of light on distant Atlantic waves or the brightening of an evening cloudscape. He moved with a curious ease from such scenes to studies of heavily draped Egyptian peasant women on the banks of the Nile, and their North African counterparts in Algeria. A representative work is Fellah Women (Femmes Fellahs, Fig. 35), where Cottet concentrates on the silhouettes of women clad and veiled from head to toe in black, wandering through a barren cemetery. He makes no concessions to femininity by revealing curvaceous forms, as Belly does in his water carriers by the Nile or even Guillaumet in The Seghia, Biskra (see Fig. 20). The dour colors, dun browns and grays, convey the unrelenting harshness of the landscape, in which Cottet poses his women of another culture as sphinx-like, the secret of their appearance and of their lives held close about them like the harsh cloth in which they are swathed. Cottet sometimes ran afoul of the precept of truth to Oriental conditions of light: some critics felt that in transporting his sepia and ash gray palette to Egypt he “Bretonized” both the fellah women and the Oriental landscape.12 But he was often exempted from the complaint of conventionality leveled at the Orientalist Painters just because of the distinctive and personal manner apparent in his art. Formulaic work failed to count as art according to then current criteria. By the late nineteenth century for the majority of critics (if not the public) mere imitation, no matter how exacting, was not sufficient to constitute the work of art. What was needed was a particle of individual, subjective self, an emotional content, an individual perception. The definition Emile Zola had given in 1867 of the work of art as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament” still guided the thinking of many critics. And more than one review of the Orientalists alluded to another of Zola’s maxims: “What I seek in a work of art . . . is a man.” Félicien Fagus of the La Revue blanche compared the Orientalists’ pictures unfavorably with those of Monet and Sisley, each of which incarnates a specific time and place. In the Orientalists he found only the impersonal: “I did search for a man and I found one, but he was dead,” he wrote of the painter Guillaumet, whose works were in Bénédite ’s retrospective exhibition.13 Fontainas’s appreciation of

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figure 34 Charles Cottet, Low Mass in Winter, Brittany, oil on canvas, 1902.

Cottet makes the point exactly: “Wherever he goes M. Cottet sees like a painter, without troubling to conform to vain picturesque traditions that he proves wrong in some places and goes beyond in others.” 14 In the decade after 1910 similar arguments explain the considerable popularity of André Suréda among postsymbolist critics like Gustave Kahn and Victor Barrucand.15 Suréda’s Fountain at Tlemcen (Une fontaine à Tlemcen; see Plate 5) is indeed “rich in memory and imagination” (as Barrucand observed of the artist), with its visual reference to a famous Poussin in the Louvre, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well. That too was a parade of female beauty, but Suréda emphasized the decorative— patterned textiles and juxtaposed limbs, silhouettes and negative spaces. Relief is leached out, and flatness and the arabesque bring a certain level of abstraction to this agreeable modernizing version of the Maghrebian scene (which postdates Matisse ’s less mellifluous, more challenging solutions). The core group of Orientalists, by contrast, were academic realists who had a stake in accuracy. Their painting fell prey to another charge—that it resembled what La Plume’s Henri Eon called “colored photography.” That complaint had often been leveled against meticulous academicians like Ernest Meissonnier and William Bouguereau in later-nineteenth-century debates.16 Yet photography, colored or not, violated Bénédite ’s Fromentinian aesthetic, which sought to limit the documentation in painting and keep something of the generality and unity considered proper to the work of art. That photography itself had no place in the Salons of the Orientalist Painters, even if certain pictures seemed photographic to the critics, was confirmed in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts by Ary Re-

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figure 35 Charles Cottet, Fellah Women, oil on canvas, 1894.

nan. A frequent contributor to the Gazette, Renan had studied painting in Gustave Moreau’s progressive studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which during the 1890s produced future modernist Orientalists like Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Evenepoel, and René Piot. In Renan’s own body of work, the symbolist thematics of Moreau alternate with landscape views made in the Middle East. Renan’s long essay “La peinture orientaliste” is, along with Bénédite ’s own essays, this period’s major contribution to the study of Orientalism. The paragraph Renan devoted to the role of photography in the Orient and its relation to painting is typically acute: “For remote countries whose climate is unhealthy, the photograph remains the document par excellence. Soon the entire world will have been photographed—of Norway or of Tahiti, of Mecca or Samarkand . . . there exists an immense repertoire of irrefragable images. . . . It is in looking at the available photographs of the Orient that one gets a melancholy reminder of the insipidity of this little school today. It has done little more than color what appears on the retina, with a perfection analogous to that of the lens. It cannot equal subjective truth.” 17 Renan believed that weaker artists capitulated to photography by approximating its means. At the same time, the photograph proves his contention that only a personal response, in which the Oriental scene is transfigured by “faith and enthusiasm,” retains validity as art. If this painting of unmediated veracity was at one extreme, at the other was art too deliberately staged or too artificial in its fakery of things seen. Henri Eon paired the o¤ense of “colored pho-

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tography” with the masquerade of Oriental props, a “veritable Orientalism of the bazaar even more deplorable than the studio Orientalism dear to our fathers.” 18 Bazaar Orientalism, arrived at on French soil by trumpery, became a trope in the society’s discussions. Long-established trade links between Europe and North Africa, the Middle East, and India had made the purchase of Eastern carpets, items of clothing, cheap jewelry, and decorated furniture as much a feature of faddish fin-de-siècle life as it is today, facilitating the task of the “studio Orientalist” living in mainland France. If one had neither the inclination nor the resources to travel abroad and collect items of costume on the spot (as a painter like Gérôme or a writer like Pierre Loti had done on numerous occasions), one could purchase them in the bazaars of great trading centers like Marseille, Bordeaux, or Paris or in regional towns such as Nîmes, as Bénédite remembered it from his youth. Many nevertheless believed that the procedure of the studio Orientalist was not in itself dishonorable, as the brilliant success of the odalisques by Ingres (that archetypal studio Orientalist) had shown. For the critic Arsène Alexandre, who in 1896 had not yet been to the East and supposed the same of eighty percent of visitors to Durand-Ruel’s, “The important thing is that the painting be good. The Orient as imagined and painted by a great artist who may never have left his Montmartre studio will be much more satisfactory than a true Orient brought home by a landscapist who is literal and dry.” 19 Not far from Montmartre studios was the Place Clichy, and in Paris at the turn of the century the shops established there served the bourgeoisie, artists in particular, as a bazaar. Home decorators’ emporiums like Bacri Frères and Paul Argand’s Magasins de la Place Clichy had already shown their centrality to the Orientalist fad by advertising at and exhibiting in the 1893 Muslim Art Exhibition. But most critics associated the Place Clichy with faked exoticism—for example, Adolphe Dervaux, in a gibe published in La Plume: “Don’t several of these Orientalists seem to be très Place Clichy (carpets, furniture, new Metro station)?” 20 The works were condemned because they failed to convince as art—the Place Clichy became a figure for inauthentic experience or, worse, for an illusion that seems inauthentic (unlike what Alexandre ’s masterly studio Orientalist produced). One writer even suggests that the Oriental bibelots from the French bazaars were not to be trusted: it was all too evident that they were made in Parisian sweatshops.21 Paintings purporting to depict scenes never observed, with copies of dubious import goods as props to the illusion—from such Orientalist simulacra all authenticity had been expelled, like air from a vacuum pump. For the veteran reporter of the fauve and cubist avant-gardes Louis Vauxcelles, the Orientalist Painters failed to match the expectations he drew from the poetry of Baudelaire: “Don’t lay too much store by that magic word ‘Orientalists,’ in hopes of making one of those prestigious promenades in the land of the sun described in the divine verses of the “Invitation au voyage.” Nothing is more gloomy, more dreary, less evocative. . . . It’s as if these ladies and gentlemen have only ventured from their studios in the Batignolles to go and dream in front of the billboards of Place Clichy stores.” But Vauxcelles concedes that such an excursion from the fashionable Batignolles artists’ quarter to the clichés

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of Clichy to procure the requisite moment of inspiration is enough to ensure the pictures’ “lively success” among the sedentary public: “Doubtless there is nothing so suggestive as a casbah or some Cambodian dancers for the walls of your bourgeois dining room.” 22 Such comments posit a gulf in taste and understanding between the middle-class public and the symbolist writers who constituted, for the most part, the corps of avant-garde critics. But symbolist artists had no automatic antipathy to the Orientalist enterprise. Gustave Moreau had long been interested in the ancient East, in the art and myth of Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as well as India and Persia. His paintings on Greek mythological themes had an “oriental” insistence on visual extravagance. In his biblical images, like the celebrated Dance of Salome (Danse de Salomé; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), he developed an aesthetic in which a love of syncretic Eastern religion, profuse ornament, and flashing colors creates a highly personal conception of the East. Although Moreau was not a traveler, at least two noted Algerian-born symbolists of the 1890s, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer and Armand Point, did show regularly at the Orientalist Painters. The landscapist Point (who had organized the 1889 Algerian pavilion’s exhibition) turned to esoteric symbolist subject matter after settling in France. The Paris-based Lévy-Dhurmer began treating Eastern scenes with great frequency after 1900, returning regularly to Algeria and Morocco over a thirty-year period. His chosen medium was pastel, whose pale, crumbling colors uniquely suited the atmosphere of lyrical introspection he attained in his best works. Most of those were based on visual notes gathered on his travels, but he composed them back in the studio. Lévy-Dhurmer’s Evening Promenade, Morocco (Promenade du soir; private collection) is an image of womanhood exceptional among Orientalist paintings in that it both respects the traditional veil of the North African woman and plays upon that covering up of the visage to develop an aura of mysterious beauty (Fig. 36). As authors from Renoir to Loti had pointed out, the covering of the body and head only gave more force to the expression of the eyes. Several of Lévy-Dhurmer’s pastel portraits also succeed in escaping the stereotype to establish a more intimate rapport with the sitter than had been visible in, for example, Renoir’s hastily drawn Algerian figures. Lévy-Dhurmer’s Moroccan (Le Marocain; Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris) places its subject before what looks like a backdrop of the holy city of Moulay-Idriss, outside Fez.23 The artist had used the device of placing writers before the city they wrote about in such portraits as that of the poet Georges Rodenbach (seen before the canals of Bruges he evoked in his Bruges-la-morte of 1892). More pertinent is the image of Pierre Loti (Fig. 37), starry-eyed and distinctly beautified, sporting his best Turkish moustaches, before a backdrop of the waters of Constantinople at night. (The scene recalls the love boat in his famous novel Aziyadé.) If the idea of portraits attached to places obtains here too, the beautiful floating face and robed bust of this Moroccan youth are those of a scholar or artist connected with the religious zone of Moulay-Idriss housing the tomb of the saint, a mosque, and Koranic schools. The third prominent symbolist (even postsymbolist) associate of the Orientalist Painters was Emile

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figure 36 Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Evening Promenade, Morocco, oil on canvas, ca. 1930.

figure 37 Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, Portrait of Pierre Loti, “Phantom of the Orient,” pastel, 1896.

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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.24 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 agricultural workers are flattened forms rendered in radically simplified pen outlines, with no attempt at modeling. In a more sustained canvas like Arab Festival (Fête arabe) the visual treatment owes something 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 disa¤ection 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.” 25 Bernard’s sepia-toned, smoky palette persists in his Cairo Merchants (Les marchands du Caire), contrasting with the brilliant hues common to both Gérôme-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 indication 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 Constant.” 26 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 imaginative 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

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figure 38 Emile Bernard, Cairo Merchants, oil on canvas, 1900.

did engender Orientalist art, it was usually paintings or sculptures illustrating specific figures.27 Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, for example, inspired the hieratic bronze Salammbô and Mathô (Salammbô et Mathô) by the sculptor Théodore Rivière (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.” 28 There is a discrepancy between the romantic aspiration for the Orient evinced here and the real-

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figure 39 Théodore Rivière, Salammbô and Mathô, bronze, 1895.

ity of the prosaic painting-and-travel movement in colonialist France. Indeed the French term art colonial, in regular use from about 1920, perhaps more accurately captures the tenor of late Orientalist painting. Ary Renan had not defined the Orientalist movement in thematic terms but rather in terms of political geography. For him the Orient encompassed “a large part of Asia and the whole northern coast of Africa. . . . This vague word is thus defined quite clearly by the frontiers of the ancient Muslim conquests.” 29 Other critics realized that the society itself o¤ered a loose definition of Orientalism in the array of paintings it displayed. They read o¤ the geographical boundaries of the East with a litany of place-names: “For these painters the Orient begins to the east of Paris and radiates wherever the warm sun shines intensely. The Basque country and Venice are both part of it.” 30 Scenes from Venice and Spain were indeed common at the Orientalist Painters, almost as if any southern country that was not France was by definition exotic and could be posed as the Other.

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Dinet and the Ethnographic Sensibility

If one painter and one issue typified the Society of French Orientalist Painters in the public mind, they would be Etienne Dinet and the ethnographic sensibility. Dinet was a founding member of the society and a close friend of Léonce Bénédite ’s. He exhibited more works, more frequently at the Salon than any other Orientalist, participating without fail every year until 1914, and again in the sporadic exhibitions of the 1920s. However one judges the aesthetic limitations of Dinet’s art (and many critics of his day were unhappy about its literality, brazen color, and frequent mawkishness), his handling of the ethnographic was something to be applauded. Arsène Alexandre, for example, placed a premium on studies of “scènes et types,” “moeurs,” and “races” in art because of their inherent difficulty. Other painters might be accused of failing to characterize a people correctly, but not Dinet. His long years in the Berber community at Bou-Saâda had given his representations incontrovertible authority, discernible even to those who may not have known his personal history: “What most of the Orientalists lack . . . is a knowledge of their subject other than its surface and decor. M. Dinet has completely renewed the genre by his intimate knowledge of Arab life.” 31 Few visual or literary artists who traveled in the late nineteenth century were not sensitized to ethnographic issues, already present in the criticism of Gautier and Fromentin. By that time the philosopher Hippolyte Taine ’s use of the material determinants of “race, milieu, and moment” to assess culture had widespread currency. Taine held that the physical environment in which a people lived had a fundamental impact on its characteristics and way of life. Not every account of race and culture was informed by the evaluative hierarchies of being exemplified by the racist taxonomies of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau.32 There was also a more liberal curiosity about the specificity of other peoples that was common to late-nineteenth-century traveling artists of varying aesthetic stripe, from a symbolist like Gauguin in Tahiti to an arch-realist like Dinet in Algeria. The two artists can be usefully compared, not least because each gradually shifted alliance from French metropolitan culture to the culture and cause of the indigenous. After a half-decade in Oceania, Gauguin changed his stance on the French colonial presence from complicity in exploiting the indigenous to opposition.33 Dinet’s course was similar, except that he has not been subject to strong charges of exploitation, and he “went native” in a far more thoroughgoing sense (and for a much longer time) than Gauguin. A brief selection of religious and mystical subjects by each artist brings out their dissimilar conceptions of the substance of cultural and ethnic di¤erence. Gauguin’s Ia Orana Maria (We Greet Thee, Mary, Fig. 40) can be seen as symptomatic of the artist’s attempts to grasp the shifting context of religious belief in colonial Tahiti in the 1890s.34 The picture ’s Christian iconography is evident, even if it takes the doctrinally muddled form of the mission Catholicism of Papeete and surrounding settlements. Varying the dusky Christs of Bibles for native consumption, Gauguin o¤ers a vision of Tahiti as a holy land where an angel annunciate appears to an indigenous Mary (who is already holding a child, confusing the Gospel version of events). This work and others postulate Tahiti as a Gar-

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figure 40 Paul Gauguin, Ia Orana Maria (We Greet Thee, Mary), oil on canvas, 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

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copied out from Jacques-Antoine van Moerenhout’s 1837 book Voyage aux îles du grand océan. Behind 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.35 In certain related paintings, such as the wellknown Mana’o tupapa’u (The Specter Watches Over Her; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), Gauguin 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 ine¤able 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 active perspective of the modern artist who understands that cultural traditions are made and remade in the present, not just recovered unchanged from the past.” 36 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 di¤erent phases of prayer in the desert Muslims’ religious observance, from Er Rakâa, or Inclination and Es Soujoud, or Prostration to Imam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia” (Imam présidant la prière: “At Tahia,” Fig. 41).37 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, prophète 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 written by Sliman ben Ibrahim. The Vie du prophète 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.” 38 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.39 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-

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tions Dinet prepared for his final book, Pélerinage à la Maison Sacrée d’Allah, published in the year following his own hadj to Mecca and death soon after.40 A major independent composition of 1900 such as The Son of a Holy M’rabeth (Le fils d’un saint M’rabeth, 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 convulsionnaires 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’o 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.” 41 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 images 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 capture 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.” 42

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figure 41 Etienne Dinet, Imam Leading the Prayer: “At Tahia,” oil on canvas, ca. 1921.

Etienne Dinet’s avatar Gustave Guillaumet had made a particular commitment to living in North Africa and to transposing its image in the disinterested quotidian spirit of ethnographic study. Guillaumet “had seen and lived the daily life of the desert . . . in the douars or by the ksours, those small sleepy settlements in the midst of oases that have the air of old Hebraic towns.” Unlike Chassériau and Fromentin, whose images of women sought to inject a seductive poetry into their veiled existence, Guillaumet, for Bénédite, was true to the humdrum life of Kabyle housewives—the sound of their mortars and pestles, the dexterity of girls decorating Kabyle pottery—even entering their houses and “little by little penetrating the intimacy of their conjugal lives.” 43 In short, Guillaumet was a realist, domesticating the exotic in work that parallels the peasant paintings of his older friend JeanFrançois Millet. One function of ethnographic work was to capture for posterity the image of peoples threatened by European encroachment.44 Gautier had already defended Orientalism in a Dehodencq painting of Spanish Gypsies in these terms: “When this bizarre race—an emigration of the pariah tribes of India—has disappeared, drowned by the invasion of civilization, it will be found again in its entirety,

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figure 42 Etienne Dinet, The Son of a Holy M’rabeth, oil on canvas, 1900.

with its types, its gestures and its demeanor, in the picture of M. Dehodencq.” 45 Such statements, built on a concept of cultural and racial decline, manifested the insistent “colonial nostalgia” that Chris Bongie has identified in the works of painters such as Gauguin and writers such as Victor Segalen and Loti who were active in French Oceania at the fin de siècle.46 Today we would reject such theories, for two reasons. First, they overestimated the fragility of cultures and peoples, many of which (like the Gypsies) have survived. Second, they privileged notions of a static “authentic” culture frozen outside time, thereby relegating to degraded status the changing culture of indigenous people in dynamic situations of colonial exchange.47 Bénédite saw the decline of colonized peoples less as a Darwinian inevitability than as the result of antagonism to cultural di¤erence and government policies of assimilation. Like the curator Georges Marye in 1893, he was not beyond casting barbs at French colonial administrations and French colonists for bringing about the destruction, not only of monuments, but of ways of life: “The union of the races, which is not being achieved quickly enough for our politicians, is already too far advanced from the point of view of art. The sadness of daily seeing the vestiges of these spectacles and cus-

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toms . . . disappearing under the egoistic brutality of our Western exploitation has given birth to the desire to scrupulously note down . . . all of the color, poetry, strangeness, and seduction.” 48 Such a preservationist attitude, however sympathetic from the position of today’s multiculturalism, nevertheless has about it an element of romantic nostalgia (as well as a questionable insistence on “race” as the actual currency of human di¤erence). But the wider collectivity of the Orientalist Painters embraced it, making the salvage of such cultural riches part of its platform. Dinet is exemplary in this sense, achieving unprecedented detail and apparent accuracy in his representations of the Kabyle and Bedouin peoples of southern Algeria. In di¤ering degrees, both Dinet and Gauguin represent that rare phenomenon, the artist who seemingly crosses over into the world of the Other and draws on a privileged font of information. But Dinet went further than Gauguin, identifying with the cause of the desert people whose language, faith, and home he adopted (even if he retained the French language and kept an ancestral home at Héricy, outside Paris).49 Bénédite embroidered Dinet’s cross-cultural persona to the extent of writing that “his very physiognomy has taken on the characteristics of a grand nomadic chief.” 50 His interest fired by trips to North Africa in his early twenties, Dinet, trained by Bouguereau but inspired by the influential peasant painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, began a life of regular visits to Algeria in the mid-1880s. Early on he studied Arabic with Paul Leroy at the Ecole des Langues Orientales; around 1892 he received the support of Sliman ben Ibrahim, an essential figure in the Dinet phenomenon. Sliman was a young Mozabite—emigrant from the wealthy Berber trading enclaves of the M’Zab farther south—then resident in Bou-Saâda. He acted as the painter’s elevated “native informant.” For Dinet, Sliman was willing to “collect the songs of the desert, explain the legends, comment on the holy books, give the reasons for customs and costumes.” Sliman even e¤ected his own cultural translation by becoming interested in painting, that “art which people present as forbidden.” 51 Thus he could assist Dinet by arranging for Ouled-Naïl and other models to pose for him and by ensuring the correctness of their gestures. On his regular trips to Paris with Dinet, Sliman apparently became an assiduous visitor to the Louvre and the Luxembourg. As has been noted, he was often present at the Orientalist Painters’ annual banquets and was evidently a symbol of cultural authentication in his role as the society’s only indigenous correspondent. Dinet painted at least two portraits of Sliman: one is a sensitive bust in honorific mode, showing a beautiful three-quarter view of the Mozabite in burnous, silhouetted against desert hills with medals and prayer beads prominently displayed on his chest (see Fig. 27). A second shows Sliman battling the wind and sleet of a wintry Paris, head and shoulders bowed, his expression bleak as he confronts the European elements near the fountain and the Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde (Fig. 43). The choice of backdrop—a memorial to Napoleonic Egyptology that here symbolizes the antiquity of Sliman’s continent—was surely deliberate. Dinet’s potent image of dépaysement, almost exile, is virtually unique in Orientalist painting, situating a “traditional” Maghrebian, not in his own element (as in the first portrait), but at the seat of metropolitan French power.

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figure 43 Etienne Dinet, Sliman ben Ibrahim at the Place de la Concorde, oil on canvas, before 1908.

Because of his friendship with Sliman, Dinet’s art becomes a collaboration between an expert from inside the target culture and an empathetic practitioner who reeducates himself along local lines: Dinet “has become like an Arab, a cultivated Arab.” 52 Without detailing here François Pouillon’s richly studied history of Dinet’s life and exchanges with Sliman, one can comment briefly on the ethnographic in several critical texts informed by the painter, but written by the Orientalists’ Bénédite. One focus of these texts is gesture as a marker of ethnic identity. (Bénédite rarely noted more traditional racial and physiognomical typing.) Even in his account of Dinet’s early Salon canvas The Snake Charmer (Le charmeur de vipères; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) in 1890 Bénédite deployed ethnographic and luminary tropes equally in his discussion; in the painting one sees the pronounced study of gesture and faces close-up that is a striking feature of Dinet’s art. In the market-

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place at Laghouat, wrote Bénédite, “a numerous group of Arabs, who have come from all points of the desert, surround the old conjurer. Wrapped in their dirty white burnous . . . their eyes blinking under the burning light that illuminates their copper faces strangely, they observe, with the most varied expressions of indi¤erence . . . admiration or astonishment . . . the snake charmer, an old fossil of bizarrely mixed blood, who makes bracelets and necklaces with his trained reptiles.” 53 Such studies of physiognomy and expressive gesture, descending directly from academic principles Dinet would have learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, are taken to levels uncharacteristic of late-nineteenth-century art. In his 1903 essay on Dinet, Bénédite recounts the thinking of the artist himself who, living half his life in Paris and half in the desert, finds that the quality of modern gesture has been modified, if not degraded, by “contact with the machine and by the division of labor, not to mention secondary factors like the theater, public meetings, barracks, taverns . . . where each individual in the crowd is an actor.” By contrast, among the people of the Sahara, “where the patriarchal way of life has continued without interruption as if time stood still,” one could find “the same attitudes, the same gestures, the same physiognomical expressions perpetuated through the centuries.” 54 For an artist disenchanted with modernity, such a culture could form a treasure trove of visual resources. A photograph of the artist painting on his terrace at Bou-Saâda shows how Dinet posed and studied such scenes (Fig. 44). The subject, a man in the embrace of four Ouled-Naïl courtesans, is reworked in several images, including a postcard that excludes the painter, and at least one canvas.55 The Ouled-Naïl (who are discussed more extensively in Chapter 7) were Berber tribespeople notorious among Europeans for sending their younger women to work as socially sanctioned prostitutes in oasis towns like Bou-Saâda and Biskra. Dinet specialized in detailed depictions of Ouled-Naïl women, with their elaborate headdresses and encrusted jewelry (in which their earnings and thus dowries were embodied). Even when depicting the Ouled-Naïl engaged in their characteristic dances, Dinet approached the subject so as to diminish the sexualized and venial aspect of their presence before an assumed (but never depicted) European viewer. The men one sees in these love scenes are people from the same group: Dinet e¤ectively romanticized social and sexual relations among his models at Bou-Saâda. Other works of his treat scenes—sometimes mawkish, sometimes gritty with realism—of prostitution, intoxication by drugs, estrangement of spouses, even the casting out of women and children. More numerous, however, are oils in an elegiac mode. In “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute) (“La quesba” [longue flûte de roseau]; see Plate 6), a young Ouled-Naïl woman in full regalia sits on a terrace at dusk with her lover, gazing distractedly as she heeds the music of his flute. Her left hand catches her transparent mauve veil in a gesture from the dance, while her right entwines with her partner’s and rests gently on his knee in a gesture of simple a¤ection. In a similar if more energetic spirit, Spring of Hearts (Le printemps des coeurs; private collection) embroiders the theme of desert love that runs

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figure 44 Dinet painting on his terrace [at Bou-Saâda], ca. 1925.

through Dinet’s book Tableaux de la vie arabe, which it illustrated. In his accompanying text Sliman describes the love games of “striplings and damsels” on the banks of the oued among the oleander groves. In a poetic mode the author invokes the mythic morning breeze that incites each pair of young lovers visible in the picture in a di¤erent way. In the foreground, as a youth pushes forward to cover his partner’s neck with kisses, “the girl, whose wrist is armed with a mass of sharp-pointed bracelets, tries in vain to bring it down in anger upon her inseparable one.” 56 Dinet’s cinematic, almost photojournalistic, approach is as far as possible from the disengaged reserve of fin-de-siècle aesthetics. In thus personalizing human encounters among indigenous Algerians, Spring of Hearts exemplifies the unique perspective Dinet gave to Orientalist painting. The desert stories of Isabelle Eberhardt, exactly contemporary with Dinet’s works, are based more on personal observation than on a weaving in and out of the folkloric. Eberhardt’s writing is terse and stripped bare, whereas Dinet’s visuals are excessive and cloying. There are nevertheless certain parities in their cross-cultural projects of finding sources for art. Eberhardt, fluent in Arabic and dressed as a young religious male scholar, or tolba, for several years roamed the desert regions of southern Algeria, observing traditional life and infiltrating religious confraternities. She married an Algerian spahi, or indigenous regular in the French army, and earned a meager income from articles and short stories she sent back to Algiers, where they were published in Victor Barrucand’s liberal bilingual newspaper, L’Akhbar. Eberhardt’s cross-dressing as well as her cultural masquerade, and the anticolonial tenor of some of her texts, led French authorities to judge her subversive. (She was

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expelled from Algeria at one point.) Eberhardt lived and died on the edge, killed by a flash flood in 1904, aged twenty-seven.57 In contrast, Dinet usually dressed as a Frenchman and maintained regular professional and social contacts with Paris, even if his later cohabitation with Sliman and his family and, above all, his sincere conversion to Islam, led the French of Bou-Saâda to ostracize him. The most interesting of all the conservative critics of new art at this time, Camille Mauclair, held Dinet in special esteem, applauding his sound technique and probing drawing of the human figure. He felt that Dinet’s handling of light, “bathing his figures in a sort of phosphoric glow,” surpassed that of the impressionists. Mauclair recognized the psychic appeal that the life of Islam, “in its pride, its barbaric luxury, its cruelty, and its immense melancholy” (as he put it), had for Dinet, who was “magnetized” by its mystery.58 Yet for the critic, Dinet’s unparalleled investment in the life of the desert peoples was not an end in itself but had a broader relevance in the face of an ever-expanding colonial culture. “Later on,” Mauclair writes of Dinet’s canvases, “they will be incomparable references, they will have fixed without the coldness of archaeology a civilization and a race called upon to transform themselves to the point of travesty by the fatalities of a ‘modernism’ that is slowly killing the Orient.” 59 Such an estimate of Dinet’s future proved close to the mark. Bénédite already granted that Dinet seemed to enjoy the approval of those he represented. In the Tableaux de la vie arabe, Bénédite claims that Dinet not only has exceeded his predecessors’ comprehension of this people but has also understood them “as a native would have done.” Remarking the interest in Dinet’s work of the locals of Bou-Saâda (the most intelligent of whom see it, he says, as an exaltation of the virtues of their people and of Islam), he calls Dinet “the ‘Sheikh’ of the Orientalists.” 60 However sophistic these claims, Dinet’s art, once it had been endorsed by Sliman’s texts, was more than just tolerated by segments of the indigenous Algerian community. Dinet’s formal conversion to Islam in 1913, his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1929, and the way the Arab community in Bou-Saâda in 1930 mourned him as El Hadj Nasr’Edine Dinet all bear this out. Dinet was mourned also by the colonial authorities (including Governor-General Pierre Bordes, who gave the eulogy) as a symbol of cultural coalescence in “la France musulmane.” His funeral at Bou-Saâda was attended by a throng of five thousand people from desert and town. That ceremony was also a stage on which the elite of the Muslim reform movement could proclaim the value for indigenous Algeria of this prestigious convert.61 So the argument for ethnographic Orientalist art comes full circle, from being anathema to Fromentin, still concerned to maintain le beau, as understood by the European tradition, to being a site of cultural value for a contemporary North African public. The art of scrupulous representation has di¤erent uses and significance for di¤ering historical constituencies. The way North African, Saudi, and other non-European buyers in today’s art market have embraced Dinet’s pictures shows they have cultural currency as records of a way of life now transformed. In this new context, Dinet’s meticulous constructions document pristine desert life for a non-European audience, some of whose forebears they may even represent.62

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Orientalists in the Public Eye

The reception of Dinet’s pictures makes it clear that there is no way to prescribe how pictures may be read and used, particularly with the seismic shift of decolonization in North Africa. It is surprising how many of the elements canvased by a range of art critics who viewed Orientalist art in the annual Salons of the Orientalist Painters around 1900 still have currency. The skepticism and lampooning of the work as clichéd or merely photographic still reverberates among older promodernist critics, art historians, or exhibition goers who discount what they see as academic kitsch. The favorable early critics, who endorsed the scientific, ethnographic, and indeed historical functions of Orientalist art would have seen their predictions validated, but by the indigenous rather than the European community. Chief among them was Léonce Bénédite, who emerges as a figure of considerable importance to the history of Orientalism, not only to the movement’s organization and aesthetics (see Chapter 2), but also to its rhetoric, the construing of turn-of-the-century cultural politics, with due recognition of the task of propaganda. Focusing on the latter introduces a third element in the three chapters investigating the Society of French Orientalist Painters and its diverse activities. Chapter 3 concerns the institution and its internal strategies of consolidation, and Chapter 4, the aesthetic and political debates generated in the annual exhibitions held at the Durand-Ruel Galleries and then in the larger spaces of the Grand Palais. But the explosion of activity that characterized the organization in its early years, 1895–1900, spun o¤ into much wider spheres and addressed a public so large it is hard to credit today. I refer to the universal and colonial exhibitions, whose role in relation to Orientalist visual arts I turn to in Chapter 5.

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plate 1 Eugène Fromentin, Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat, oil on canvas, 1859.

plate 2 Henri Regnault, Hassan and Namouna, watercolor, gouache, and black pencil on paper, 1870.

plate 3 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mosque at Algiers, oil on canvas, 1882.

plate 4 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Jardin d’Essai in Algiers, oil on canvas, 1881.

plate 5 André Suréda, A Fountain at Tlemcen, gouache, 1916.

plate 6 Etienne Dinet, “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute), oil on canvas, ca. 1914.

plate 7 Etienne Dinet, Andalusia in the Time of the Moors, color lithograph poster, 1900.

plate 8 Victor Prouvé, Arab Horseman, oil on canvas, 1890.

plate 9 Léon Carré, The Nude Dancer, gouache and gold leaf, 1912.

plate 10 Charles Dufresne, Oriental Scene or Bathers, watercolor, wash, and pencil on paper, ca. 1914.

plate 11 Henri Matisse, The Casbah Gate, oil on canvas, 1912–13.

plate 12 Henri Matisse, Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape, oil on canvas, 1912.

plate 13 Azouaou Mammeri, View of Moulay-Idriss, oil on canvas, ca. 1929.

plate 14 Mohammed Racim, Illumination with Koranic verse, gouache and gold leaf, 1916–17.

plate 15 Mohammed Racim, The Rais, gouache heightened with gold, ca. 1931.

plate 16 Ketty Carré, The Courtesan, distemper on cardboard, 1918.

5 Colonial Panoramania

T

he universal expositions brought metropolitan and regional publics (as well as many foreign visitors) face-to-face with the French colonies through a complex array of representations. The best known are the colonial pavilions, elaborate temporary structures, each a pastiche of traditional building styles in the colony. Nearly as familiar (touching as they do the history of anthropology as well as popular culture) are the native villages, where traditional temporary dwellings—huts, tents, tepees—were sta¤ed by indigenous peoples brought from far-o¤ colonies.1 The insides of the colonial pavilions, however, are a little-examined sphere of visual art and spectacle: the use of panoramas and dioramas, and collections of easel paintings to represent distant colonial sites.2 The word “panoramania” in this chapter’s title was coined to describe the fashion for the vast circular paintings that gave unprecedentedly accurate “all-embracing views” of places.3 Such gigantic paintings, along with dioramas and tableaux vivants, proved among the most popular attractions of the universal and colonial expositions. Orientalists harnessed all these forms of image making, and the phrase “colonial panoramania” suggests the enthusiasm for such visual technologies, as pressed into service by colonial interests in fin-de-siècle France. In propagating panoramania in the colonial sphere, the Society of French Orientalist Painters once

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again proved a driving force, at least in the three expositions treated in this chapter: the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, the 1906 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille, and the 1907 National Colonial Exposition at Nogent-sur-Marne. The society realized that its annual Salons were minor events compared with the expositions—thirty-nine million people visited the 1900 Paris exposition over its seven-month duration, for example.4 Anticipiating such success, the Orientalist Painters organized two separate exhibitions for 1900, and its members worked on murals for colonial pavilions and on panoramas, dioramas, and other spectacular projects scattered about the colonial precinct.5 It is not surprising that the Society of French Orientalist Painters, formed as it was in the aftermath of the Fine Arts Room at the 1889 Algerian pavilion, came to specialize in assembling exhibitions on request, providing a thematically appropriate veneer of colonial high art for expositions and other displays. Léonce Bénédite, at the invitation of the premier cultural institute in French Tunisia, the Institut de Carthage, in 1897, had taken an exhibition of one hundred pictures to that protectorate.6 The Orientalist Painters made painting as a means of cultural transfer their special province, exploring the potential of murals, panoramas, and salonnets (or little Salons) of portable easel pictures to communicate between nation and colonies.

Colonial Spectacle: Murals, Panoramas, Dioramas

In considering how the Ministry of the Colonies regulated the vast colonial precinct of the Trocadéro Gardens in 1900 (Fig. 45), it is useful to draw upon the cultural theorist Tony Bennett’s idea of the “exhibitionary complex.” Bennett distinguishes between official government displays at the expositions and popular attractions and assesses the interplay between those zones in a discursive as well as material sense. “Initially,” Bennett writes, “these fair zones established themselves independently of the official expositions and their organizing committees. The product of the initiative of popular showmen and private traders, . . . they consisted largely of an ad hoc melange of both new (mechanical rides) and traditional popular entertainments (freak shows etc).” 7 As expositions came increasingly under the control of the central government, the fairgrounds more closely complemented the themes presented in the official zones. Such a relationship is evident in the displays devoted to Algeria, prominent among the pavilions of the Trocadéro Gardens (on the Right Bank of the Seine across the river from the Ei¤el Tower) that housed the French colonies, foreign colonies, sovereign Oriental powers, and attractions like the the Trans-Siberian Panorama.8 Algeria, as the richest French colony, had pride of place on the main axis between the Trocadéro and the Ei¤el Tower. Its official and commercial sections were housed in two separate buildings on either side of the great thoroughfare. (The commercial section is visible in Figure 46.) Both were designed in the “Moorish” style by the French architect Albert Ballu.9 The Palace of Algerian Attractions, a conglomerate of “picturesque, familial, and mercantile Alge-

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figure 45 Colonial precinct of the Trocadéro Palace gardens, west side, Paris Exposition, 1900.

ria,” 10 was a major site of colonial panoramania: it housed two commercial installations, the Moving Stereorama, and the Algerian Diorama (to which I will turn shortly). Below them was the much photographed Algerian Quarter, a corner of a generic casbah reconstructed on the banks of the Seine. The idea was derived from the famous Cairo Street of the 1889 exposition, with a similar emphasis on the realism of the facsimile architecture.

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figure 46 The Algerian Street—Unofficial Section, Paris Exposition, 1900.

Indeed simulacra played a crucial role in the exhibitionary complex. The streets and villages of 1900, with their sta¤ of transported indigenes, claimed to remove observers to the other world. They were a confluence of dreams and real-life encounters: indigenous displays were often the site of ludic exchanges, ennui, even sexual engagements that shattered the illusion of a pristine world of visual alterity. As early as the 1867 exposition commentators sensed the now familiar idea of the exposition as microcosm: “This immense exposition recapitulates the entire world. . . . Dreamers of travel, those who are attached by the short chain of their jobs and who dream of excursions to the banks of the Nile or the Bosphorus . . . have no reason to complain. If they cannot go to the Orient, the Orient has come to them.” 11 Opposite the jumbled Palace of Algerian Attractions was the spatially more coherent Official Palace of Algeria, a government installation in composite Moorish style, with horseshoe arches and a long colonnade. The central court, with its ceremonial staircase addressing the Pont d’Iéna, was based on one in the Bardo Palace, and the dome and minaret, on Algerian models like the Mosque of Bou Me-

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dine near Tlemcen. On the Official Palace ’s basement floor a set of casts of classical antiquities from the ruins of Timgad and Tebessa established a museological tone, simultaneously claiming, that is, to educate and delight. Those purposes were somewhat opportunistically spliced, as Zeynep Çelik points out, with a wine bar for tasting the “delights” of colonial viticulture.12 Up on the airy first floor of the Moorish courtyard, after the displays of the Algerian press, the education authority, and the Winter Tourism Committee of Algiers, came the stand-alone Fine Arts Room mounted by the Orientalist Painters. It was decorated with a frieze of stenciled cactus designed by Chudant, incorporating the initials of the Society of French Orientalist Painters.13 Here the society had been asked to provide (as Bénédite wrote) “an exhibition of more particularly ethnographic character.” According to the Hachette guide there was “nothing so gay and bright as this hall inundated with light, where all these canvases representing scenes of Algerian life are shown to the best advantage.” Hachette also commends a “large chart of the French domination in Africa, as well as the relief map, 6 by 4 meters, that occupies the center of the room.” 14 Such didactic displays alter the symbolic tone of the Fine Arts Room considerably. Facts and figures, hortatory phrases, combinations of images and words were variants on the standard exposition installation that Philippe Hamon, in his book on the nineteenth-century exposition as a formation of literature as well as architecture, has characterized as “exemplary objects.” “Scale models, blueprints and cut-aways of machines . . . [were] all accompanied by descriptions. . . . Similarly, on the boulevard, items bearing names and labels were exposed behind shop windows accompanied by a laudatory epideictic discourse—the advertisement.” 15 Such visual and textual installations in the colonial pavilions were designed to convince spectators of the particular colony’s economic worth and potential and of the good sense of the colonial enterprise in general. The emphasis on this “epideictic discourse” increasingly weighed against the aesthetic claims of the fine arts at the expositions. In 1900 two permanent buildings, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, housed the main national fine arts displays: in the Grand Palais, contemporary works selected by the guest nations, and in the Petit Palais the prestigious Centennial and Decennial of French Art. Artworks not selected for display in either building were in a sense tainted by their attachment to the didactic and peripheral context of the national and colonial pavilions, which were classified hierarchically, according to “nations and the supra-national constructs of empires and races.” 16 Thus one commentator, lauding the art on view in the French colonial pavilions, could lament that the official jury of 1900 would not consider for awards any work by artists in the Trocadéro precinct.17 That is not to say the Orientalists showing at the Algerian pavilion lacked the status as artists to be represented in the Grand Palais: works by the society stalwarts Cottet, Dinet, Leroy, and Lunois were indeed on exhibit there.18 But much of their work at the Grand Palais was non-Orientalist; at the Algerian pavilion, in contrast, most of the one hundred and thirty-five easel paintings were of Algerian subjects. The exceptions were works exhibited by amateur artists resident in Algeria. Their flower

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pieces and portrait subjects were displayed to show that the civilized arts flourished among émigrés to Algeria.19 Although such an exhibit assimilates art to the didactic project, the didactic genre was best visible in the Official Palace ’s domed hall, which contained material samples of the country’s agricultural produce: wheat, sorghum, corn, cork, and so on. The cycle of decorative paintings on its walls related to this produce: Sowing in the Arab and the French Way ( Les Sémailles à la mode arabe et à la mode française) and The Harvest of Dates, Alfa, and Oranges ( Le Récolte des dattes, de l’alfa, des oranges).20 (Alfa is a desert grass.) Illustrative and literal, they put the technology of painterly representation to work in a way that may today seem labor-intensive but was guaranteed to have an impact in the age before the color photo enlargement. These wall paintings introduce the greatly expanded context in which the technology of painting was used at the universal expositions. Easel painting worked as a token of cultural value, the “high” creative arts. In the environment of international competition that characterized the universal expositions, it came to stand for the prestige of French culture and the preeminence of France in the arena of nations. The role of specifically colonial easel painting was to disseminate into the representations of the colonies the capital generated by metropolitan high culture. Easel painting could be used to claim the colonies as a vehicle for the arts and, when those colonies themselves begot such painting, as proof of the project’s instigating “culture,” as the French conceived it, in the local situation. In some ways the true usefulness of colonial painting was realized only on the expanded scale of decoration and beyond.21 Decorative painting had a key role in the Palace of the Ministry of Colonies, a neobaroque building designed by Scellier de Gisors. So did large bronze sculptural groups: in front of the building was the Monument to Madagascar ( Monument de Madagascar) by Louis Ernest Barrias, dedicated to “the memory of the officers, soldiers, and sailors who died for our country, Madagascar 1895.” 22 Inside, the distinguished official painter Fernand Cormon provided two large ceiling pieces, France and Her Colonies (La France et ses colonies) and Fauna and Flora of the Colonies (Faune et flore des colonies). The first shows the apotheosis of a female incarnation of France, standing in the clouds with a ring of muses behind her, welcoming a motley crew of the colonized, seen from below: an Arab on a rearing horse, a Senegalese rifleman, and an Ouled-Naïl woman are all identifiable.23 It was the illusionistic technologies of the panoramas, dioramas, and their variants, however, that transported the spectator to colonial situations with an unrivaled sensory intensity. The circular canvases of the panoramas proper were numerous at the 1900 exposition, especially in the colonial precinct. The original panorama was set up in 1788 by Robert Barker in Edinburgh, and the genre was popularized on both sides of the Channel by the great events of the Napoleonic wars. Panoramas, as Stephan Oetterman remarks in his fundamental study, were the most distinctively nineteenthcentury mass medium, in that the year 1900, which marked the birth of commercial cinema, also signaled the demise of the panorama.24

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figure 47 Joseph de la Nézière, Diorama of Fez, Marseille, Colonial Exposition, 1922.

Some introduction to this visual technology is in order. The principle of the panorama is to presuppose an observer “who in turning round looks successively to all points of the horizon.” Such a view is constructed in a large cylindrical room, whose inside “is covered with an accurate representation in colours of a landscape, so that an observer standing in the centre sees the picture like an actual landscape in nature completely surround him. . . . The observer stands on a platform . . . and the space between this platform and the picture is covered with real objects [the false terrain] which gradually blend into the picture itself. The picture is lighted from above . . . so that no light but that reflected from the picture reaches the eye . . . the staircase [and] the platform [for the spectators] are kept nearly dark.” 25 Panoramas generally required the construction of a housing or rotunda building, and their fabrication posed specific problems, not least of which were the immense area of canvas to be covered, the calculations of perspective required to make the view appear “natural” from the central platform, and the difficulty of achieving the illusion of uniform illumination in a work produced by many hands (Fig. 47). Constructing a false terrain to mediate the space between the foot of the viewing platform and the edge of the circular canvas wall was another challenge. It was met by dispersing actual objects (carts or cannon, bushes, and plaster boulders) among illusionistically painted flats; cutout upright figures could be painted to merge visually with the picture space itself.

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figure 48 Louis Tinayre, The Panorama of Madagascar, Paris Exposition, 1900.

At the Trocadéro two important but conventional panorama installations were run as private enterprises. Both were thoroughly colonial in theme, celebrating the best-known French military and expeditionary exploits of the 1890s: the annexation of Madagascar and Colonel Marchand’s expedition across East Africa in competition with the British in the “scramble for Africa.” 26 I mentioned before that battle scenes, contemporary and commemorative, were one of the two great subjects of the panorama (the other was the view, from a central spire or peak, of famous cities or landscapes). Several panoramas exhibited over the century in Paris had been Oriental in theme, from the 1799 Battle of the Pyramids (reconstituted in the 1850s by Colonel Jean-Charles Langlois in homage to Napoleon) to scenes from the Crimean War in the 1860s. Continuing this tradition, the painter Louis Tinayre devoted the Panorama de Madagascar in 1900 to the military events by which General Joseph Gallieni achieved the surrender of the Malagasy forces (Fig. 48). Tinayre had been present at the scene he painted. His panorama was on the upper floor of the enormous circular Madagascar pavilion, just north of the Trocadéro Palace. The scene was introduced by eight small “dioramas”—curved canvases enclosing a three-dimensional foreground on which scale models of soldiers and armaments were set on a false terrain.27 These dioramas documented the early stages of the campaign, from the disembarkation at Majunga on. The panorama painting itself showed “the exact position of French troops at Tananarive on 30 September 1895, with the bombardment of the capital and the act of surrender to General Duchesne.” 28 The military action could be studied in all its detail from the central viewing platform, for which Tinayre used a spe-

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figure 49 Scellier de Gisors, Pavilion of the Dioramas, Trocadéro Gardens, Paris Exposition, 1900.

cially imported Malagasy timber hut. The final display of four dioramas showed the aftermath, “the pacification and the development of the colony by General Gallieni.” 29 Such a colonial panorama performed in various ways for the observer. It served as an object of what Bennett calls “stupefaction” in the face of its technological virtuosity, compounded no doubt by the message of European technical superiority and efficacy in the art of war. At the same time it provided an imaginary transport to Madagascar, even though panoramas, because of their very meticulousness (as Oettermann remarks), typically leave little to the imagination. I am not arguing that the panorama exhibits any more specific cross-cultural modality than standard Orientalist easel paintings; with equal ease, however, it was enlisted into the political, historical, and experiential project of colonialism. Many of the official colonial pavilions in 1900 featured smaller panoramas and dioramas; the series of Indochinese pavilions, for example, contained panoramas of the principal cities Hue, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Mytho, and Hanoi.30 Several images of smaller Caribbean and African colonies and protectorates that lacked their own pavilions were gathered in the Pavilion of the Dioramas (Fig. 49). Various artists associated with the Orientalist Painters were active at this pavilion. The Somali Coast boasted an Environs de Djibouti, prepared by Henry d’Estienne for the Ministry of the Colonies after the maquette of Marius Perret.31 Paul Bu¤et, whose demanding mission to paint in Abyssinia with government funding is discussed in Chapter 6, presented a suite of six scenes of the colony of Djibouti and of Abyssinia. Paul Merwaert would no doubt have been sent to French Oceania to prepare his officially sponsored diorama Pearl Fishers on the Touamotou Islands (Les Pêcheurs

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de perles sur les îles Touamotou).32 In 1900 members of the Society of French Orientalist Painters acted as experts available for hire to visualize everything in the global French overseas empire. Displays at the Palace of Algerian Attractions (a commercial, as opposed to an official, space) o¤ered novel physical sensations, a less earnest didacticism aligned with the pleasures of modern tourism. In the commercial zones technical experimentation was put to work. Vying for attention among the exhibits was “a new mechanism that has been very warmly received by the public: the Moving Stereorama, or Poème de la Mer” (Fig. 50).33 An initiative of the entrepreneurs Francovich and Gadan, it was described enthusiastically in the Hachette guide as “enabling us to accomplish, without the least fatigue and sheltered from the cares of seasickness, a voyage along the Algerian coast. With the help of an ingenious gadget—an assemblage of canvases and planes in relief that turn before our eyes—we rapidly forget our presence on the banks of the Seine and believe ourselves transported over the Mediterranean to within sight of the enchanting coasts of Algeria.” 34 The Dutch popular science journal De Natuur, more precise about the technology, explained that the sightseeing voyage began with the morning light on the fishing boats in the port of Bône (now Annaba). Then followed a scene of Bougie (now Bejaïa), with a calm sea and blue sky, converted to choppy sea as the viewers’ putative steamship approached Algiers (with its famous panorama of white houses and minarets); the Poème closed within sight of the port of Oran at evening. Along the way the spectator encountered boats of all kinds, even “an imposing squadron of warships, including ironclads, battle-cruisers and torpedo-boats” 35—a militaristic image that announced the French possession of Algeria and advertised French sea power to all foreign visitors to the exposition. A second geographical representation of the premier colony, a transect of the nation from the desert at Biskra to the port of Algiers (Maxime Noiré’s painted Diorama de l’Algérie), asserted possession just as clearly.36 Across the Seine on the Champ-de-Mars, in the continuation of the exposition behind the Ei¤el Tower, were star commercial attractions featuring the painted canvas. Like the Moving Stereorama, these o¤ered more than a central viewing platform and static encircling panorama. The Maréorama, Hugo d’Alési’s installation, gave the illusion of a maritime voyage from Marseille to Constantinople (with landings at Nice, Sousa, Naples, and Venice), as experienced from the bridge of a facsimile steamer that rolled and pitched, because of a set of enormous hydraulic pistons. The scrolling topographical canvas required for this multisensory experience was one and a half kilometers long. Nearby was the immensely popular Cinéorama, “a new application of the cinematograph to the panorama.” 37 Most pertinent to the colonial context, however, was the Panorama du Tour du Monde, by the architect Alexandre Marcel and the painter Louis Dumoulin (Fig. 51). Together they designed a magnificent display on the Champ-de-Mars that today looks as if it had strayed from Euro-Disney. Conceptually the Tour du Monde was a compressed version of Jules Verne ’s famous novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) that led the visitor “from one end of the world to the other end” in

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figure 50 Moving Stereorama, Algerian section, Paris Exposition, 1900.

figure 51 Louis Dumoulin and Alexandre Marcel, Le Tour du Monde, Paris Exposition, 1900.

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just over an hour.38 The exterior of Marcel and Dumoulin’s multistory building was a polyglot of architectures: a Cambodian temple, or wat; a seven-story Chinese pagoda; an entrance based on a Japanese ceremonial gateway; and an apparently North Indian balconied main structure. It was vaunted as one of the most original creations of the exposition: “No expense has been spared in making this spectacle as exact and as seductive as possible. The gate alone, executed by Japanese carpenters using materials from Japan, cost one hundred thousand francs.” 39 Visitors descended the interior in a slow spiral, walking past large-scale dioramas with topographical backdrops painted by Dumoulin and his team. In these dioramas “M. Dumoulin had ingeniously organized in the foreground little scenes containing indigenous persons from the countries represented: this was the animated panorama.” 40 It is not surprising that Dumoulin ventured an innovation in panorama scenography. Early in his career he had executed the vast panorama of the Battle of Waterloo, one of the few panoramas still on view today.41 In 1900 Dumoulin’s scenes combined the familiar ideas of the indigenous village and the theatrical performance—what Sylviane Leprun calls “plastic ethnology”—with large-scale topographical painting.42 As surviving photographs indicate, however, claims to scientific accuracy should not be exaggerated: in the Tour du Monde Dumoulin played fast and loose with ethnic and national identity, particularly that of peoples colonized by European powers. In one photograph (perhaps a montage) Javanese dancers and a gamelan orchestra from the Dutch East Indies perform before a painted view of Angkor Wat, emerging from its jungle fastness in French Cambodia (Fig. 52). Thousands of kilometers are compressed into this collage of exotic icons. Dumoulin was more respectful in his diorama of Japan, a sovereign nation that, after all, had its own pavilion at the exposition. Twelve professional geishas brought over from Tokyo figure in a formal garden at cherry-blossom time at Nikko, “the holy mountain, covered with thousand-year-old temples and admirable gardens.” 43 From such Far Eastern dioramas as this and the Chinese Village at Shanghai, Dumoulin moved westward, to a scene of Port Said on the Suez Canal and a Cemetery in Constantinople. This last ensemble was transparently inspired by Pierre Loti’s most famous novel, Aziyadé (1879).44 A commercial attraction like the Tour du Monde stood outside the normal taxonomy of exhibiting nation-states that Tony Bennett elucidates. It included scenes from subject states, colonies both French and otherwise, and nations that were sovereign (albeit under pressure from European powers), like China, Japan, and Turkey. The physical situation of the Tour du Monde gives the clue to its interpretation: located well away from the official colonial precinct, near the northeast pier of the Ei¤el Tower, it was adjacent to the pavilions of the Alpine and Automobile Clubs—travel and sporting bodies with strong links to the tourist industry. More significant, its position in the overall layout matched that of the Maréorama, the Cinéorama, and a ride named the Great Celestial Globe: like them, it was an attraction of the new technologies of vision. Trading on the empirical, mimetic, and

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figure 52 Louis Dumoulin’s painted view of Angkor Wat with Javanese dancers, Le Tour du Monde, Paris Exposition, 1900.

ethnographic languages of the official colonial pavilions, but not limited by the actualities of colonial control, the Tour du Monde took the entire world of mankind, in one imperializing sweep, as its field of representation. In constructing it, Louis Dumoulin had unequaled authority. As a longtime official painter to the French navy, he indeed became a kind of Pierre Loti of the painted view. (Loti’s source material for his exotic romances was his lifelong career as a naval officer.) As for Dumoulin, travels around the world a¤orded this former student of Henri Gervex who had once sought and received the advice of Edouard Manet an unending series of landscapes and scènes de moeurs (human studies).45 Dumoulin worked in a bright-toned, quasi-impressionist technique, displaying an eye for vivid detail and a sometimes daring sense of composition. His curiosity about the Far East piqued during the 1880s by the japonisme craze, Dumoulin obtained from Director of Fine Arts Castagnary a diplomatic passport and free passage with the French navy on sea-lanes heading east. In 1889 he exhibited one hundred paintings he had made in Japan, China, and Indochina. (The great supporter of japonisme Philippe Burty wrote the preface to the catalogue.) The exhibition successfully presented some of the early painted images of sites of a kind made popular by novels like Loti’s Mme Chrysanthème (which inspired Van Gogh’s Japanophilia).46 Prior to 1900 Dumoulin was no stranger to the great expositions: the Indochinese part of his Far Eastern suite had been put on view in the International and Colonial Exposition of Lyon in 1894.47

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The idea for the Tour du Monde possibly arose at that time, with Dumoulin surrounded by smallscale colonial pavilions. In any event, it became one of the most popular attractions at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition. Curiously, Léonce Bénédite did not co-opt the talents of Dumoulin, who never exhibited at the Orientalist Painters. On the contrary, Dumoulin, who after his success in 1900 was appointed commissioner of fine arts for the 1906 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille, went on to found the only exhibiting society that rivaled the Orientalist Painters, the Colonial Society of French Artists.

Modalities of the Salonnet

The second strategy for disseminating Orientalist art into the broad public domain of the expositions grew out of the society’s primeval function: that of mounting exhibitions of easel painting. Hardly a radical cultural practice, it did less to cross the hierarchies of the visual than the Orientalist Painters’ participation in panorama painting and its mechanized variants. Yet in manipulating what I call the salonnet, the proponents of Orientalist art siphoned o¤ the high art of painting from respectable exhibitions and moved it into the carnavalesque world of temporary colonial representations. Thus in 1900 the Orientalist Painters engaged in a third, most unexpected, participation, in a largely forgotten zone of spectacle: Andalusia in the Time of the Moors. This “immense village” covered five thousand square meters of the Trocadéro Gardens,48 presenting “all that is picturesque from ancient and modern Spain. It is the ‘Rue du Caire ’ of 1900, better run.” 49 Its organizer is described as a M. Roseyro, apparently a publisher with links to L’Illustration and the Revue des deux mondes. It has been suggested that Roseyro was of Sephardic Jewish background, which might explain the drive to re-create a time when Jewish as well as Islamic high culture flourished on the Iberian Peninsula.50 The writer Armand Silvestre, who himself had established a popular theater at the 1900 exposition, set the scene in his guidebook: “With this magnificent reconstitution, one can relive the Arab civilization of the fifteenth century, which shone with such brightness in the South of Spain. For this the promoters of the enterprise have had only to draw upon the marvelous treasures of Moorish architecture that the monuments of Cordoba, Seville, and Granada have preserved for us.” 51 The two major architectural works were the Lion Court, based on the Patio of the Lions at the Alhambra Palace in Granada (Fig. 53), and the tower of the Giralda at Seville, seventy meters high, like the original, and topped with its gyrating golden Genius. The Giralda encapsulates the theme of cultural hybridity and accretion that animates Andalusia in the Time of the Moors, being “Moorish in its base, Renaissance in its bell tower.” 52 The Alhambra, as an architectural marvel, had been a place of pilgrimage for Orientalist artists and writers since the early nineteenth century.53 The challenge for the organizers of Andalusia in 1900 was to reconstitute the historical environment of the Alhambra. This they did (at least in the official exposition photograph) with a montage of Maghrebian men and women

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figure 53 Lion Court, Andalusia 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 awareness 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 e¤ect 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.” 54 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.” 55

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figure 54 The Arena, Andalusia in the Time of the Moors, Paris Exposition, 1900.

Christian knights jousting with Moors would activate memories of the Crusades, and of Emperor Charlemagne, who had halted the Saracen armies at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in 778. That was the central action of the medieval French literary classic the Chanson de Roland. Yet in 1900 from the French perspective, the camel-mounted Touareg (the Berber nomads always clad in blue who dominated the Sahara) were a real threat to Saharan trade routes and to France ’s attempts to extend its military rule into the far south of Algeria, where the French were also pressuring the sultan of Morocco for territorial concessions. The Touareg had almost nothing to do with medieval Andalusia, but everything to do with the French experience of resistant Islam. Such feigned martial conflicts may have had less allure than the varieties of dance performed at ethnically coded sites across the Andalusian precinct. Dance has been identified as one of the great

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figure 55 Room of the Society of French Orientalist Painters, Ghent Exposition, 1913.

signifiers of cultural identity as well as sexuality in the romance of the universal expositions.56 Given the absence of living Moorish culture in present-day Andalusia, Maghrebian dancers were called to duty. Thus dancers of the sect of Aïssaouas performed adjacent to a copy of the facade of the Mosque of the Aïssaouas from Tétouan in Morocco. Elsewhere, Jewish women from Tangier, Kabyles, and Ouled-Naïl women were figures of the past, standing in for exiles from Andalusia, relics of a culture lost to Europe. But they were also figures of contemporary currency, exponents of an allure familiar to colonial tourists and soldiers in present-day Algeria. In contrast, the dance troupes brought up from Spain—the “Sévillanaises” with their bolero or the Gypsy flamenco dancers from presentday Granada—presented a less conflicted view of the balletic arts and could still in some sense be claimed as European. Against this background of bodies and beasts in conflict, and of passionate dance, the logic of the Orientalist Painters’ presence is that of quietude and the museum. “Museum” is indeed the name given to the space where “the Society of Orientalist Painters . . . has organized an exhibition of the finest works by its members. Next to these canvases so full of sun and light we find a complete retrospective exhibition of Muslim art.” 57 No doubt the Orientalists o¤ered characteristic scenes of Maghrebian life in which no European presence was felt, symbolizing the life of old Moorish Andalusia. A later photograph shows a typical society installation, with paintings of the Maghreb, Oriental carpets, clay sculpture on pedestals, a leatherwork saddle, and even arrays of Moorish weapons (Fig. 55). There would certainly have been Spanish scenes—previous Orientalists’ Salons had regularly included works painted in Spain, a country that (as the colonial novelists the Leblond brothers expressed it) was the very “liege land of Orientalism.” 58

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This salonnet functioned, then, not like a panorama, which presented a view of a singular location, but like a multifarious collective view of lands settled, either currently or in the past, by the Moors. As a scattered collectivity it nuanced a straightforward trompe l’oeil landscape painted on a high brick wall opposite the Spanish Village: a giant view of the Alhambra and Monte Sacro. The museum even contained a metonym for Spain itself: an exhibition dedicated to the bullfight. One imagines its appeal to the young Andalusian Pablo Picasso, had he strayed over to Andalusia in the Time of the Moors during his visit to the Paris exposition. At the Grand Palais, his bedside melodrama Dying Moments (Derniers moments) was an official Spanish entry, even if his bread-and-butter paintings in 1900 were scenes of the bullfight and the café-concert. The main surviving record of the Orientalist Painters’ contribution is the poster Andalusia in the Time of the Moors (L’Andalousie aux temps des Maures), by Etienne Dinet (see Plate 7). Featuring a life-size figure of a female dancer, this enormous chromolithograph, framed by panels of hand-painted tiles, is full of verve despite its somewhat garish colors. In it Dinet imagines an Andalusia straight from his studies of the Ouled-Naïl in Bou-Saâda and Laghouat: a tattooed young Berber woman in rich flowing robes of green and yellow and heavy silver amulets dances in a narrow horseshoe archway. Behind her, smiling Arab men smoke and wait in the purplish evening air. This poster too has its epideictic function: the dancer exhorts passersby to enter her gourbi, or Moorish village—which after all allegorizes the Andalusian exhibit itself. Dinet’s Andalusia stresses the Islamic element at the expense of the Spanish, rereading the historical other in a contradictory colonial present. The multiple involvements of the Society of French Orientalist Painters at the 1900 Paris exposition opened the path for further exploits. The society had impressed the commissioner of the colonial section, Jules Charles-Roux, a wealthy industrialist, writer, and politician from Marseille (Fig. 56).59 When in 1906 he was head of Marseille ’s own great exposition, he gave extraordinary prominence to the visual arts. Marseille ’s mounting of the first-ever national colonial exposition needs explaining. As the great colonial port of France, Marseille served North Africa and all the Eastern shipping routes. A large and wealthy city, it was a commercial rival of Paris. In an era when great exhibitions were a mark of the ambition and prestige of emerging capitals—Philadelphia, Melbourne, Chicago, Lyon, Hanoi, Liège—Marseille was eager to seize such an opportunity for itself. At the close of the 1900 exposition the interest in the colonial domain was such that a further exposition was planned, in which the colonies would be the exclusive subject of study. The exposition, backed by the powerful Chamber of Commerce of Marseille, opened there in April 1906 on a campus of thirtysix hectares at Longchamp. Before closing in November, its total of 7,960 exhibitors drew some 1.8 million visitors.60 The exposition had two principal parts: a Grand Palais, showing the metropole ’s o¤erings to the colonies, and a series of colonial pavilions containing products destined for continental Europe. The two other key sections were oceanography and the fine arts. One result of the Marseille exposition was a lesson in decentralization. Germany, Britain, Bel-

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figure 56 Jules Charles-Roux, 1906.

gium, Russia, Spain, and even Mexico sent official visitors delegated to study French colonialism. Charles-Roux’s opening speeches favorably documented the weight of Marseille and the colonial sector in the overall French economy.61 The success of the 1906 and 1922 Marseille expositions was recognized in 1983, when the city commemorated the two events with a series of retrospectives. Mayor Gaston Deferre (the husband of the writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, who was the granddaughter of Jules Charles-Roux and the biographer of Isabelle Eberhardt) evoked the refusal of the people of Marseille “to bow to the excesses of an aggressive centralism, imposing their initiatives, defending them when Paris sought to thwart them.” 62 For Commissioner Charles-Roux, the abundance of fine arts exhibitions was deliberate policy. In his preface to the luxurious illustrated catalogue Charles-Roux laments the indi¤erence of the French public to “the lessons of the official displays—statistics, graphics, the rather arid documentation.” He perceived that more spectacular attractions, including the ever-popular exhibitions of painting, might redress the problem.63 At Marseille the fine arts were installed as an “attraction” in the pavilion of

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the Ministry of the Colonies. Over half of its eleven rooms were given to painting and sculpture, but to reach them the visitor had to run the gauntlet of rooms devoted to the Geographical Service, colonial health, and so on.64 The nature of the fine arts displays was determined by Louis Dumoulin, by then the artistic advisor and commissioner of fine arts at Marseille. Dumoulin had collaborated closely with CharlesRoux in 1900 in designing the Grotte Khmer for the Indochinese section (as well as mounting the Tour du Monde), and Charles-Roux had formed a high opinion of his “talent as an artist and as metteur en scène.” By appointing Dumoulin, Charles-Roux wished to avoid the “chaos and the errors of taste that often exist in these colossal agglomerations of monuments, of palaces and kiosks, of towers and campaniles, of grottos . . . bridges, and walkways.” Dumoulin’s role was to coordinate and harmonize the “plantation du décor” for the whole exposition, as well as oversee the fine arts.65 In keeping with the vigorous regionalism of the Marseille e¤ort, a major retrospective of Provençal art was installed in the metropolitan pavilion, the Grand Palais. It included works from the Avignon Primitives to artist heroes like Pierre Puget and Jean-Honoré Fragonard to the nineteenth-century Provençaux François Granet and Adolphe Monticelli.66 Contemporary Provençal art was represented in surprisingly advanced form by Matisse ’s friend from Marseille, Charles Camoin, and the young expressionist Auguste Chabaud. Paul Cézanne, however, the most patriotic of all Provençal avant-gardists, was not included. Even in 1906 (the last year of his life) Cézanne was very likely too controversial. Yet his spirit hovers over the strange exotic scene at Longchamp, where pagodas and the tower of Angkor Wat were profiled against what Charles-Roux called the “marvelous decor of mountains”—the rocky mountains of L’Estaque where Cézanne had recently made some of his greatest landscapes. The contemporary vigor of the Orientalist movement was well established in the pavilion of the Ministry of the Colonies. The largest room was given to the “living Orientalist and colonial artists,” including members of the Society of French Orientalist Painters.67 Dumoulin, however, enlisted another group of colonial painters, by and large artists working for the various ministries or colonial governments. Several of them were familiar from Paris in 1900: Georges Rochegrosse from Algiers, Charles Duvent and Joseph de la Nézière with their Far Eastern views, Paul Merwaert (who had died in 1902) with his West African sites, and José Silbert, the president of the Marseille painters’ group. Silbert exhibited figure paintings studied from life in Tangier and Algiers, like his Cockatoo Trainer (Montreur de cacatoès), its technique realist but its colors almost psychedelic, like the rainbow-hued cockatoos themselves.68 Silbert would play a major role in organizing the fine arts at the next National Colonial Exposition of Marseille, in 1922. An additional salonnet that sprang from Dumoulin’s initiative comprised the works of young French painters competing for new traveling scholarships instituted for the Marseille colonial exposition. After that competition Dumoulin and Gaston Bernheim (of the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery) went on to

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form the Colonial Society of French Artists (Coloniale for short), modeled on Bénédite ’s Orientalist Painters, to encourage such grants.69 Charles-Roux saw the value of mounting a historical exhibition of the colonial visual arts “to establish the balance sheet of our colonial riches, our wealth of memories.” The display had two sections, a historical colonial exhibition and a retrospective of Orientalism. The first sought to evoke “the glorious epochs when France was the sovereign mistress of India, Louisiana, and Canada,” as well as to follow the more familiar campaigns of expansion in Indochina, Madagascar, and West Africa. Paintings, engravings, lithographs, and curios would “reawaken the dormant specters of men and the failing memories of things.” 70 This exhibition of colonial history was small, but as Charles-Roux predicted, it became a standard feature of subsequent colonial expositions—that of Vincennes in 1931, for example, with its theme of celebrating the centenary of Algeria as a French possession, was a major undertaking, researched over several years and provided with a significant scholarly catalogue. The Retrospective Exhibition of French Orientalists consolidates a familiar idea, first broached in the early 1890s by Bénédite. To curate this Marseille retrospective, however, Charles-Roux called on the talents of Gaston Bernheim. His enlistment in the colonial cause at first seems surprising: with his brother, Josse, Bernheim was the director of one of the most distinguished art dealerships in Paris, bidding fair to supplant Durand-Ruel’s hold on the market for nineteenth-century progressive artists, established contemporaries like Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, and, after 1909, new talents like Matisse. As is so often the case, Gaston Bernheim had a colonial background, having spent his youth in the French Antilles. He was also an amateur painter, who exhibited female nudes from time to time under the name Gaston de Villers. His experience at Marseille had a lasting impact on the colonial art scene in that he became one of its major promoters in the 1920s, as treasurer of the Coloniale. Bernheim’s retrospective of sixty canvases drew largely from private collections, including the families of artists like Belly, Guillaumet, and Chassériau, and from major collectors like Prince Alexandre de Wagram and the specialist collector of Orientalism from Angers, a M. Bessonneau (who lent ten major pieces). Bernheim’s retrospective was peculiar in unexpectedly including the modernists Edouard Manet and Paul Gauguin with the Orientalists recognized as canonical. Manet was represented by a portrait bust entitled Negro Woman (Négresse), whose inclusion seems primarily a way of annexing the great modernist, somewhat unconvincingly, to the exoticist tradition.71 To claim Renoir and Gauguin seems more legitimate. The Algerian phase of Renoir (with Besnard, the only living artist in this retrospective) had already been accredited by the Society of French Orientalist Painters. At Marseille Renoir was represented by three canvases: the Arab Festival, Algiers: The Casbah (lent by Claude Monet), Madame Stora in Algerian Costume, and an unidentified Head of an Algerian Woman (Tête d’Algérienne).72 Paul Gauguin had heretofore been rigorously excluded from all exhibitions of Orientalist art, de-

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spite critical acclaim and the abundance of his Tahitian paintings on the Parisian art market after 1893 (he died in 1903). Bénédite would have none of him, either at the Orientalist Painters or in collecting for the Luxembourg. Roger Marx, however, had included Gauguin in the Centennial of French Art at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, and at Marseille his Tahitian Landscape (Paysage à Tahiti) was legitimized in the catalogue with the phrase “Centennale 1900.” Gauguin’s Martinique (La Martinique) was lent by Prince de Wagram, probably a major Bernheim client.73 Some months before the massive Gauguin retrospective at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris, the injection of the still controversial Gauguin into this construct of a colonial canon was certainly daring. Bernheim apparently sought to raise the prestige of Orientalist art by affiliating the work of the avant-gardist with it. Yet it is a historically accurate connection that few twentieth-century scholars saw fit to make. The final Orientalist salonnet to be considered here, as bizarrely unexpected as that at Andalusia in the Time of the Moors, occurred in 1907 at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Nogent-sur-Marne. After 1900 this botanical garden was well known for its small colonial expositions focusing on agriculture and accompanying tribal encampments. The origins of the colonial garden at Nogent went back to 1897, when a Tunisian bureaucrat proposed a botanical garden for Paris where new plants could be grown under agronomical conditions and experiments made to save new colonists time and uncertainty. In 1898 an officer was sent to study Kew Gardens outside London, and a tract of state land near Vincennes, at Nogent-sur-Marne, was ceded to the Ministry of the Colonies for the creation of a “Jardin d’Essai colonial.” 74 Expositions began to be organized at Nogent under ministerial patronage. As early as 1905 one of the nine categories (tropical agriculture, husbandry of exotic animals, colonial engineering, and so forth) of the National Exposition of Colonial Agriculture included the surprising class of fine arts.75 Once again painting and the graphic arts appeared, to document the colonial e¤ort visually. At the same time the contexts in which such art appeared tell us something about the mechanics of “colonisation intellectuelle” and the colonial process itself. When the National Colonial Exposition was organized at Nogent for the summer of 1907, the Society of French Orientalist Painters, no doubt spurred by the success of its Marseille venture, was called in. It seemed almost too easy to arrange, “in the middle of the reconstituted or lived scenes of colonial life, . . . the pavilion of fine arts organized by the Society of French Orientalists . . . [containing] souvenirs of local customs, of distant voyages, and of picturesque interiors.” 76 Here was more proof that a colonial exposition, however unlikely in theme, could hardly be conceived without two-dimensional representations. Once again the high art of painting was expected to inhabit a world of the exotic recognized as a theater of representations. A particular e¤ort was made to maximize the presence of indigenous peoples at the Colonial Garden at Nogent. The French colonies were represented there by now familiar installations, for example, the Annamite Fort, and the Kanaka and Congolese Villages. Pride of place was reserved for the display entitled Touareg of the Sahara, an attraction organized by the popular magazine Journal de Voyages.77

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The relevance of such displays to the advanced visual arts in the summer of 1907—the high summer of the Parisian avant-garde ’s Africanism, that of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse ’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (Nu bleu [Souvenir de Biskra])—is something that has yet to be investigated. The presence of such displays is certainly suggestive, strengthening the argument that opportunities for an avant-garde awareness of African and Oceanic peoples and arts amounted to more than masks that could be bought at bric-a-brac shops or visits to the Trocadéro Museum.78 Proof that progressive commentators knew of the ethnographic presence at the Colonial Garden comes at least as early as 1912, in an article by the prominent young critic Léon Werth, published in the Grande Revue (where Matisse ’s “Notes of a Painter” had been published four years before). In it Werth manifests his sympathy for the persons and culture of displaced Africans, e¤ectively themselves an exhibit at the Colonial Garden.79 When French colonial troops from North and West Africa fought in France during World War I, such sympathy flowered, contributing in the 1920s to the taste for l’art nègre and American jazz music. In closing the chapters on the Society of French Orientalist Painters, I have moved the debate from the specialist written discourse of Orientalist aesthetics to the broadest sphere of interaction with the public. There is some value in seeing the Orientalist painting movement as the visual “research and development” wing of the whole colonial movement. The universal expositions, with their commercial and quasi-industrial aspects—the gigantism of the displays, their technocratic bias, the vast numbers and diversity of the spectators—provided an ideal forum for the various interests involved. Those interests were as varied as a powerful Chamber of Commerce wishing to promote colonial trade (led by Charles-Roux at Marseille in 1906); a possibly Sephardic Jewish entrepreneur wishing to glorify a pre-Catholic, tolerant Islamic world (Roseyro’s Andalusia in the Time of the Moors); an entrepreneurial artist capitalizing on long years of overseas travel and research by harnessing the taste for exoticism (Dumoulin’s Tour du Monde); and a colonial government working in tandem with the Ministry of the Colonies to expose and popularize its achievements in the cultural and touristic precincts of the Algerian pavilions of 1900. At that historical moment, the Society of French Orientalist Painters (and its cohorts like Dumoulin and his Coloniale) provided a highly flexible mechanism of image making. It infiltrated the field of public vision, much like the cinema and color photography at expositions later in the century, but with a whi¤ of the ine¤able that “art” provides.

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6 Traveling Scholarships

and the Academic Exotic

Government Traveling Scholarships Our brilliant school of Orientalist painters . . . was it not born whole, and almost spontaneously, from the institution of the traveling scholarships, so apt to expand individualism, to establish a fascination with the new, to favor independence of temperament? – a r m a n d d a yo t , preface to Exposition du cinquantenaire de la fondation des Prix du Salon et bourse de voyage, 1926

Gathering up and exhibiting paintings made in the far reaches of the French empire is a late stage in the cycle of Orientalist production. It assumes the centrality of the metropolitan audience and of the exhibition as a theater of critical encounters. This chapter and the one that follows look back from exhibition and reception to the formative stage of the cycle, that of journeys out from the center: their genesis, their narratives, the work they produced. On such journeys, artists as dissimilar as Etienne Dinet and Henri Matisse had certain expectations, even experiences, in common. Traveling to North Africa to paint was profoundly unlike the archetypal journey of French artists to Rome, undertaken from the days of Nicolas Poussin to those of Edgar Degas.

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Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Prix de Rome scholarships in painting and architecture determined the official aesthetic life: the Villa Medici, the seat of the French school near the top of the Spanish Steps, was the destination not only for the fortunate few Rome laureates but also for the many non-prize-winning artists who traveled on their own or patrons’ funds: Camille Corot, Gustave Moreau, Degas, and Maurice Denis were among the progressives to follow that route. The best official career path followed the route between Paris and Rome: Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Prix de Rome sojourn, Salon medals upon one ’s return, membership in the Institut de France, then back to direct the Villa Medici itself. At least two distinguished artists, paradoxically, important in the history of Orientalism, took such a path: J.-A.-D. Ingres and Albert Besnard. The faltering of neoclassical aesthetics is evident in the structure of state funding for young artists to travel, as well as in the history of style. Henri Regnault, by agreement the most talented young French artist to win the Prix de Rome in the later nineteenth century, had already symbolized the erosion of its authority. He ended up leaving Rome to seek inspiration in Andalusian Spain and Tangier around 1870 (see Chapter 1). After the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, the enlightened new director of fine arts, the marquis Philippe de Chennevières, in 1874 founded a second major French scholarship, awarded, not for surviving a grueling process of elimination at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but for outstanding work at the Salon. The Salon Prize (Prix du Salon, renamed Prix National in the 1890s) initially gave a full four-year grant, only part of which was to be expended in Rome itself.1 This new prize was at best “timidly revolutionary,” in the words of the inspector of fine arts who presided over the whole traveling scholarships project, Armand Dayot. Coming late, the Salon Prize gave rise to even fewer painters of subsequent renown than the Prix de Rome, because only exhibitors at the official Salon were eligible. So the state patronized and perpetuated a specific aesthetic range at a time when the new impressionist exhibitions (also begun in 1874) and, from 1884, the regular Salon des Indépendants became venues for progressive painting. More relevant to the history of Orientalism was the inauguration in May 1881 of a set of bourses de voyage (traveling scholarships), up to eight of which were granted annually on the basis of Salon entries chosen, not by the members of the Academy of Fine Arts (who chose recipients of the Prix de Rome), but by the potentially more liberal Conseil supérieur des Beaux-Arts. The bourses de voyage were open to sculptors, printmakers, medal makers, and architects as well as painters. The scholarships were for one year, with the significant requirement that the young laureate be absent from France the whole year. The stipend was three thousand francs, payable in monthly installments, and each boursier was required to send quarterly progress reports to the director of fine arts.2 The lack of any restrictions on the artist’s destination reveals some interesting patterns in French perceptions of cultural geography. The northern Mediterranean no longer provided the natural limit: with Algeria (and since 1881, Tunisia) in French hands, a typical boursier’s route might begin with

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extended travels through Italy, followed by sojourns in North Africa, Spain, and the northern centers of Flanders, Holland, and England. Germany and Austria were occasional destinations, as was the eastern Mediterranean.3 Such travel focused on both studying art in the destination country and documenting the human spectacle, the landscape, or architecture. In continental Europe boursiers primarily worked in the museums, studying the national schools of painting and sculpture (an option not available in the Maghreb). In Italy, Spain, and North Africa architectural monuments, particularly antique ones, were of great interest. Only occasionally did artists stay put in larger towns or cities, working up finished paintings or sculptures in preparation for exhibition at the Salon back home. More usually they “documented” works to be elaborated back in their studios in France. In the months after their return, the boursiers were obliged to show the work produced from their travels to an inspector of fine arts.4 For the first two decades of the scholarships’ history Armand Dayot carried out that function. One cannot safely separate him from the emergence of what he repeatedly called “the happy institution of the bourse de voyage.” As in the case of the Society of French Orientalist Painters, a guiding personality often greatly influences the propagation of art institutions; Dayot is like a lesser Léonce Bénédite. (He in fact worked with Bénédite as a fine arts official.) Trained in the law, Dayot rose in the Ministry of Fine Arts from 1872 to 1880, when he became chef de cabinet to the prefect of Oran in Algeria. Presumably he met his wife, “une Oranaise,” when he held that position.5 This initiation into the colonial exotic helps explain why he favored Orientalist art both as an inspector and, after 1905, as the influential editor of L’Art et les Artistes. Dayot returned to Paris and the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts at a time when Jules Ferry, the most active of all procolonial politicians, was minister.6 Dayot the “ancien Africain,” or “former African” (as he described himself ), may have helped design the traveling scholarship that so concurred with Ferry’s interests in the East. Certainly he used his own North African experience in his reports assessing the accuracy of returned boursiers’ pictures. His enthusiasm in writing them is exemplified in the following comment on a visit to the studio of L.-A. Girardot (a Société des Artistes Français regular and future member of the Orientalists): “Having lived in the countries described by M. Girardot, I make bold to affirm that it impossible to be more truthful than this artist, perhaps a little inclined, before his voyage . . . to seek success in strange if not excessive e¤ects. Certain studies M. Girardot made around Tangier are minor masterpieces, and I regret that the state may miss out on buying one of these little canvases.”7 The immediate departure from Europe of a considerable proportion of boursiers helps explain Dayot’s claim, quoted in the epigraph to this section, that the Orientalist school was born of the traveling scholarships. The accessibility and relative safety (if not ease) of travel in the Maghreb in the later nineteenth century made the study of North Africa and the Middle East intensely attractive to the boursiers. Work in North Africa was by no means limited to the study of the desert, the Maghre-

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bian populace, and the exotic vegetation. Most of the boursiers also saw in France ’s African possessions the signs of an antique past. Study trips to ruined sites like the Roman amphitheaters at Tipasa in Algeria or El Djem in Tunisia were frequent (even if few paintings resulted). While most boursiers were remiss about filing reports with the director of fine arts, the one thing that did make them write was money. The papers reveal many monthly missives from young boursiers traveling far from France in unfamiliar circumstances, anxious about receiving their next scholarship installment. (It is not surprising that by the end of the century they had organized a “friendly society” to improve their conditions.)8 Although the bureaucracy charged with ensuring payment was far from perfect, the colonial system itself enabled the financial support to get through: the Rothschild Bank often forwarded moneys, or the nearest French consulate or agent: thus the artist travelers were constantly reminded of their debt to the state. The complaints of the boursiers were legion and give a good sense of the precariousness of their mission and the stresses to which they were subjected. The young sculptor Félix Soulés conveys his accumulated anxiety after traveling through Spain, Italy, and Algeria, writing from Tunisia that if his pay did not arrive soon, he would return to France, “not wishing to undergo the terrible worry of finding myself without money, in a country unknown to me, where I do not speak the language and where one must pay one ’s pension by the week.” 9 The fortitude of other individuals, however, was bolstered by recently completed military service. Indeed the military mentality was never far from the colonial adventure. For example, Paul Bu¤et, an established young Orientalist in the lineage of Guillaumet and Dinet who had shown at the conservative Salon de la Société des Artistes Français since about 1890, after winning a bourse de voyage in 1894, used his 1896 Prix National to undertake an intrepid journey to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia to document meetings between the French ambassador to Ethiopia, Léonce Lagarde, and the negus, or Ethiopian emperor, Ménélik.10 The Ethiopian coast was remote enough for Arthur Rimbaud to have chosen it, over a decade before, as the location for the career in anomie that replaced his failed vocation of poet: as a merchant with French and Italian companies trading into the African interior. Charles Nicholl describes Rimbaud’s Ethiopia of the 1880s as a rough and uncertain place where communication between the few large towns was tenuous and travel by caravan slow.11 Little had changed by the time Bu¤et arrived. Given his desire to spend the whole year in Abyssinia, he was, as a ministry clerk wrote, “worried about how he would be able to receive funds at Entotto, which is six hundred kilometers (twenty days) from Djibouti, the nearest French port.”12 By December 1896 Bu¤et could write to the director of fine arts from Harrar (where Rimbaud had lived for some years), reporting “how numerous and interesting the elements of study looked in the region that I have just crossed. . . . The difficulties of communication are very great, but I hope to be able to arrive at the Abyssinian court in the month of February.” 13 L’Illustration covered Ambassador Lagarde ’s mission and many other events linked to Franco-

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figure 57 Abyssinia—Arrival at Harrar of M. Lagarde, envoy of the French government, 1897.

British rivalry in Africa, publishing wood engravings based on photographs of Lagarde ’s arrival at Harrar (Fig. 57). As the journalist remarked of the full-dress uniform of a French minister plenipotentiary, “rarely will ceremonial embroidery be seen in such a strange and disoriented setting.” 14 By March 1897 Bu¤et was at Addis Ababa: “The party in honor of Monsieur Lagarde ’s entrance into the town . . . gave me the chance to enjoy one of the most beautiful spectacles that a painter could wish for.” To gain a rank sufficient to ensure his presence at important ceremonies, Bu¤et wrote to Paris requesting a letter recommending him to the negus. Lagarde ’s intervention made it possible for Bu¤et to begin a portrait of Ménélik by August, even though Bu¤et’s official letter still had not arrived and his money had been held up by “the halting of a caravan in the desert by a Daukali chief.” Eventually, the young artist was able to produce, on the basis of his studies, a canvas “representing

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figure 58 Paul Bu¤et, The King of Ka¤a (Central Africa), pen sketch after a painting, ca. 1897.

the emperor reviewing his army before combat,” presumably a splendid display of costumes and weaponry highly unfamiliar to Parisian audiences. Almost immediately the boursier’s picture was returned to France. Bu¤et’s Negus Menelik at the Battle of Adoua (Le Négus Ménélik, à la bataille d’Adoua) was exhibited at the 1898 Salon de la Société des Artistes Français and purchased from it by the state, keen for the return on its investment.15 Evidently enlisted by Bénédite, Bu¤et joined the Society of French Orientalist Painters in 1899 and began exhibiting his Ethiopian work regularly over the next few years. Bu¤et’s lithograph of a lancer on the edge of the Abyssinian Plateau was used for the society’s 1899 Salon poster, and Bénédite

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chose one of Bu¤et’s portrait drawings of the king of Ka¤a, in southern Ethiopia, to illustrate his article on the society in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (Fig. 58). At the institutional level, then, crossovers between the boursiers and the Orientalist Painters were frequent. Several future associates of the society, including Maurice Bompard, Bu¤et, Leroy, Rochegrosse, Emile Friant, Girardot, and Lunois (as well as artists of the 1920s) began their travels overseas with a bourse, partly vindicating Dayot’s claim that the government scholarships were the handmaiden of French Orientalism. Etienne Dinet’s own scholarship in 1885 had allowed him to follow up an enthusiasm for southern Algeria, first encountered on a private and adventitious journey undertaken in 1884. Already a promising Salon artist exhibiting rural French and religious subjects broadly in the manner of Bastien-Lepage, Dinet accepted an invitation in 1884 to travel to Algeria with two friends, the future Bande Noire painter Lucien Simon and his elder brother, an entomologist bound for the desert to research a rare butterfly. From Algiers the group took a coach south, reaching the oases of M’sila and Bou-Saâda after traveling for more than a week.16 Like most boursiers of the era, Dinet would have made careful studies in pencil or watercolor that became the basis of the work he exhibited at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français on his return, the View of the Oued M’Sila after Rain (Vue de l’oued M’Sila: après la pluie). This rather conventionally composed river landscape looks down the course of the oued, in which di¤erence from the European norm is encapsulated in the terraces of calcined mud buildings on either side; the phrase “after rain” implies that the rushing watercourse in Dinet’s picture was usually dry.17 Not an Orientalist work, however, but another, Saint Julian Hospitaller (Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, inspired by the novella of Gustave Flaubert), exhibited at the previous Salon, in 1884, had earned Dinet a bourse de voyage.18 That was the standard pattern: the bourse was awarded on the basis of academic works of nonexotic subjects at the official Salon. The records of Dinet’s bourse de voyage seem to have escaped bureaucratic collection; Dinet’s sister, Jeanne Dinet Rollince, in her posthumous biography, however, published generously from his correspondence during his year of travel. So as to arrive in Algeria in February, after the winter rains, Dinet spent the first months of his bourse traveling in Brittany, Jersey, and Switzerland. Once in Algeria he headed south immediately, arriving in Laghouat—the town famously painted by Fromentin—and telegraphing his friends Gaston Migéon (the young Islamic art expert) and a certain Michelin to join him, because the weather was propitious for a camel journey south to Ouargla: “The sun is still admirable—it has not been covered a second since my arrival at Laghouat. It is already 20 to 25 [68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit] in the shade and more than 30 [86 degrees Fahrenheit] in the sun. Everything is in flower, and many of the trees already have their leaves. I am about to prepare for my journey, which should yield some very interesting things. I will try riding a camel to see if I think I could make the expedition on this animal, which would be much more comfortable. I am still in excellent health.” 19 As Dinet Rollince observes, Dinet continued to enjoy the same iron constitution and optimistic outlook he had evinced

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during his military service. The young Frenchmen set o¤ with six camels and a guide provided by the military authorities (which continued to govern this and most regions beyond the temperate zone). Their reception as they traveled, visiting the sights and painting, was evidently peaceable: “At El Atef, the Djemâa [local assembly of inhabitants], which expects us, waits at the gates of the town and o¤ers us a superb Di¤a: hamis (all sorts of excellent ragouts), méchoui, couscous, milk, dates, hard eggs. We eat enormously—the next day my three colleagues are unwell.” 20 Making for Ouargla, Dinet and his companions were overwhelmed by the landscape: “It is absolutely as if we were on the ocean. All one sees is a straight line around one. A windstorm hits us as we put up the tent 103 kilometers from Ouargla.” Two days later they entered the immense valley that shelters the oasis town, with its two minarets among some half a million palm trees, surrounded by dunes. They were guests of the French commandant of Ouargla, a Lieutenant Le Chatelier, who was stationed there with fifty riflemen and a military doctor. As Dinet relates, the officer explained the geography of the oasis and took them on excursions, one of which provoked Dinet’s second canvas as a boursier, El Rattacine (The Well Diggers) (El Rattacine [Les puisatiers]).21 Ouargla is distinctive for the enormous number of man-made wells used in irrigation that require constant upkeep to function. That feature of desert life also fascinated the young novelist André Gide, who, when visiting the oasis of Touggourt in 1896, made a detailed account of the technique for well digging.22 Dinet described the scene: “On the twenty-ninth we go to see the rhettages, indigenous men who clean out the wells; very interesting! They stay on average two and three-quarters minutes underwater in wells forty meters deep, and for the basket that they fill I believe they are paid seven sous.” Dinet painted two oil studies of workers’ heads on the spot; his canvas (which he presented to the commandant) shows six men squatting around a small fire among the palms, while another man drags an exhausted diver from the mouth of the well.23 In Ouargla, Dinet saw and sketched festivals in which women danced and a comic masquerade in which “a man disguised as a woman [led] a camel formed of men hidden under draperies, brandishing a camel’s head at the end of a pike.” 24 Traveling back through the Mozabite center of Ghardaïa to Laghouat, the group separated, with Migéon and Michelin returning to the Mediterranean at Bône. Dinet’s second surviving oil painting, Terraces of Laghouat (Les terrasses de Laghouat), presumably dates from this stage of the journey (Fig. 59). A particularly well constructed landscape that was shown at the Salon of 1886 and sold to the state, it became (according to Bénédite) “almost immediately a classic among the little clan of Orientalists as the freest treatment yet given to the African landscape.” 25 The general idiom is close to that of Guillaumet’s later works, which stressed the mudbrick structures of desert architecture. Dinet, however, makes them the subject in themselves, diminishing the human element to three burnous-clad children barely discernible in the sandy rooftop terrain. He vigorously establishes pictorial architecture, using a network of diagonals and verticals as the terraces are bathed in light and shadow. The green swath of date palms beyond provides an

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figure 59 Etienne Dinet, The Terraces of Laghouat, oil on canvas, 1885.

anchoring horizontal. Dinet’s handling of paint texture is unusual: he worked the oils to a matte, sandpapery finish that complements the rough earthwork represented, presaging his gritty signature style of later years. While he awaited his bourse stipend in Bou-Saâda, Dinet made pencil sketches in his traveler’s notebook of subjects that later became the bread and butter of his Orientalism—“market scenes, studies of camels, washerwomen in the oued, sleeping caravaneers.” As Jeanne Dinet Rollince points out, Dinet undertook no major canvas on the spot in Algeria until 1889—his Snake Charmer. In her estimate, his first and this second, more sustained, voyage to Algeria “completely overturned the way he saw the future of his art. The idea of Brittany and of Italy vanished before the grand light of the desert.” 26 Of all whose conversion to Orientalism may be attributed partly to a bourse de voyage, Dinet remains the most significant. Not all winners of bourses were aesthetic conservatives, even if all had academic training. A significant number of exponents of art nouveau in the 1890s—including the sculptor-designers Jean Dampt and Raoul Larche and the architect Emile André—had been scholarship holders. Two of the most popular painters around 1900, Henri Le Sidaner and Henri Martin, who brought a high-color academic pointillism to the Salon with great success, were also former boursiers who had seen North

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Africa. Dayot’s publications favored the work of such artists and illustrated it in the catalogues of the large exhibitions of the Prix du Salon et boursiers de voyage, organized by the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts every five years from 1902.27 One of the most progressive of all boursiers and the one for whom the richest record of travel survives is Victor Prouvé, the future director of the design school the Ecole de Nancy. The son of a ceramist in the Gallé family workshops in Nancy, in eastern France, he worked from adolescence for Emile Gallé, the celebrated designer-manufacturer of art nouveau glass and furniture. An expert designer with the figure in both two and three dimensions, Prouvé built an international reputation in ceramics, jewelry, glassware, bookbinding, graphics, and sculpture, executed according to art nouveau principles and exhibited at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. He traveled to Tunisia in 1888 and again in 1889–90,28 staying more than a year in all. Although his background in Orientalism did not lead him to a career in the genre, his travels were a formative experience with a liberating impact. Prouvé, who shared literary and political ideas with Gallé, became an important proselytizer for the decorative arts of the Ecole de Nancy after Gallé’s death in 1904.29 He was also considered one of the leading Nancy painters. Although his best-known work today is his 1892 portrait of Gallé at the moment of inspiration, in the later 1890s he attracted mural commissions for town halls in the Paris suburbs and Nancy. He began his career as a painter under the Nancy Orientalist Théodore Devilly, moving to Paris in 1877 to study painting with Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des BeauxArts. A contender for the 1885 Prix de Rome, he was awarded a medal and a bourse de voyage for his entry at the Salon, Sardanapalus (Sardanapale). This enormous canvas, later destroyed through neglect in the Algerian museums, was a highly theatrical scene teeming with drunken or distressed nude women and dark-skinned musicians plucking strange harps. The central figure, the king, danced in a manner the prominent academician Bouguereau found disgraceful.30 The debt to Delacroix’s 1827 picture is clear in the array of beds and divans, and the work also exhibits some of the pandemonium (if not the expert drawing) of the orgiastic Orientalist subjects in which Georges Clairin specialized at the time. Recurrent illness kept Prouvé from taking up his bourse de voyage until early 1888, when he made an exploratory three-month journey to Tunisia, probably drawn there by the ancient Carthaginian heritage, popularized by Flaubert’s novel Salammbô. Passing through Constantine, Prouvé and his painter friend Jouas based themselves in Tunis for two months. As Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier points out, Prouvé, very likely inspired by Gustave Guillaumet’s Tableaux algériens, first published in 1886, took his sojourn in North Africa as an opportunity to purify his sensations before nature. He exclaimed to his mother: “Before beginning anything serious, you have to force yourself to break with the usual palette so as to render the astonishing color of these white streets, a white unknown to our European eyes.” 31 Prouvé was interested in the indigenous people he saw, making notes about the Arabs of Tunis as

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“less beautiful than those of Constantine” and remarking that the many ethnicities whose caravan business brought them to the city “redeem the picturesque.” 32 It is not surprising that Prouvé took the train south along the coast to see more of these people. He passed through Sousse and Sfax before reaching the town of Gabès in a journey lasting just ten days. Numerous pencil drawings survive from the first visit, on such standard Orientalist themes as fantasias, Aïssaouas, snake charmers, and caravans as well as semitopographical landscapes from Carthage, Gabès, and Menzel. Like Dinet, Prouvé felt a need to consolidate what he had encountered on his first, apparently unofficial, voyage to North Africa.33 The artist had had an ulterior motive on that first journey: gaining inspiration for the designs he was to do for Emile Gallé’s exhibit at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. His major work was a large jardiniere in sculpted pear wood and fine timber marquetry entitled Flora Marina, Flora Exotica. A typical collaboration between Gallé the entrepreneur (who suggested the rocaille form, shellfish, plants, and birds), the carver Louis Hestaux, and the draftsman Prouvé, with his decor of palm fronds, cactus, and two reclining “Ondines,” the work had considerable success with critics.34 His return to Tunisia was apparently brought about by issues more painterly than matters of design. Judging by his regular reports to the director of fine arts on this second, state-funded, visit, Prouvé devoted himself to oil painting as well as drawing, planning to execute one or more paintings, making numerous oil sketches, and “familiarizing myself with the ebb and flow of Arab life.” 35 After four months he was ready to move south again to Gabès. Described by the Guide bleu as one of the most interesting oases in North Africa, Gabès, established in the days of Carthaginian power, was a few kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. Its wells fed date groves, gave it magnificent gardens, and supported a string of old indigenous villages like Djara and Menzel.36 By 1890 Gabès had a European administrative and military settlement. Prouvé described Gabès in his letters to the director as “a corner of the country that is very picturesque and rich in characteristic subjects,” and an “inexhaustible source of études where everything is unexpected.” 37 In Menzel the old Mosque of Sidi Boul Baba, made of reused classical architectural fragments, had survived the French bombardment of the resisting town in 1881. A short distance away were the sandy beaches of the Gulf of Gabès, popular with European travelers for sea bathing, its reefs rich in sponges and coral. The literary legacy of this second voyage is considerable, for Prouvé kept a written journal, intending to make a book illustrated with his own drawings. Other tasks swamped him when he returned to France, however, and he published only one illustrated pamphlet, De Gabès à Douïreth, notes de voyage.38 The young man’s ardor quickly transformed his dutiful meteorological observations into pure enthusiasm: “Behind us, on the Bou Saïd side, the sea is shimmering pale green, the sky turning to lilac with lilac streaks in the sea in the foreground. Setting sun, fire kindling the horizon. We leap, we bellow, we are beside ourselves. Wagner alone in art responds to these harmonies, so marvelous, magical, and improbable.” 39 Not surprising for an admirer of Wagner, Prouvé knew

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of impressionist theory and admired Claude Monet. On another occasion, when describing the rarest e¤ect of color in the Tunisian sky, he expostulated: “It’s insanely difficult to do that. There is no one but Monet who, with his knowing palette, could manage to give that sensation.” 40 Yet the art of Prouvé in Tunisia cannot be called impressionist in any strict sense. He was a more active draftsman than most impressionists (as befits his academic roots) and made extensive use of semitopographical pencil sketches, giving a precise account of the land and tropical vegetation. His small oil sketches can be rather wan in their range of olive greens and gray-blues. Prouvé’s brushwork lacks the febrility and varying texture in that of the major impressionists. Indeed an early commentator distinguished Prouvé’s Tunisian work from impressionism. He added, “You will seek in vain in his landscape for a ‘state of the soul’; in him all is colored movements and symphonies, flows of thick earth and drifting skies.” 41 Prouvé’s focus on figural subjects also marks him as subscribing to other, specifically Orientalist, traditions. He undertook a series of fantasias, with some extremely open and fluent pen sketches of rearing horses and scimitar-wielding riders; his large watercolor Fantasia, dramatically framed to place the viewer in the midst of the action, recalls Besnard in its acid tones of yellow, lime, and burgundy (Fig. 60). The Tunisians Prouvé encountered while traveling from Gabès to Douïreth are, with the landscape, the focus of his travelogue. He devoted two pages to Tunisian women, comparing their billowing costume to the “torturing corset that makes ignoble mannequins of our women” and evoking the scene of women washing in the oued Gabès—a “laughing, screeching little world”: “All those torsos glimpsed, from the fat matron crushed into a succession of rolls and chubby masses to the pure young girl: simple lines, pert breasts making fine folds in her robe. . . . And the negresses! Large negresses, the triumph of bronze! And what torsos they have, what arms, what legs!!! No one has ever done this. . . . We feel small, incapable. . . . We stagger home. . . . Furiously we set up, and with enthusiasm prepare our poor palettes to do what we can.” 42 The eroticized visual excitement Prouvé’s words express never found an equivalent in his pictures. On his second journey, however, as he recorded these impressions, Prouvé produced some impressive compositions. His Caravan (Study) (La caravane [étude]; Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy) makes full use of the height of the canvas and gives the sense that the shrouded women tower in their attatichs, the enclosed traveling chairs on the backs of camels. Viewing figures from below became Prouvé’s specialty in his many ceiling decorations. Prouvé produced, however, what is probably his finest figure painting—of a male horseman— to record the strangest and most daring stage of his journey as a boursier (see Plate 8). At the invitation of Commandant Rébillet of the military region of Médénine, eighty kilometers south of Gabès, Prouvé made a horseback journey in the July heat to Douïreth, probably never before seen by a French artist. He spent nine days in the spectacular town, its cave dwellings built into the side of the peak, working on a large study until a harsh east wind interrupted him. In the evenings Prouvé and his

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figure 60 Victor Prouvé, Fantasia, watercolor, 1888.

friend Ollier rambled around “this strange peak, seeking to discover something in these mysterious habitations, half construction, half grotto. . . . Many old men, but in these nine days it is impossible for us to see even the nose of a woman; they are unbelievably reclusive.” As a visual trophy Prouvé published an Arabic document replete with calligraphic and legal flourishes, registering his and Ollier’s presence in Douïreth by permission of the caliph of the town.43 It was probably on his return to Médénine that Prouvé painted his Arab Horseman (Cavalier Arabe), which his daughter described as “one of his best paintings, an Arab horseman . . . with an immense red hat pressed onto his wild head.” 44 Prouvé uses backlighting to convey the diaphanous character of the man’s robes (the kind of visual e¤ect he noted in his journal). Details of the rider’s harness

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figure 61 Victor Prouvé, At the 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 bourse, he had shown two landscapes, of Gabès and Menzel, in the Salon of the Société Nationale des BeauxArts in 1891,45 thus throwing in his lot (like many younger progressives) with the newly formed Salon (which had split in 1890 from the Société des Artistes Français). The Nationale ’s radical privileging of the decorative arts favored his work as well as that of his countrymen Gallé and Louis

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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).46 He executed 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 Gabès 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 Abd-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 e¤ect 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. – v i c t o r b a r r u c a n d , “Les Abd-el-Tif,” 1928

With government bourses de voyage and additional grants administered by the Society of French Orientalist Painters and its sister institution, the Colonial Society of French Artists, or Coloniale, metropolitan 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-

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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 Marçais), 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.47 In 1900 a new governor-general of Algeria was appointed, Charles-Celestin Jonnart, whose aspirations for the colony and attitude toward cultural matters so di¤ered from those of the mass of French Algerian colonists that he was called a Turk and an Arab.48 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, Arsène Alexandre. Alexandre ’s “Reflections on the Arts and the Arts Industries in Algeria,” published in the leading progressive weekly L’Akhbar beginning 15 February 1905, became an influential document in the development of art in the colony.49 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 a¤air 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 1900.50 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.” 51 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 cultural 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 traditional 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 e¤orts of beginners.” Alexandre indicts local art school teaching on the one hand,

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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.” 52 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 Künstlerhaus in Munich, where visiting professional artists could gather. That proposal resulted in the founding 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 [sic], above the Jardin d’Essai. It is admirable 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.” 53 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.54 Unoccupied and in sore need of restoration, 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.” 55 Governor Jonnart was quick to act, and by April 1907 the villa had been requisitioned by the government, restored, and let out to the first two artists, recruited by a competition in Paris.56 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.57 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 di¤erences 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.” 58 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.59 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

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figure 62 Jean Bouchaud, The Villa Abd-el-Tif Overlooking Algiers, gouache, 1925.

were organized by the president of the Society of French Orientalist Painters is not surprising, given Bénédite ’s expertise and his regular visits to Algiers. Competition works were exhibited at the Orientalists’ Salon, and several Abd-el-Tif artists went on to become regular exhibitors there. The initial jury of four was soon expanded to include members of the Orientalist Painters and, more important, former Abd-el-Tif artists.60 After World War I “les Abd-el-Tif ” dominated the selection process, preferring a relatively traditional pictorial realism among prizewinners during the 1920s and 1930s: Sabine Fazekas and Elizabeth Cazenave agree that the group of Abd-el-Tifians was, in that sense, self-perpetuating.61

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From the outset, then, the Villa Abd-el-Tif depended on metropolitan expertise, and its aim, made clear in Alexandre ’s report, was to draw on metropolitan artistry to raise the level of colonial cultural production in the visual arts. The colony had the visual “raw materials” in nature, while the home country provided the expertise: the colonial paradigm thus translated readily into the visual realm. As for the villa, the numerous articles devoted to it in the Algerine and even Parisian press underscore its impact on the colony’s cultural life. It was a vital addition to the colonial art scene. Cazenave documents the numerous connections between the villa and the broader nonindigenous art world in Algiers, from the patronage of major private collectors like Lung and Meley to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the National Museum of Fine Arts (after 1930), whose director, Alazard, she describes as virtual master of the villa, with his residence at the back of the museum just a hundred meters from the villa’s grounds.62 A significant number of Abd-el-Tif artists, graduates of Parisian art schools with no previous calling for Eastern subjects, became professional Orientalists thereafter. Numbers of them continued to visit the colony regularly; several settled in Algiers. The two inaugural prizewinners in 1907 were the sculptor-painter Paul Jouve and the painter Léon Cauvy, who stayed on in Algiers and in 1910 was appointed director of the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a post he held until his death in 1933. Cauvy, who triumphantly exhibited the fruit of his Abd-el-Tif stay—fifty works in all—at the 1909 Orientalist Painters’ Salon in Paris,63 became one of the most representative artists of School of Algiers painting after World War I. Earlier he had focused on scenes of daily life in the foothills of Kabylia beyond the plain of the Mitidja, its agricultural and pastoral ways. But he specialized during the 1920s in market and port scenes in the capital. Cauvy concentrated on indigenous people in traditional garb but often made no attempt to dissimulate the presence of modern colonial buildings, machinery, or shipping: in that sense he is a colonial “realist,” more at ease with a multicultural situation than most touring artists. Cauvy interpreted such anecdotal scenes in an agreeably modern style. He used a high-color palette and broad segments of color for descriptive purposes, rather like the cloisonnist poster artist David Dellepiane from Marseille, who made posters in a similar manner for the 1906 exposition, although Cauvy’s technique has also been linked to that of the Anglo-Belgian Orientalist Frank Brangwyn. Indeed Cauvy’s imagery was appropriated by the government for its official advertising, as his poster Wintering—Tourism—Algeria (Hivernage—Tourisme—Algérie, Fig. 63) indicates; his related poster for the centenary of Algeria in 1930 was widely di¤used in France and overseas. From his position as professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Cauvy made his colonial cloisonnism the virtual lingua franca of the Algiers studios in the 1920s, a¤ecting such artists as Marius de Buzon, J.-L. Antoni, and the young indigenous painter Abdel-Halim Hemche. Other Abd-el-Tifians had a material influence on local art by taking up lesser teaching positions in Algeria and selling paintings to the local gentry, some of whom no doubt lionized them socially.

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figure 63 Léon Cauvy, Wintering— Tourism—Algeria, color lithograph poster, ca. 1930.

As a condition of their tenure the Abd-el-Tifians gave one significant work to the governor-general’s office. (Eventually all these works went to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers.)64 Those boursiers selected before World War I had the greatest impact in Algeria and Paris. Léon Carré, one of the most interesting Abd-el-Tifians (Fig. 64), was elected in the third round of scholarships (1909). He was unusual in having regularly visited Algeria, his first work produced there the Arab Market (Marché arabe) that won him the Prix Chenavard in 1905.65 A Breton by origin who had trained under Léon Bonnat and Luc-Olivier Merson, Carré had a solid realist technique in rendering Parisian street life and the zoo animals at the Paris Jardin des Plantes. After setting up at the Villa Abd-el-Tif

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figure 64 Léon Carré painting in a garden overlooking Algiers, ca. 1913.

with his wife, the artist Ketty Carré, he made a number of sympathetic paintings of her in the villa’s garden. In Tea in the Garden (Le thé dans le jardin) a lavish still life of European tea service and fruit serves as a foreground to Ketty, with her terrier lapdog and opened correspondence, seated before a frieze of aloes and nasturtiums that discreetly symbolize the subtropical Mediterranean.66 Such works are unusual among “Orientalist” productions, if the word may indeed be used here, in that they image the European, rather than the indigenous, presence in North Africa. Even more remarkable in this sense are Carré’s 1910 studies of Algiers workingmen, Spanish or Maltese by their dress, not Arab. In his Mule Driver (Type de muletier) and Muleteer (Le muletier, Fig. 65) a tough mustachioed worker in a slouch hat pauses, holding a cigarette and a goading stick, to rest his four mules, heavily laden but gaily caparisoned. Behind him several other workers, in turbans, labor with other mules beyond a mass of prickly pear. As Jean-Marie Carré (the artist’s brother?) noted at the time, Carré’s exoticism “has nothing of the traditional turqueries” or romantic subjects of Delacroix and Fromentin. His is “an ethnic Orientalism. He studies the races who rub shoulders on the Mediterranean coast . . . be they Spaniards or Arabs.” Léon Carré’s favorite reading at this time was the Notes de route by Barrucand’s friend Isabelle Eberhardt, so stripped-down in their narratives, so unsentimental.67 With Léon Carré producing many drawings as he traveled as far south as Biskra (and west to Spain, where he worked in 1911), and Ketty Carré pursuing her own projects (see Chapter 10) at the villa,

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figure 65 Léon Carré, The Muleteer, oil on canvas, 1910.

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.68 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).69 Most likely through Etienne 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.70 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

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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 boursiers 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, Abd-elTif 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.” 71 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.72 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.73 Fernand Antoni did a series of eighteen small panels in the upper reaches of the vast Salle des Fêtes. 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-

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figure 66 Léon Carré, Murals in Presidential Antechamber, Palais d’Eté, Algiers, ca. 1923.

ily group—two mature women, a boy, and an old man before an aged oak tree. The decorative elements of striped pantaloons and white Moorish palace and garden beyond complete this carefully integrated multifigured composition (Fig. 67). At the feet of the woman in the foreground a ewe with her lamb and a hen with brood bespeak family values, but no potentially troubling vigorous Algerian man is seen. The image, easeful bucolic decoration for a summer palace, omits any discord. De Buzon, the other main muralist, from Bordeaux, first went to Algiers with an Abd-el-Tif scholarship in 1913. After serving in World War I, he relocated to Algeria, where his bright palette and energetic painterly touch made him one of the best-known painters of the School of Algiers. De Buzon’s imagery of Kabyle agriculture and customs was appreciated to the extent that newly reappointed Governor-General Jonnart commissioned him to paint murals for the palace staircase. His scenes of Kabyle life, the Kabyle Cortege (Cortège kabyle) and Return from the Market (Retour du marché, Fig. 68), mirror long-standing French preferences by privileging this industrious community of farmers and shepherds. In a setting of high rolling hills dotted with olive trees, the figures of men,

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figure 67 Léon Carré, Muslim Life, Palais d’Eté, Algiers, ca. 1923.

mules, and horses form, as Alazard writes, “the point of departure for many a precise study of Kabyle habits and customs.” 74 Pouillon, however, grasps the contradictory political message of these panels, which mummify traditional life. For him they evoke “traditional indigenous society in a bucolic frame, the pacified springtime of rural prosperity . . . at a time when indigenous society survived—and in what a state!— only in the interstices of European cities, or on the Saharan periphery. . . . Yet here it is, impeccable, haunting this palace from an operetta, speaking the essence of a land that no longer resembles any of this, an essential Algeria made to flourish for eternity.”75 It would be wrong to associate the Villa Abd-el-Tif exclusively with latter-day exponents of an “academic exotic” enlisted to furnish the iconographic and decorative needs of the Algerian government. Especially in the years before World War I, some distinctive personalities also had their tenure there, and their art broadens the scope of Orientalist painting in the twentieth century. Probably the only unequivocal modernist (if not a member of the consecrated avant-garde) there was Charles

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figure 68 Marius de Buzon, Return from the Market, Palais d’Eté, Algiers, ca. 1923.

Dufresne. Descended from a family of Norman sailors and trained as an engraver and sculptor, Dufresne largely taught himself painting after moving to Paris, where he spent evenings sketching in the dance halls and café-concerts and entered a set of pastels on this modish subject (favored at that time by Georges Rouault) at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants, where they were noticed by Louis Vauxcelles. Around 1908 he is thought to have met Dr. Joseph Mardrus, translator of the Thousand and One Nights, who introduced him to the circle of Islamists that included Bénédite and Dinet. No doubt they encouraged him to apply for the Abd-el-Tif scholarship, for which (as an exhibitor at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts) he was selected in 1910.76 Dufresne ’s Algerian gouaches and watercolors count, after Matisse ’s Moroccan canvases, as the most stylistically advanced images of North Africa by a French artist before World War I. Dufresne, an habitué of the Salon des Indépendants and thus familiar with fauvism and the beginnings of cubism, spent his two scholarship years based in Algiers, working in watercolor and gouache in the Jardin d’Essai and producing oil paintings of women on terrace rooftops—those somewhat conventionalized scenes of Moorish life, influenced by Gauguin, were among the first works he had attempted in the medium. A talented draftsman, Dufresne undertook a series of meticulous but stylish pencil drawings of

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figure 69 Charles Dufresne, North African Landscape—the Oued at Bou-Saâda, pen and ink, ca. 1910–12.

the topography of the oasis town of Bou-Saâda (Fig. 69), where he was no doubt Dinet’s guest. (It is interesting that Dufresne produced these more literal drawings there, given Dinet’s intolerance of avant-garde experiment.) Frédéric Lung, a rich viticulturist with contacts in Bordeaux who was Dufresne ’s most assiduous patron and a major protector of the Abd-el-Tifians, bought several line drawings,77 as well as three large gouaches of the Bou-Saâda oasis, an informal triptych on the themes of tropical vegetation, running water, and the low-key human presence of women who wash clothes or bathe. In the most descriptive of those works the rocky terraces of the oued at Bou-Saâda are recognizable; the least literal is a tapestry of interlocking palm fronds, spiky trunks, and green canopies (Fig. 70).78 The Bou-Saâda suite parallels other decorative works concerned with botanical exoticism by Dufresne ’s contemporaries Jules Migonney (another progressive Abd-el-Tifian) and Henri Matisse; as one critic wrote, Dufresne’s “entanglements of Algerian greenery seem to have been elaborated more for tapestry cartoons than any other reason.” 79 Dufresne ’s Oriental Scene or Bathers (Scène orientale or Baigneuses; see Plate 10) is a more synthetic invention based on the oasis motif, with date palms, cacti, washerwomen, and a pair of oxen suggesting Dufresne did not insist on the purity of “African” fauna but could include marks of colonial settlement and agriculture. The standing nudes in the center of the composition unmistakably

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figure 70 Charles Dufresne, Algerian Oasis, gouache, pastel, Chinese ink, pencil on cream paper, ca. 1912.

quote Henri Matisse ’s bronze sculpture Two 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 Nationale 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

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perspectives, the magic of an Oriental dream unfurls: human bodies of the most diverse races, various stu¤s, plants of capricious form.” 80 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.81 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.” 82 The Villa Abd-el-Tif was the most positive of all the initiatives studied in this chapter on traveling 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 o¤ered 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 bourses. More particularly, Algerians, whether of indigenous or pied-noir descent, could not apply. The institution remained faithful to Arsène 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 determined by the home country. Around 1914 pied-noir and indigenous artists could receive scholarships to study in Spain, and the Casa Velázquez 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 o¤ering traveling scholarships primarily to the talent of mainland France.

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7 Matisse and Modernist

Orientalism

T

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 pictorial 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,1 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 Gérôme 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

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Salons, or even to the Orientalist Painters (imagining for a moment that Bénédite might have accepted them). Instead he managed a feat neither Renoir nor Monet had accomplished with their Mediterranean canvases—displaying them as a coherent group in a one-man thematic show at a 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 1912.2 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).3 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 Français and the Orientalist 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 hagiography 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.4

Biskra, or the Impossibility 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. – i s a b e l l e e b e r h a r d t , “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 Matisse ’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-

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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, Lévy-Dhurmer, René Piot, and several of Matisse ’s colleagues 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.5 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 Provençal painting.6 The Marseille exposition also o¤ered 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-Naïls) 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 1906.7 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 Algerian 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!” 8 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.” 9

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figure 71 Biskra, with old indigenous village in the foreground, new town beyond, before 1933.

figure 72 Henri Matisse, Street in Biskra, oil on canvas, 1906.

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Passing through El Kantara, the line went down to the oasis of Biskra—all country celebrated in Orientalist painting. El Kantara, “a sudden breach in the mountains, as if cleft by a formidable sword stroke,” 10 had been the subject of innumerable photographs and Orientalist canvases; its literary consecration had begun with Fromentin. The oases of the Zibane some fifty kilometers south, Tolga and Biskra above all, had also been painted repeatedly since the 1880s by artists like Guillaumet, Landelle, Dinet, and Leroy. As Prosper Ricard, a specialist in North African architecture and art, explained, “Because of its mild climate, its proximity to the great steppes, and its important oasis, Biskra is a winter station that is much frequented. Next to the oasis a hybrid town has been created, whose activity is fortunately more interesting than its architecture.” 11 Biskra, once a Roman settlement, had been occupied by the French since 1849, its “hybrid town” laid out on a grid abutting the Fort St. Germain (Fig. 71). Here was the Biskra that for Isabelle Eberhardt had been “sullied and deposed,” complete with town hall, church, military club, and numerous buildings dedicated to tourism, from the Palace Hotel to the Biskra Casino. The casino, in Moorish style, boasted “gaming rooms, caféconcerts, and indigenous dances.” 12 The resort’s public gardens and racecourse competed with the attractions of ethno-tourism: the quarter of the Ouled-Naïls (next to the market), the “Moorish bath” and the “Negro village,” and camelback excursions to the desert organized by the Comité d’hivernage de Biskra. If Eberhardt refrained from engaging this environment in her short stories, it was nevertheless the setting of Robert Hichens’s popular 1904 novel The Garden of Allah (in which Biskra is detailed prior to an account of adventures in the desert farther south) and, as we will see, of André Gide ’s Immoraliste.13 The several scattered indigenous settlements of nearby Old Biskra, “strange villages of earth, always crumbling, ceaselessly rebuilt,” attracted painters, as did the “oasis of 150,000 palm trees, slender and superb, o¤ering their blooming aigrettes to the sun, [and] the innumerable seghias that flow, brimful, along earthen levees.” 14 Such scenes were the subject of paintings like Guillaumet’s Orsay Seghia, Biskra (see Fig. 20) and of most picturesque photographs of the oasis. At the annual exhibitions of the Orientalist Painters in Paris between 1893 and 1911, thirty-five painters exhibited many dozens of pictures—landscapes, interiors, figure paintings—from Biskra. In 1893 (the year André Gide first visited, in the company of Renoir’s friend Landelle) no fewer than seven painters showed Biskra paintings at the Orientalist Painters. The oasis was a veritable Barbizon—or, better still, a Pont-Aven—of the exotic landscape. Many features of the Biskran picturesque are evident in the one painting that survives from Matisse ’s Algerian trip, the little oil sketch on panel Street in Biskra (Rue à Biskra, Fig. 72). In a classic view up a street, Matisse marshals a shaded wall as the right-hand coulisse. In the shadow an Arab man sits, sheltering from the sun in a posture immortalized by Fromentin’s Street in Laghouat. To the right and left are the inevitable date palms, etched against the sky with gestural strokes. Houses are visible, the pitched roof of a European-style dwelling at left, and in the center distance the open arches

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of a large Moorish building, marker of the exotic. Matisse later defined the motif himself: “On a road near the oasis, in the vicinity of the mosque, I did a small size 5 painting. The mosque in the background, a palm, and the street running between two walls.” 15 Matisse handles the subject as a fauve painting, revising the conventional Biskra picturesque according to the dissolving, scattered brushwork of his own exacerbated pointillism. One could argue that in 1906 no painter ought to have been better equipped to approach the problem of desert light and color than Matisse, who, as Maurice Denis noted, had pursued the image of sunlight well beyond the findings of either the impressionists or the neo-impressionists in a series of exaggerated colored “equivalents” that, rejecting the normative imitation of e¤ects of light, instead juxtaposed patches of color, whether contraries or unrelated, to produce luminous sensations. Out with “local color,” and in with colored equivalents to sensations of light.16 In fact Matisse found it almost impossible to apply his system in such an unfamiliar situation. “I went from one surprise to the next, but without being able to distinguish whether my astonishment came from . . . the new customs or types of people I saw or from purely pictorial emotions.” 17 Matisse collapses the cultural and ethnic di¤erences between himself and the locals into the schematic, almost phantasmatic “customs and types” standard in Orientalist texts. He goes on to use the categories of detached avant-gardist aestheticism, writing of his “purely pictorial emotions.” Later in this detailed letter to Henri Manguin (written after his return to France) one sees Matisse the traveler automatically comparing what he sees, the unfamiliar, with what he already knows. So he characterizes the desert at Biskra (like other artist travelers) by relating it to the seashore at low tide.18 “The desert surprised me, imagine an immense beach . . . of sand and pebbles. I kept looking for the sea on the horizon. Because of the sun, and it’s almost always like this, the light is blinding. As a painter I saw many interesting subjects, but of course my stay was too short. The Biskra oasis is very beautiful, but I know that one must spend several years in these countries in order to extract something new and that one cannot just take one ’s palette and one ’s system and apply it.” 19 Matisse knows that his “palette”—an aesthetic system developed in another clime (largely the South of France)— is inadequate to the representation of African conditions. That the ghost of Fromentin’s aesthetics hovers over these remarks is perhaps not surprising for a devoted student of Gustave Moreau, one of Fromentin’s closest friends. Matisse had certainly read Fromentin,20 but he also had the historical advantage of seeing the works of more recent painters like Guillaumet, Dinet, and Gauguin, virtual émigrés to the pays de la lumiére who had indeed “spen[t] several years in these countries.” So Matisse experienced the impossibility of painting Biskra. Even if he failed in the practicalities, Matisse the eloquent conversationalist left a mark, on an art-loving Frenchman who owned an emporium in the Casbah of Algiers. M. Le Glay and his wife feted the artist there before his return to Collioure. “Come back soon,” he wrote to Matisse. “Oriental painting may be in fashion, but except for one or two, we have strictly speaking no artists here who know how to paint with light. Given the

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temperament I recognized in you, there can be no doubt that you will succeed on a grand scale.” 21 It is perhaps fortunate for M. Le Glay that Matisse had no painting to show for himself—given the art scene in Algiers, his fauve work would have looked even more intolerable there than to the bourgeoisie of Paris. Matisse ’s perceptions of life in Algeria have an unsentimental, even acerbic, ring reminiscent of Evenepoel’s: How they have wrecked this country! How the place has become vile, disgusting, ugly, you can’t imagine! . . . I except the old quarter of Algiers, the mosques (they couldn’t knock them all down), the Jardin d’Essai, and the rare corners where nature is still mistress! But downtown, the suburbs, their surroundings . . . chimneys disgorging smoke of every hue, and everywhere, on the heights, are barracks, prisons, mental asylums, six-story buildings . . . ships’ sirens wailing up from port. . . . And a mixed population of fringe Parisians and Spaniards, thrown in [abâtardi] with Italians, Corsicans, Jews, and Arabs.22

Matisse likened the new Algerian towns to a Paris that was “filthy, not cleaned for a long time.” The indigenous people he encountered, he described thus: “The Arabs who were nice to me at first disgusted me in the end—I found them too downtrodden.” 23 With the typical double-face of the imperial mentality, Matisse expects of the Arabs the fierce pride for which the French had long admired them, yet he speaks as if their being “downtrodden” was their own fault, rather than that of his countrymen. He also reserved a comment for women, or at least women considered as exponents of ethnic dance: “As for belly-dancing, I didn’t even bother to look for it in Algiers, and I saw it by chance for a quarter of an hour in Biskra. The famous Ouled-Naïls, that joke? One has seen it a hundred times better at the Exposition.” 24 The irony of his remark is that the dances, like everything else at the expositions (Matisse doubtless referred to that of Marseille, although Ouled-Naïls had also been present at Andalusia in the Time of the Moors in 1900), were often themselves decried for conveying a lack of conviction. The “famous Ouled-Naïls” of Biskra were just as notorious for their prostitution as for their dancing, which brings us to a further reason for the fame of Biskra as a wintering place for Europeans: what is these days called sexual tourism. This facet of colonial experience has received scant attention in the literature on Orientalist art.25 More discreetly, no doubt, places like Biskra and Tangier were the Bangkoks and Manilas of the late nineteenth century. Gauguin’s philandering in Tahiti and the Marquesas is one of the rare cases of an artist’s sexual adventurism in the colonies to remain on record: his blunt avowals escaped the screen of late-Victorian etiquette. More pertinent to North Africa is André Gide ’s novel L’Immoraliste, published in 1902, in which the theme of homosexual love is

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figure 73 Etienne Dinet, An Ouled-Naïl, oil on canvas, before 1906.

made evident, if with discretion. The book was informed by the author’s own trip to Biskra in 1893 to undertake a convalescence and by subsequent visits during which Gide renewed friendships with teenage boys in the town.26 The Immoralist has been seen as a precedent for Matisse ’s visit, but in a way that avoids any mention of the lineaments of the plot.27 Gide ’s “immoralist” is a young French philologist, recently wed, who travels to the desert warmth of Algeria for reasons of health. In the winter resort (station hivernale) of Biskra he forms a sexual relationship, and his partner is a teenage Arab boy. As Joseph Boone shows, the idea of the complete anonymity of action possible in a foreign place, with a member of another, far poorer people, is persuasively presented.28 Plentiful information exists to suggest Matisse ’s heterosexual preferences, and at Biskra the pos-

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sibility of the heterosexual encounter was incarnated in the figure of the Ouled-Naïl woman. As I have previously noted, among the Ouled-Naïl there was a class of women for whom prostitution was a socially sanctioned manner of gaining wealth. Skilled entertainers who worked unveiled, the OuledNaïl women were renowned for their dance and their complex costumes. Etienne Dinet devoted a book, illustrated with his paintings, to the group, entitled Khadra, danseuse Ouled-Naïl (Fig. 73).29 In this 1909 text, co-authored with Sliman ben Ibrahim, Dinet recounts the life of the young itinerant performer Khadra, traveling in a small troupe of Ouled-Naïl under the watchful eye of an elderly woman (Thaous) and a male guardian. One of the last locations they visit is Biskra, where they must compete with foreign dancers from North Algeria—one was even a Maltese—masquerading as Ouled-Naïl and massacring their stately dance in the process. In a narrative previously devoid of contact with the French, nonindigenous clientele appear only at Biskra. In Dinet’s account they are perverse, so that Khadra and her friends are “sickened by the demands, unhealthy curiosities, and erotic fantasies of certain of these Europeans.” Remarkably, Dinet exempts one group from this charge: artists and writers, who alleviate the disgust of the Ouled-Naïl: “These men loved in them the grace of their postures and of their draperies, the sparkle of their eyes, the sculptural beauty of their bodies, the volupté of their flesh. . . . Far from o¤ending them, their company charmed them, and their homage flattered them. Sadly, they rarely had much money, and they were swiftly expelled by Thaous.” 30 One wonders how far Dinet was defending artists like himself by a form of special pleading (which incidentally implies that his caste were rarely sexual customers of the Ouled-Naïl). Matisse’s dismissive remark that he had encountered the famous Ouled-Naïl “by chance” in Biskra suggests he was well aware of this cultural iconography. One begins to wonder about the precise nature of the “souvenir” of Biskra he evoked in the only other work associated with the Algerian trip, his celebrated 1907 canvas Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), in the Baltimore Museum of Art. Painted well after his return to France, it was exhibited under the nondescriptive modernist title Picture III (Tableau III) at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants.31 In 1920, however, Marcel Sembat, Matisse ’s friend and a collector who admired his Moroccan work, published the picture under the title Odalisque, a term clearly associated with the Orient and with ideas of sexual availability. The title Nu bleu (“Souvenir de Biskra”) appeared in 1931 in authoritative exhibition catalogues, where it was apparently given at Matisse’s suggestion.32 Thus late in life Matisse revived the Biskra association, which, given this voluptuous image, is in part an erotic one. It hardly matters whether the painting clandestinely inscribes the memory of an actual sexual encounter (something that would hardly have been exceptional for a lone Frenchman in Biskra) or a hypothetical one that resulted from the crossing of OuledNaïl availability with the pictorial ambition to do a tropical odalisque. But this atmosphere of erotic possibility must be added to recent accounts of the Souvenir of Biskra that rightly pursue African elements in the image, whether they attribute them to Matisse’s contemporary study of black African sculpture or the confused signs for racial typing, which “simply do not add up in Matisse’s painting.” 33

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Tangier: Colonial Atmospherics

The story of Matisse ’s encounter with Tangier is one of the will to paint triumphing over conditions of a kind that had made painting impossible in Biskra. The artist dealt determinedly with the difficulty of obtaining models, with torrential rains, with the unfamiliar light. Over two seasons of painting, he stayed in one location, Tangier, until he had seized images that constitute what is today considered one of the finest bodies of all Orientalist painting, approaching that of Delacroix in aesthetic import. Matisse exhibited them briefly as a group at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris on his return, and they were quickly dispersed to the wealthy patrons who had already bespoken the majority.34 Commenting on that first exhibition of 1913, the progressive poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote that Matisse ’s Moroccan Café (Café marocain) and Casbah Gate (Porte de la Casbah) are “among the rare tolerable works inspired by contemporary North Africa.” Most likely the relative lack of anecdotalism in these pictures as well as Matisse ’s abandonment of illusionism for the discipline of abstraction impressed Apollinaire, a champion of cubism vehemently opposed to the “literary” element in modern art. Other alert critics of the day also assessed the formal qualities of these pictures, René Jean seeing in them “a sort of colored music that goes to the extreme limits of the pictorial domain.” 35 The anecdotal, by tradition, was plentiful in Orientalist pictures. Matisse’s Moroccan works should have qualified for exhibition at the Orientalist Painters—his titles, like Moroccan Café, Zorah, and On the Terrace (Sur la terrasse; see Fig. 75), were indistinguishable from those of many society members. In the 1890s Renoir had seen no problem in joining the Orientalist Painters’ ranks to exhibit his views of Algiers, but that attitude could be considered a sign of the aging Renoir’s conservatism. In the days of fauves and cubists the aesthetic divide was suddenly more pronounced. I would argue that by deliberately isolating his Moroccan paintings from populist contexts such as that of the Orientalist Painters, Matisse proposed a reading of them that most commentators, from Apollinaire and René Jean in 1913 to Pierre Schneider in 1990, have endorsed.36 Their isolation suggests that the abstracting and avant-gardist character of Matisse ’s works of modernist Orientalism di¤ers fundamentally from that of the Orientalist Painters and has di¤erent implications in cultural politics. For one may read Apollinaire’s “rare tolerable works” as implying that paintings of North African subjects were usually reprehensible for their style or for the odium attached to painting the colonial scene. Such an attitude would not be unusual among the left-leaning Parisian intelligentsia, as we have seen. But the experience of modernist artists who actually made colonial voyages, like Gauguin or Matisse, suggests a more ambivalent attitude that turns on issues of authenticity and the preservation of the di¤erence of the Other, today described as “colonial nostalgia” in literary studies and as the “salvage paradigm” in critiques of anthropology. Pierre Loti is an example pertinent to Matisse’s case. Few writers were more openly anticolonial (except perhaps Loti’s younger colleagues, like Isabelle Eberhardt and Victor Segalen). Loti’s romances

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of the exotic were based on his exploits as an officer in the French navy. Situating his books in locations as diverse as Tahiti, Japan, Senegal, and Turkey, Loti often decried colonialism’s modernization of those cultures because it destroyed their authentic character and di¤erence. Concluding his travelogue Au Maroc of 1890—a signal text because Matisse had read it before visiting Morocco—Loti intoned: “O somber Maghreb, stay, for a long while yet, walled in, impenetrable to things new. Turn your back upon Europe and immobilize yourself in the ways of the past. . . . May Allah conserve for the Arab people its mystic dreams, its disdainful immutability, and its gray rags!” 37 Loti, who would call for a halt to the march of colonialism, shared this preservationist attitude with a number of modernist artists whose work, like his, colonialism itself paradoxically made possible. The trouble Evenepoel took to shun the stews of Algiers and escape the tourists by going to Blida (where he painted mostly traditional life) and Matisse, to flee south to Biskra (even if he could not paint there) bespeak similar attitudes. The Tangier Matisse represented in 1912–13 is the romanticized one the Orientalist and touristic mentality proposed to him: largely scenes of traditional Moroccan life and characters that could still be found in the casbah of a town whose other districts were cosmopolitan, polyglot, and modernized. Indeed Tangier was one of the most domesticated corners of the Islamic Orient available to a European artist. In Au Maroc, Loti introduced the city as the gateway to the south: It is very close to our Europe. . . . In three or four hours steamships arrive there, and a great quantity of tourists is disgorged each winter. Today it has become truly banal, and the sultan of Morocco has made a point of half abandoning it to foreign visitors. . . . Seen from the sea, it seems almost smiling, with its surrounding villas built in gardens in the European style. It . . . remains a good deal more Muslim than our Algerian towns, with its walls of snowy white, its high turreted Casbah, and its minarets tiled with old faience.38

For four centuries Tangier had been a strategically important port jointly held by some combination of European powers along with Turkish, and later Moroccan, authorities. By 1889, when Loti visited, French ambitions to create an “Afrique française” were well advanced. The journey of Ambassador Paternôtre to present his credentials to the sultan (Loti accompanied him as a famous man of letters sympathetic to Islam) turned out to be just a prelude to a long series of impingements on Morocco’s territorial sovereignty that resulted in the protectorate, declared on 30 March 1912.39 But in refusing to discuss “politics” or modernization in his book, in making it purely descriptive, Loti himself presented Morocco in an Orientalist, aesthetic guise, in deliberate confrontation with Delacroix, an artistic predecessor on an identical itinerary.40 As with Loti, so with Matisse: “I found the landscapes of Morocco just as they had been described in the paintings of Delacroix and in Pierre Loti’s novels. One morning in Tangiers I was riding in a

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meadow: the flowers came up to the horse ’s muzzle. I wondered where I had already had a similar experience—it was in reading one of Loti’s descriptions in his book Into Morocco [Au Maroc].” 41 Traveling overland on horseback from Tangier south to Meknès and Fez, Loti repeatedly evokes vast meadows of springtime flowers, inviting his readers to “step up beside me on my brown horse . . . across the wild plains carpeted with flowers, through deserts of iris and asphodels.” 42 Matisse ’s account of the Lotiesque meadow confirms Said’s contention that the discourse of Orientalism precludes any unstructured encounter with its objects. As a result, all European e¤orts to know foreign cultures are constrained by the perspectives of Eurocentrism. Formalist art is a complex expression of that Eurocentrism, with its narrow band of subjects and its suspension of anecdotal detail in favor of iconic types. The resemblance between Matisse’s Maghrebian subjects and Renoir’s—Moorish architecture, exotic gardens, costumed types—is not fortuitous: a similar aestheticist orientation meant Matisse saw such subjects, quite unlike those, for example, of Dinet. John Elderfield has argued that Matisse, in his letters and postcards home, betrayed scant consciousness of the fraught Moroccan political situation or the condition of his sitters. His chief preoccupation was the weather and how that a¤ected his art.43 What for Elderfield was a biographical fact supporting his own stance on formalist exegesis in reality exemplifies the bracketing of the extraaesthetic that characterizes the artist on tour in his country’s colonies—the specialized consciousness that makes the colonizing aesthetic possible. That specialized consciousness had two consequences: first, it led to the painter’s curiously suspended engagement with the culture he had chosen to confront, so that in the very act of obtaining sitters, Matisse reproduced the notion of the colonial subject typical of Orientalist painting. Second, it gave new significance to the process of abstraction, a feature of Matisse ’s finest Moroccan works, which also constitutes the chief interpretative challenge of modernist Orientalism. I will treat these two issues in turn. Among the sixty pen sketches produced alongside Matisse ’s grand canvases, one image stands out for its self-consciousness about the artist on tour in the colonial situation (Fig. 74). Matisse whimsically insists on the discrepancy between himself, in bowler hat and tails, and the Moroccan woman in traditional robes and full veil standing behind him. The theme of the drawing is cultural di¤erence, investigated with a willingness to parody oneself that seems in advance of most ethnographic works of the day.44 Cultural di¤erence is not just a matter of contrasts in costume, however, since the artist’s representational system for tabulating his observations is specific to his own culture: once again it is necessary to recall that Maghrebian Islamic society had no tradition of illusionistic painting, so that Matisse (and hundreds of other Western painters) violated indigenous Moroccan codes of behavior in the very act of painting, which he undertakes with the sovereign self-assurance of the colonialist as he transcribes the floral arches of the saint’s tomb before him. The action the sketch records resulted in a painting, the small streetscape entitled Marabout, Tangier (Marabout, Tanger; private collection).

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figure 74 Henri Matisse, H. Matisse by Himself, pen and ink on paper, 1912.

Neither that Moroccan canvas nor any other describes the situation of the artist by including his own image; rather, all the works pretend that the painter formulated self-sufficient pictures as he encountered them. Thus they emphasize the fabular aspect of painting, drawing on the iconographic repertoire that constitutes the Orientalist dream. In the paintings by Matisse that represent women, for example, the itinerant artist confronted the second, more urgently binding, code of Moroccan behavior as it a¤ects painting: the law of the veil, obliging women moving outside, in the public realm, to cover their faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. As Pierre Loti explained in his 1906 novel Les Désenchantées (a treatise on what seemed to Loti the unhappiness of modern Muslim women),45 the eyes of veiled women became an instrument of intensely focused seeing, necessitating a new expressiveness in the look cast upon others. The usual expedient of the Christian colonial image maker working in North Africa, however, was to strip o¤ the veil in making paintings or their mass-market relatives, picture postcards. As Malek Alloula argued, doing away with the veil was a fundamental violation of Islamic laws of propriety.46 Photographers and artists forming images of unveiled women for European consumption purported to show either Islamic women in the harem (the private domestic interior no foreigner could see, which Western imagination nonetheless endowed with epic sensuality) or women not bound by the law—Jewish women and prostitutes. Almost all the models who posed unveiled belonged to those two categories. Matisse’s paintings of the unveiled Moorish girl Zorah by implication oscillate between these poles.

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figure 75 Henri Matisse, On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1912–13.

The few members of Matisse ’s Parisian audience sufficiently aware of the North African colonies to understand what it meant to discard the veil could presume Zorah, in her traditional dress, was a prostitute or else a Jewish girl. Other painters in Tangier at the time were acutely aware of such issues.47 But with the passage of time, the specific reading fell away in the “universality” of the audience for modernist art. For today’s audiences, On the Terrace (Sur la terrasse, Fig. 75) shows a smiling girl whose physical context is carefully generalized. Such is the obfuscation of the conditions of production brought about by Orientalist practice. In late spring 1912 Matisse expressed concern in a letter that his teenage model, Zorah, if her brother found her posing for the artist, might be killed 48—eloquent evidence of the transgression involved in obtaining an authentic sitter, and of the artist’s apparent willingness to endanger his model for the sake of his art. But by Matisse ’s second trip to Tangier, in October 1912, Zorah had apparently become a prostitute—he found her, only after a long search, in a brothel. The paintings themselves give no clue to that drama.

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Matisse ’s willingness to take trouble to obtain a true sitter contrasts with Renoir’s use of European models in about 1880, calling into question the ethnic authenticity of his painted “types.” Renoir, it seems, was untroubled by myths of authenticity, and though he complained about the problem of obtaining models, he was happy to produce a variety of images of women in mixed North African costume based on whoever—including the children of French acquaintances—was available to him. It is worth pointing out how conventional Matisse ’s staging of the “Moroccan Woman” was. The small jewel-like painting he executed for the Sembats (with their limited budget), the Seated Moroccan Woman (Marocaine assise; Musée de Grenoble), has the absolutely standard format of a woman seated cross-legged on the ground. The many similar images include both postcards for European tourists, like those reproduced in Alloula’s book, and middle-of-the-road Orientalist pictures. For the European audience the cross-legged women in them, in billowing robes or breeches, might— under a putatively ethnographic recording of di¤erent ways of sitting—subtly encode the North African women’s apparent physical ease as erotic. Matisse presumably executed a set of standing single-figure paintings near his hotel (whose proprietor had apparently o¤ered him a studio-room). On both trips to Tangier, January–April 1912 and October 1912–February 1913, Matisse stayed at the Hôtel Villa de France, a somewhat luxurious establishment catering to distinguished foreign guests. The hotel was also the base for Hilda Rix, a talented young Australian artist who worked in Tangier in 1912 and 1914 and described its ambience.49 As I found during a visit in 1991, its position is crucial in the layout of Tangier: it still stands on a steep slope on the border between the Europeanized town and the old Tangier of the Medina and Casbah, with the modernized port downhill to the north. Behind the hotel are European buildings— hotels, consulates, and businesses, while to the west over the ridge the many European villas mentioned by Loti nestle among the greenery. The hotel’s best rooms overlook the Anglican Church of St. Andrew and, beyond it, old Tangier, with the large market (Grand Socco) and the Medina, or indigenous precinct, ascending the slope toward the far hill with the fortifications of the Casbah. In this hotel precinct Matisse probably painted Zorah Standing (Zorah debout), Fatma the Mulatto Woman (Fatma, la mulâtresse), and Amido, which bears a generic similarity to Renoir’s Ali, the Young Arab, posed three decades before. Matisse, like Renoir, had found a boy willing to pose for a sustained period and painted him with an antipicturesque casualness in a street costume that marks him as less an exotic than a cultural go-between of the polyglot city zone. In Amido Matisse apparently worked from the same model as Hilda Rix, also staying at the Hôtel Villa de France. Both artists mention painting an employee of the nearby Hôtel Valentina; Rix called him Harmido.50 His clothing fits the description Rix gave of the employees of her hotel, “silent footed be-turbanned servants [who] move about their duties.” Harmido was reliable as a paid model to the extent that Rix praised him as “a brick” who “keeps absolutely still,” unlike almost all the other models with whom she had to contend in Tangier.51

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While Matisse seemed content to paint Amido in his work clothes, he went to more e¤ort to document ornamental costumes in female figure studies. Fatma the Mulatto Woman and Zorah Standing, painted on canvases the same size as Amido, can be considered parts of an informal triptych of costumed figures. Standing figures of saints from Russian icons, which had impressed Matisse in Moscow in 1911, are thought to have helped inspire these works.52 Zorah Standing, in particular, is static, confronting, hierarchized. The playing-card flatness of the image meshes with the schematic rendition of the subject’s body (the forearms and hands are little more than vague strokes of paint). Yet the intense expression of Zorah’s face, squeezed in at the top of the canvas, is abetted by the energy invested in planes of contrasting colors. Matisse had pioneered this strategy of chromatic composition with his 1905 Portrait of Madame Matisse: The Green Stripe (Portrait de Madame Matisse: La raie verte; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), making hues that wrestle on the picture plane a metaphor for intensity of character. Modeling is absent here, with the embroidered trim of Zorah’s caftan helping divide up the canvas. The partial return of modeling in Fatma contributes to the awkwardness of a figure in which passages of decoration—such as the embroidered waistband and the colored cloth panels beneath the caftan—are paramount. Unlike Dinet, Gérôme, or even Renoir, Matisse no longer relies on the literal description of sumptuous costume to animate the work; clothes instead become a staging point for chromatic fantasies of the painter’s inventing. Orientalist painting relies on the successful control of costume—not only the clothes sitters happen to wear, but the whole “science” of using dress to make an image more convincing. Costume in this specialist sense was an element of academic art instruction, one that Matisse would have absorbed in his training under Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Matisse ’s comments on the archaeological accuracy of costume in Orientalist painting are pertinent to this element of pictorial rhetoric: “Rembrandt treated biblical subjects using real Turkish items from the bazaar, and his emotion was there in them. Tissot painted his Life of Christ with all the possible documents, even going to Jerusalem. His work is false, however, and has no life of its own.” 53 Matisse was clearly familiar with James Tissot’s vast series of watercolor illustrations of the 1890s, exhibited to acclaim (while Matisse was a student) prior to the publication of Tissot’s volume La vie du Christ. The series had been favorably reviewed by another Moreau student who commented on Orientalist art, Ary Renan, who approved the premise (based on his father’s famous text) of accurately reconstructing the ethnic types, the costume, and the landscape of Christ’s life on the basis of travel in Palestine and archaeological research.54 For Matisse, however (like Arsène Alexandre writing in the 1890s), the authenticity of representation depended on what the artist sees and how plausibly his imagination transforms it, rather than on any “reality” of documentary observation. None of Tissot’s learned study of costume and manipulation of ethnic types would convince viewers unless the artist’s transformative “emotion” was involved. Matisse was thoroughly modernist in thus recognizing the artifice of pictorial representation, the

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figure 76 Henri Matisse, The Standing Riffian, 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 travels 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-

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lished comparative photographs, including a hand-tinted postcard the artist sent to his son.)55 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 e¤ectively at war with France. The establishment of the French Protectorate of Morocco in March 1912 was only partial and largely excluded the Atlas, which was only gradually “pacified.” 56 Newspapers contemporary with Matisse ’s visit in early 1912 reported that French military columns in the Moroccan countryside were engaged in “mopping 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.57 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.” 58 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 Riffians 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

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figure 77 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.” 59 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.” 60 Military campaigns and political maneuverings by Field Marshal Lyautey and his Moroccan allies gradually 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 general Noguès, 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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figure 78 A. Delannoy, Marcel Sembat, ca. 1910.

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 Gérôme, and more recently the harem guards of Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte de Nouÿ 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 Riffian, a magnificent mountaineer type, savage as a jackal.” 61 In a 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!” 62 This text, so nonchalant in referring to a “barbarian” and noting the literary parallel to the medieval lay of the Franco-Saracenic

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wars, surprises in conceding nothing to Sembat’s own radical position on colonialism. Sembat, as a specialist on French foreign a¤airs 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).63 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.” 64 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.” 65 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.66 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 Riffians. 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 Gérôme or Deutsch. This modernist procedure may be related to Matisse ’s reworking of the symbolist precept that rejects 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.67 This is the second phase of the argument concerning Orientalist painting in the hands of a mod-

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ernist like Matisse: such painting, more abstracting and allusive than its nineteenth-century counterparts, whether academic (Gérôme) 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,68 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 e¤ect 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.” 69 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 in a decorative manner. I can see them in no other way.”70 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 distressing 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

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was the occasion for deliberate experimental play.71 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 Hôtel 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.72 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.” 73 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.” 74 Matisse ’s words emphasize that he chose to paint the least European aspects of Tangier. As in Biskra, Matisse was uninterested in colonial modernity. Like most Orientalist painters he e¤aced in his works the material and social depredations of the colonial process.75 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 strongholds, 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 themselves 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 Casbah). 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).76 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

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figure 79 Henri Matisse, Landscape Viewed from a Window, oil on canvas, 1912–13.

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.77 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

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figure 80 Bab el Assa, Tangier, 1991.

buildings. In most cases that fragment, a site of revealed di¤erence, is the opening between inside and outside: portal, doorway, window—from the monumental Bab Mansour at Meknès, 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 apparent reversal of his perspective from the Hôtel Villa de France, site of the Landscape Viewed from a Window (Paysage vu d’une fenêtre, Fig. 79). A recent photo shows that the artist, in framing The Casbah 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-

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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 translate the directional fall of light. The crouching figure on the left (a portal guard or an artisan) is virtually e¤aced 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 signature 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.” 78 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 di¤ers 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 undi¤erentiated green field that collapses perspective other than that implied by the seated figures’ diminishing size. (Yet that

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figure 81 Henri Matisse, Moroccan Café, distemper on canvas, 1912–13.

perspectival diminution does remain a controlling feature of Western pictorialism.) Matisse reduces material incident to flat tempera color: unmodulated brown for the limbs of the figures, apple green for the remainder. A row of babouches, painted over by Matisse, can still be discerned at the base of the painting, evidence of a decision to remove material that might imply an anecdotal sequence of events on the part of the café patrons.79 This large decorative canvas provides much the strongest case for the influence of Islamic art. Matisse’s device of visual rhyming with circular and oval forms—establishing relationships between the heads of the figures and the circles in the false frame—accords with decorative painting fully responsive to Islamic ornamentation. Matisse’s attitude toward the Islamic visual arts is a pressing issue in the abstraction of these paintings. If, as is often maintained, Matisse’s aesthetic owes something to the study of Islamic art, his sympathetic identification with the culture of his Moroccan sitters may require that we reassess their status in his work and recast the general problem of his Orientalism. Matisse ’s encounters with Islamic art in exhibitions and his personal collecting of artifacts (beginning with his 1906 visit to Algeria) are well documented. The painter often spoke of the inspiration such art provided, while scholars from Alfred Barr to Rémi Labrousse have sought to define the

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relation of his work to specific art forms. Thus fundamental features of ceramic tiles and textiles, such as the rugs that he had begun collecting in Algeria, and of the borders of miniature paintings—a love of pattern, the repetition of ornamental motifs, and the predominance of arabesque line—found echoes in Matisse ’s painting in the postfauve period. Rugs themselves exemplify principles of contrasting color composition and the generation of pictorial relief by juxtaposing flat patches of color. Matisse successfully transferred those principles from his Parisian paintings, where rugs were motifs, to works such as Zorah Standing that were conceived as jigsaws of clashing chromatic forces. Finally, Matisse is known to have admiringly studied Persian and Mughal miniature painting at exhibitions in Paris and Munich (even if he did not collect it). The miniatures’ complex enframing devices, the suspension or distension of perspective, the employment of color fields, and the rendition of the figure in unmodeled curvilinear silhouettes all found echoes in Matisse ’s paintings before 1914. The bodies in Moroccan Café and, to a lesser extent, the figure in On the Terrace (see Fig. 75) exemplify those renderings. Matisse used such pictorial devices most intensively, however, in the metropolitan French works of 1910 and 1911 such as the Interior with Eggplants (Intérieur aux aubergines), painted in controlled studio environments, rather than during his Tangerine rambles or in his presumably denuded hotel studio-room. Apart from the Moroccan Café, a pseudo-Islamic element appeared most clearly in Matisse ’s Moroccan gardens, painted during the first trip to Tangier (see Fig. 83). Much Islamic decorative art that is not based on geometric pattern involves the schematic interpretation of vegetation in the complex foliate interweavings of the arabesque. The arabesque appealed greatly to Matisse as a device for organizing the flat surfaces of landscape painting,80 and as such it had a role in his Moroccan gardens. Yet these paintings of contemporary Tangier also belong to a distinct tradition of Orientalist painting, exemplified by Renoir, in which sumptuous vegetation serves as a marker for travel and the exotic experience.

Tropical Gardens

In the static world of the Orientalist picturesque, certain plants carry associations with particular climes, the date palm, for example, signifying an oasis. But the reality of plant life in colonial situations was complex. Treated as a resource, plants may be shifted from their natural habitat and installed elsewhere to satisfy scientific, economic, or ornamental interests. European botanical gardens had long cultivated plants from the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific. (The Jardin d’Acclimatation at Nogent, established in 1897, was a recent example.) Conversely, colonial settler societies, for cultural and economic reasons, sought to grow crops, plants, and trees from the home country (or other colonies) in the new setting. In French North Africa the jardins d’essai, or botanical testing grounds, were of particular inter-

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figure 82 E.-A. Séguy, Mass of Anthuriums in the Garden at Hamma, Algiers, 1921.

est to painters. The most famous was the Jardin d’Essai at Algiers: Renoir had painted its palm groves in 1881, and when Matisse was in Tangier, Abd-el-Tifians like Jules Migonney and Charles Dufresne were designing decorations and basing easel pictures on its exotic plants, a fashion that continued well into the 1920s (Fig. 82). Matisse ’s Moroccan gardens belong to that tradition. He was enraptured by the luxuriant vegetation of Tangier,81 yet the garden where he executed his landscapes was even less a native one than the Jardin d’Essai. Like a horticultural microcosm of Tangerine society, it was a site of heterogeny. Matisse worked in the garden of a Scottish expatriate, Jock Brooks, who lived in a neighborhood of villas inhabited by wealthy Europeans. The location of Villa Brooks and its protection, as a private garden, from potential confrontations made it a secure “European” space.

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figure 83 Henri Matisse, Moroccan Garden, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas, 1912. Photograph © Museum of Modern Art, New York.

(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-

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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!” 82 These recollections evoke the Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape (Les acanthes, paysage marocain) canvas, 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, Tipasa in 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 acanthus 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 pu¤ed 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.83 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,” o¤ered 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 allusions 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.” 84 So Schneider contrasts the orientality of Matisse with “orientalism,” a term he never actually defines

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but uses to designate picturesque and anecdotal nineteenth-century painting in the tradition of Prosper Marilhat and Gérôme. 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 complications 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 mounting up any debt in the political sphere.

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8 Advancing the

Indigenous Decorative Arts

T

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 prepared 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 decorative 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.1 In 1846 the French government was planning an Algerian museum in Paris, to be stocked largely from the booty of military operations (euphemistically referred to as razzias, or raids) carried out against Abd-el-Kader

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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 administrations 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 o¤ this neglected part of its long-established permanent exhibition through a group of antique dealers in the Casbah, at derisory prices. The sale set o¤ a 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 1897.2

Governor Jonnart and Associationist 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.3 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.4 The strikingly di¤erent 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 di¤ered: in Morocco a French resident-general, General (later

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figure 84 Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, 1931.

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 Marçais 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, Marçais noted that “the Algiers of the Corsairs [had been] cut up, the capital of the deys refashioned on the model of a Marseille suburb.” 5 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.6

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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 1911.7 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, e¤orts 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.” 8 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 e¤orts 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.9 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 architectural forms—rather than the previously standard neoclassical or neobaroque styles—reflects that cultural and political sympathy.10 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 François 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.” 11 The new architectural regime was so distinctive that the residents of Algiers began to refer to a Jonnart style.12 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 Dépêche algérienne, and the massive Central Post Office in downtown Algiers.13 Marçais described the program as taking inspiration “directly from preexisting Muslim architecture,

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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 Pêcherie with great success,” while its gateway and interior ornamentation, inspired by medieval Maghrebian models, had to be adapted to the Turkish floor plan.14 Such a heterodox mix of sources betrays confusion about the value of di¤ering 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.15 Comparable attitudes toward indigenous heritage were evident in Jonnart’s provisions for the indigenous 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 backbone 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.” 16 Arsène Alexandre ’s second, more sustained, inquiry resulted, we saw in Chapter 6, in the founding 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 [poncifs] that guide the hand and dispense with all mental initiative.”17 The critic, however, dismissed as sterile the academic instruction of the Algiers Ecole des BeauxArts. 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 entered Alexandre ’s discourse. On the contrary, he stressed the place of vegetative motifs in Islamic

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figure 85 Gold and silver Berber jewelry from Algeria, ca. 1901.

art and went so far as to suggest a mixed-race drawing school at the Jardin d’Essai, where students could observe “the di¤erences 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.” 18 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 symptomatic. The most important, in view of its antiquity and descriptions of it by several commentators

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figure 86 Mme Luce Ben-Aben’s embroidery workshop, Algiers, ca. 1907.

besides Alexandre, was the ouvroir of Mme Luce Ben-Aben, a prominent member of the Comité du Vieil Alger (Fig. 86).19 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.” 20 Indeed the philanthropic aspect of Luce Ben-Aben’s modern operation was much remarked, but the issue is complex: 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

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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.21 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 textile design.22 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.23 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 platform 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 ouvroirs 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 caids [leaders] . . . demand, more than the colonists, the immediate organization of professional teaching for the colony’s arts industries.” 24 Jonnart’s most substantive response was to establish an umbrella organization, the Office of Indigenous Arts, by 1908. Its activity in Algiers was coordinated by Prosper Ricard, the prolific author 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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figure 87 Edouard Herzig, Trial Creation of a Carpet in Hispano-Moorish Style, ca. 1907.

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 ouvroirs around the country. The teenage Mohammed Racim was one of the talented indigenous draftsmen Ricard employed as a copyist,25 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 decorative 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

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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.26

Lyautey’s 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 sta¤ 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.27 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.28 Lyautey became closely affiliated with the members of the powerful Committee for French Africa in the French government, led by Eugène Etienne. A brilliant officer, Lyautey had been poached from Madagascar by Governor Jonnart to lead the French military activities at Aïn 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.29 Since its inception, Lyautey’s administration in Morocco has been the subject of largely approv-

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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.30 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 heritage) 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.31 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).32 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.”33 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 a¤ord 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, Meknès, 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? 34—its e¤ect 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

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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.” 35 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 Vitruvius, 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.” 36 Prost’s remark makes it clear that the motive for salvaging Moroccan handicrafts was not mere aesthetic passion. The industries concerned—small ceramic tiles (zeligs), carpet weaving, leatherwork (the famous maroquinerie 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 sta¤ surely knew the Alexandre report (published in L’Akhbar by Barrucand soon after the death of Isabelle Eberhardt, Lyautey’s and Barrucand’s mutual friend). In Morocco, however, theory and experiment 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.37 He attributed that state of a¤airs 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 zeligs.38 Coupled with this “inundation of the Moroccan markets,” Gallotti claimed, was a loss of traditional expertise, 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.

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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 Nézière 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 1917,39 launched that journal’s extensive arts coverage with an imaginary dialogue entitled “A Renewal of the Moroccan 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 style here marks the least productions of the least artisans.” 40 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 Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi “discovered” 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.” (très bien) is evident (see Fig. 89). De Tarde delights in such confirmation of his idea of cultural conditioning: This child looks 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.

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figure 88 Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi, A Daisy, pencil, 1917.

De Tarde defends that abstraction by citing Rodin to the e¤ect that the distortion of nature is the basis of true art. “I would submit the drawings of the young Bennâni to the meditations of the cubists,” he suggests in conclusion.41 Such demonstrations of cultural vitality, sensitive to the aims and traditions of Moroccan aesthetics, did not address the practical problems facing the arts industries in Morocco. To do so Lyautey founded the Office of Indigenous Arts Industries mentioned earlier. It existed in embryo in 1915, the year of Casablanca’s Exposition Franco-Marocaine, in which the pavilions of Rabat-Salé, Mogador (now Essaouira), Marrakech, Meknès, and Fez each contained examples of regional artisanal products. Two museums and two inspectorates of indigenous art were set up at that time, in Fez and Rabat.42 The office itself was formally established under the umbrella of the Service des Beaux-Arts in 1916, and its first director was Joseph de la Nézière, the well-traveled Orientalist painter and writer with extensive experience in Indochina and North Africa who had exhibited regularly with the Society of French Orientalist Painters in Paris. De la Nézière appointed both male and female inspectors of indigenous art as liaisons with Mo-

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figure 89 Bennâni-abd-el-Hadi, A Bouquet of Flowers, pencil, 1917.

roccan artisans,43 themselves already part of a venerable and strictly organized guild system. The inspectors obtained work by two methods: in the great arts capital of Fez, they commissioned pieces from the best artists in a given corporation or guild, sometimes giving them models to follow but encouraging them to work in their own studios without supervision; and in Rabat, Meknès, and the revitalized pottery center Safi, they set up state workshops, provided materials, and placed expert artisans on salary.44 The carpet industry best exemplifies how the office operated. Carpet manufacture was the object of special interest under the Lyautey administration; it was acknowledged as “the principal and most widely practiced of the Moroccan arts industries,” which could become “one of the country’s principal resources.” 45 The major coastal cities had their own traditions of high-pile carpets, with those of Rabat in particular famous throughout North Africa for their precision weaving and sumptuous design, thought second only to those of Persia. The Rabat workshops, although they originally based their floreated designs on classical Persian precedents, had long given distinctive local inflections to such models (Fig. 90).

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figure 90 Classic Rabat carpet, mid–nineteenth century.

Berber carpets (either flat-weave kilims or rough hand-knotted shag), constituted a second great heritage. They were (and are) made both in the populous Moroccan hinterlands, such as the Beni M’Guild or Zaïan regions, and in the mountainous regions of the Moroccan Atlas among the Glaoua and other peoples. Kilims, although more coarsely made of poorer materials, were said by the French to have escaped Arab influence; they instead exhibited ancient geometric designs linked to the tattoo patterns of Berber women. Progressive French commentators on the Moroccan arts at the time preferred these “tribal” rugs to Rabat carpets, partly because they perceived in them an affinity with contemporary French art—a taste disputed by some indigenous city dwellers, who considered them crude.46

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Like much textile making in Algeria, carpet weaving had traditionally been the province of women in Morocco, where the métiers, run by ancient corporations, were usually divided along gender lines. All stages of the manufacturing process seem to have been performed by women and their female children, from the initial carding and spinning of the wool, through the dyeing process, to the weaving of the finished product. The three stages of manufacture were executed by distinct groups, with poorer families predominant in the first two stages. The labor of children was crucial: in weaving households, girls from six to twelve years were often the main manual workers (partly because of their tiny fingers). Their younger sisters played music or served tea while the maallema, or senior craftswoman, usually a mother or aunt, directed the proceedings.47 The administration responded with cultural sensitivity to the gynocentric organization of the carpet industry: the Office of Indigenous Arts Industries appointed a group of female inspectors authorized to enter the homes of the weavers, provide them with materials, and direct their activities (Marie-Louise Gallotti was one of them).48 Following the experience in Algeria passed on by specialists like Ricard, practical research had to be undertaken. The first task was finding good dyes. To cut costs in a declining market, carpet makers had begun using aniline dyes from Europe that produced harsh colors that degraded quickly in light.49 At the Medersa of the Oudayas in Rabat the protectorate set up a small dye works to recover the vegetable dyes, calling upon the expertise of older women who still knew the recipes. The next step was to gather examples of the finest old Rabat carpets as exemplars for future production (following the Luce family’s practice). An enquiry located “certain women who were weaving cheap carpets [tapis de pacotille] who still possessed some of the skills of fine weaving.” 50 An artisan designated the best maallema by the pasha undertook to copy an antique model, counting the number of knots per centimeter to replicate the design exactly. “The first copy was mediocre,” writes Gallotti, “the second was less so, and the third was much better than the second. Finally we had proof that remaking old Rabat carpets was not impossible.” 51 A number of such copies from the Oudaya ateliers were exhibited next to their exemplars in the 1917 Exhibition of Moroccan Arts in the Pavillon de Marsan, to be discussed shortly. In a 1919 Paris exhibition such copies were a triumph (Fig. 91), according to one critic: “The exposition o¤ers us twenty really beautiful carpets, in which the weave is tight . . . the design sure. . . . Apart from Persian carpets I know none that can equal them.” 52 But the real test of the reformed industry’s vitality had to come from carpets that went beyond copying old models to using designs the weavers themselves had invented (Fig. 92). Such “invention” had to take place within limits, however: in a massive undertaking, Prosper Ricard (by 1923 head of the Service of Indigenous Arts) and his sta¤ documented all the known kinds of Moroccan rug and published them in the illustrated Corpus de tapis marocains, set out in four volumes between 1923 and 1934.53 The books present Moroccan rugs region by region, starting with those sections of the country that fell earliest under French control (Rabat, followed by the Middle Atlas) and ending

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figure 91 Joseph de la Nézière, photo of the Exhibition of Moroccan Carpets at the Pavillon de Marsan, Paris, 1919.

with territories in the High Atlas that resisted longest. For these last information remained only partial at the time of publication; much of it was provided by military officers, some of them with ethnographic training—a notable complicity of the arts administration in intelligence gathering for military uses.54 Those officers did their best to answer questionnaires, whereas for Rabat and some Middle Atlas rugs, interviews with female rug makers themselves yielded valuable nomenclature and information on specific motifs. Ricard’s work contains high-quality photographs, detailed analyses of rugs, and black-and-white plates registering in diagrams all the known decorative motifs, knot by knot, that make up the official corpus (Fig. 93). Each volume publishes the dahirs that collectively protected these designs, the most important being the dahir of 22 May 1919 (21 Chaabane 1337) “instituting a state stamp to guarantee the authenticity of origin, the good quality, and the indigenous character of Moroccan carpets.” 55 A work of remarkable scholarship and taxonomy, the Corpus de tapis marocains was also an in-

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figure 92 Rabat carpet of modern manufacture, ca. 1920.

figure 93 Analysis of the design of a Zaïan carpet, 1926.

strument of surveillance that sought to maintain an art form within certain limits. Although Ricard, as a connoisseur, knew that subtle variations of traditional formulas, weavers’ inventions, and the vagaries introduced by unreliable raw materials provided variety in Moroccan rugs, the Corpus was prescriptive, driven by the need for quality control at the heart of protectorate policy governing industry. Experts knew that traditionally new carpets had been sold at auction in the Moroccan souks by a dellal, or town crier. A strict system of quality control was enforced by the mohtaseb, a senior city official or “provost of merchants who put his visa on every piece worthy of being sold in the bazaar and cut up all the other pieces.” In 1919 Raymond Koechlin, curator of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, noted how “the administration has reintroduced the custom of the visa. Henceforth the seal on the back of any carpet is like a passport of honor.” 56 The protectorate legislated so that only carpets so accredited could be exported, thus supposedly excluding the pacotille that damaged the standing of such products in the marketplace. It also enabled Ricard, at the end of the 1920s, to

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calculate exactly the increase in accredited carpet production: from six thousand carpets in 1920 to thirteen thousand seven hundred in 1930 (with a combined surface area of almost half a million square meters).57 The protectorate ’s reorganization of the Moroccan carpet industry must be considered a partial success in that sixty years later in independent Morocco the mixture of traditional practices and official commerce was still fully evident. As I found in Fez, the ancient tanneries and dye works were still in pungent production, and the state-sponsored carpet manufactory was turning out monotonously crisp examples of Zaïan-style flat-weave rugs. But the most interesting quirky rugs, of irregular design and uneven materials, were sold outside the government net, in cavelike boutiques in the medina of Fez or, better still, by the roadside at the encampments of seminomadic Berbers.

Decorative Arts Exhibitions and Associationist Aesthetics

The spiraling productivity of the carpet industry in the 1920s was all very well, but for colonial policy makers the significance of reforms in the Maghreb would have been limited if new markets, in France and beyond, had not also opened up. Exhibitions of decorative arts played a crucial role in the commercial and cultural dissemination that was part of official protectorate policy. We have already seen how French expositions and trade fairs were a dynamic interface between distant colonies and the urban public in Europe. The place of colonial decorative arts had been limited in the great expositions of Paris and Marseille—the French could not yet rival the productive richness of British Indian handicrafts and textiles, for example. But in the 1920s—a decade so much associated with modernizing decorative arts that the term “art deco” was coined to describe them—the colonial decorative arts that had developed in Algeria and Morocco were widely recognized. It will suffice to focus on just two exhibitions, the modest Pavillon de Marsan display of 1917 that revealed the new protectorate ’s products for the first time and the celebrated International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts of 1925.58 During World War I, just one year after the Office of Indigenous Arts Industries was founded, the leading French design body endorsed Moroccan reform e¤orts. The Paris-based Central Union of the Decorative Arts helped mount the Exhibition of Moroccan Arts in 1917, in the Pavillon de Marsan along the Rue de Rivoli at the Louvre.59 That distinguished location housed the Museum of Decorative Arts (launched in 1903 by the Islamic art show organized by Gaston Migéon). Like the previous fairs held in Rabat, Casablanca, and Fez, this was partly a commercial venture, but with a uniquely charitable goal. Sales from the exhibition were dedicated to supporting the families of Moroccan soldiers wounded on the Western Front. It was presumably de la Nézière who involved the Society of French Orientalist Painters as cohosts. Members of the society exhibited dozens of canvases of Moroccan scenes.60 Another small room contained photographs by the Service of Histori-

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cal Monuments of Moroccan architectural treasures, some of which were undergoing restoration, if not outright excavation (as in the case of the Roman city of Volubilis near Meknès, then being disinterred by German prisoners of war). Beyond painting and photography the Marsan exhibition focused on historical Moroccan art. Many pieces were lent by prominent Frenchmen and -women established in Morocco—Mme Lyautey, for example, sent an assortment of Moroccan lacework for display, and her husband, the French war minister in 1916–17, some exquisite damascened daggers, long swords, and Rabat carpets. Several distinguished Moroccans, from El Hadj Thami Glaoui, pasha of Marrakech, to M’hammed el Tazi, the sultan’s representative in Tangier, also took part as lenders. Their participation was no doubt meant to attest to the policy of power sharing under the protectorate. De la Nézière matched the antiques with their modern-day equivalents, produced and shipped by the Office of Indigenous Arts and Industries. Classic examples of Rabat carpets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were exhibited alongside the newest re-creations from the protectorate’s workshop of the Oudayas in Rabat. In war-torn France, with the usual season of cultural events dramatically curtailed, the Exhibition of Moroccan Arts (and its attendant lecture series and documentary film screenings) had considerable novelty value. This was the fist time the art of France’s newest colonial possession had been o¤ered to the capital’s public. Critics were enthusiastic, and several considered at length the new Moroccan carpets prominently displayed in the great hall of the Pavillon de Marsan, as they subsequently were again in 1919.61 That second, larger peacetime exhibition, devoted exclusively to carpets, conveyed to the public the advances made in just a few years of industry reform. Despite some critical uncertainty about the quality of the protectorate’s new carpets, it was a big commercial success: all three hundred carpets imported from Morocco were sold in 1919, confirming a growing taste in France for this item of sumptuous domestic ornament. The rugs were also becoming fashionable among settlers in the new colony: “Frenchmen established in Morocco,” Koechlin pointed out, “are very taken with rugs.” 62 The idea of catering to the taste of French colonists with indigenous artisanal products gathered momentum during the 1920s. The Moroccan authorities flirted with it in 1922, in the vast Marseille colonial exposition, where Morocco was a significant presence for the first time.63 Lyautey’s administration sought to highlight its achievements in a pavilion that was a modified Atlas casbah, “a veritable fortress on whose crenellated walls one would hardly be surprised to see long rifles suddenly appear.” The exhibition converted the country’s political unrest to romantic attraction: “rough Morocco, whence every day news comes to us of the systematic struggle against the dissidents.” The interior displays maximized this topicality, with exhibits of the French army and costumed mannequins of Zaïan guerrillas. At the casbah’s center was the Moroccan courtyard, “a ravishing patio executed following an interior from Fez” using only authentic zeligs of Moroccan fabrication, carved timber balustrades and beehive plaster capitals and cornices (Fig. 94).64 The character of exhibition displays, which I evoked briefly in relation to the Algerian pavilion

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figure 94 Central Patio of the Moroccan Pavilion, Marseille Colonial Exposition, 1922.

at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, requires some attention here. The display at Marseille, a facsimile of an indigenous living space with rooms nearby containing isolated examples of Moroccan artisanship, consolidated ideas of turn-of-the-century exposition practice. In contrast, the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (or Arts Decos) challenged this piecemeal conception, with its stress on authenticity. At the same time, it produced a prestigious platform on which to promote new Moroccan arts and crafts. The aestheticist tenor of the Arts Decos exhibition, a high-brow display of luxury industries, meant that two attractions previously central

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to the “exhibitionary complex” were marginal: live ethnographic entertainments and large-scale technological attractions. The pavilions were smaller in 1925, and exhibits emphasized finished products (rather than the productive process), beautifully displayed in specially built interiors. These were inspired by the installations in major Parisian department stores and by the model apartments shown at expositions and annual Salons at least since 1900.65 Most histories of the Arts Decos concentrate on the pavilions of the great French department stores (Printemps and Galeries Lafayette) or design houses (Lalique), or those of radical modernists (such as Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit nouveau or Konstantin Melnikov’s pavilion for the U.S.S.R.). The presence of colonial pavilions has been largely unremarked—an amnesia evidencing the prejudices of modernist historiography. The colonial arts, excluded from the prestigious main site for the design house pavilions (on the axis of the Invalides) and the foreign sections around the Grand and Petit Palais, were relegated to the exhibition’s edge, along the right bank of the Seine. There the smallish pavilion buildings of North Africa, French West Africa, French Asia, and the Pavilion of French Colonial Art each encompassed a range of ethnicities and geographical regions. Indochina opted for a mandarinic building form rather than the usual Khmer temple, French Africa deployed a more discreet Senegalese fort than in previous expositions, and North Africa, a two-story Moorish palace with courtyard. This colonial precinct in 1925 was probably included in the exposition because of a proactive Ministry of the Colonies; it also answered the needs of contemporary design. In the 1920s l’art nègre became thoroughly fashionable, and Far Eastern and North African arts also had some impact on modern design. Great Parisian tastemakers like the couturiers Paul Poiret and Jacques Doucet were part of the movement. Poiret’s well-known a¤ection for orientalizing costume dates back to the preceding decade and the era of the Ballets Russes.66 In 1919 he made a two-month trip through the Protectorate of Morocco, whence he returned “loaded down with marvels: antique pottery, priceless carpets, veils, scarves, belts, and embroidered dresses.” He immediately set about putting them all to use in “the adaptation of Moroccan art to contemporary fashion.” 67 The wealthy collector Jacques Doucet also invested in Oriental and African visual art, particularly textiles, furniture, and ceramics. His exquisite modernist studio in Neuilly (near central Paris), containing masterworks by Matisse, Picasso, and other leading School of Paris painters and sculptors, gave an important place to colonial arts (Fig. 95). Besides collecting—for example, the Moroccan ceramic bowls visible in his stainless steel vitrines—Doucet also commissioned new work. The cabinetmaker Pierre Legrain made furniture inspired by French West African ceremonial chairs and stools for Doucet and others.68 The organizers of the Arts Decos were interested in such procedures of colonial adaptation. Their official report of 1925 defined three sorts of colonial art: “The first, which best corresponds to the exact meaning of the word, is indigenous art; but another colonial art is that practiced by European colonists, incorporating or juxtaposing to primitive civilizations the imprint of their needs, their sci-

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figure 95 The “Studio orientale,” apartment of Jacques Doucet at Neuilly, ca. 1929. Moroccan ceramics in vitrines.

ence, their aesthetic. Finally, the same name is appropriate to European works influenced by exoticism.” 69 The Pavilion of French Colonial Art was devoted to the middle term. A building with upturned eaves that resembled the Indochinese pavilion in more than one way, it contained “furnished ensembles and decorations inspired by indigenous styles, executed with primary materials of colonial provenance and destined for colonial habitation.” 70 The decorators’ ensembles, by all accounts the least successful of the colonial installations, were attacked by the official report itself. The designers “lacked information on colonial life and knowledge of the climate and its e¤ects. They presented us with a bedroom and a dining room whose veneers would not have lasted six months in the tropics and with overstu¤ed furniture instead of seats and beds appropriate to the hottest latitudes.” 71 The adaptations of the French to colonial conditions engendered one set of compromises, the clash between traditional arts and the modern, another. Indeed alert visitors to the Arts Decos saw discrepancy in displaying tradition-oriented arts in an exposition based on a “strict obligation imposed

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on the exhibitors to produce nothing but the new.” So Victor Barrucand, covering the exposition for L’Akhbar, concluded that people, paradoxically, “had to make the new with the old. The result in the international sections is a crowd of bizarre things” that he likened to prewar cubist-inspired furniture and decoration. Cynical about what is now called art deco design itself, Barrucand nonetheless praised the colonial e¤ort. “Morocco and Tunisia have tackled the question with courage,” he wrote, “seeking to make the most of the indigenous arts by adjusting them to the requirements of the modern home.” 72 An alert observer from Indochina, Henri Gourdon, remarked that modernization was improving the lifestyle of indigenous people in the colonies, with moves from rural to city life and an embourgeoisement that he believed was transforming the everyday setting of their lives.73 The collaboration postulated here could be termed associationist aesthetics in that it recognized unique indigenous traditions but hoped to see them fruitfully adapted to European uses. Europe was automatically considered the source of the modern: the generator of new technologies, the culture that privileged innovation and monopolized creativity, in contrast to its colonial dependencies.74 Gourdon was uncharacteristic in conferring the epithet “originality” on indigenous art products in 1925: “They have the potential to be original, and they are by no means out of place in an exposition of modern decorative arts.” 75 The main vehicle for such exchanges in 1925 was the modern domestic ensemble in which items were tailored to a guiding aesthetic. Such ensembles surely o¤ered the colonials the best chance of finding a place in the European market for the industries de luxe. Two of the three North African installations, those for Tunisia and Morocco, had this ensemble character. The Tunisian section postulated the decoration of the home of a wealthy Muslim évolué, with rooms or spaces designated “dining room,” “harem,” “office,” “bedroom,” “guest room,” and “central courtyard.” Several rooms had a specific focus: the harem, for example, displayed lace and textiles, while the dining room, reproduced in a number of publications, was devoted to “the arts of marble, stone, and ceramics” and featured gray limestone from the Djebel Oust.76 Modifying traditional Tunisian dining practice, the room o¤ered a waist-high U-shaped table with designer place settings. Banquettes were set into walls on the table’s three sides, in niches decorated with large ceramic tile panels painted with floral motifs reminiscent of Iznik design. The main stone and tile work was done by a firm of Italian name (perhaps not surprising given the strong Italian presence in the colony), with a dozen craftsmen and -women responsible for other elements. Morocco’s exhibit, a two-story apartment coordinated by Tranchant de Lunel, in contrast, focused on decoration in Moroccan taste for a European (Fig. 96). Thus its “vestibule,” “hall,” “petit salon,” “bedroom,” “bathroom,” and “office-studio” appear to address a French émigré with a taste for indigenous art settled in one of the new towns, rather than a Moroccan évolué who might be, say, an administrator in the indigenous government. The small scale of the interiors promoted a sense of intimacy associated with the modern home for writers like Gourdon, who called this series of rooms

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figure 96 Office/Smoking-Room and Bathroom, Moroccan section, Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts, 1925.

the “most interesting and original ensemble” in the entire pavilion. Barrucand likewise praised Morocco for its “creativity,” especially endorsing the little mosaic bathroom.77 Written criticism such as theirs easily glosses over the contradictions of an associationist aesthetic. Not everyone accepted the rhetoric: a skeptical correspondent in the Monde colonial illustré pointed out the radical di¤erences between French and Berber civilizations (with corresponding di¤erences in the “instruments of domestic life”). He found the idea of seeking a harmony flawed in itself: “It is an error to believe a new style has ever been obtained by the addition or the mixing of styles. . . . The art of primitives imported home has never ‘realized’ anything. In modern art, the only original creations are due to new materials: iron and reinforced concrete. The rest, particularly in furniture and decoration, is nothing but hybrids.” 78 This charge of hybridity has a derogatory sense no longer current in today’s debates on globalized art: of hybrids as the ill-formed o¤spring of mismatched parentage, of combinations that devalue their sources.79 The writer had a clear sense that traditional ethnic and geographical identities should be respected—he criticized the octagonal bathroom Barrucand had loved for featuring a Persian tiled dado with a cypress motif rather than something of Moroccan inspiration. Both indigenous work and collaborations between indigenous and European craftsmen had a large

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place in the festival of associationist intentions that was the North African pavilion. Tunisia favored the indigenous, Morocco the collaborative. The guiding principle was more liberal than Henri Prost’s subaltern conception, that the Frenchman controls design while the native applies ornament. As Lyautey optimistically declared in a statement on urbanism elsewhere in the pavilion: “French policy in Islamic countries is one of reciprocal respect, of esteem, of the penetration of the two civilizations.” 80 If there is a kernel of truth to this propagandistic declaration, the actuality of events far from the banks of the Seine should not be forgotten: the French in Morocco had recently joined forces with the Spanish army in the northern zone of the country to take on Abd el-Krim in the War of the Rif, which extended south to the very gates of Fez. Outgunned on the ground and confronted with European airpower, the nationalist leader surrendered in 1926. But the Arts Decos’ visually splendid displays of indigenous industry from the pacified sections of the Maghreb e¤ectively placed such issues at arm’s length. In other words, the message of the exposition was business as usual. It is curious to see the point Algeria, the colony with which I began this discussion of decorative arts policy, had reached by 1925. The Algerian display in the North African pavilion contained clear signs of a continuing paternalist, rather than collaborative, approach to the indigenous arts. Unlike Morocco and Tunisia, Algeria had no coordinating designer for its section other than the official architect, Charles Montaland. Rather than a suite of decorated rooms, Montaland o¤ered a conventional open exhibition hall with a central arcaded Moorish court, roofed and hung with elaborate neoMoorish vitreous lamps (designed by the painter Dinet’s sister, Jeanne Rollince). Neither did Algeria attempt to put items of indigenous craft together in a functional, decorative aggregate. Instead the main displays—of carpets, lace, and embroidery—were contained in tall vitrines along the walls, supplemented by heavy pieces of freestanding furniture inlaid with motherof-pearl and precious woods. The focus on textile industries attested to the proliferation in Algeria of schools and ouvroirs employing female labor: the schools were usually run by female French schoolteachers, the workshops by missionary sisters such as those of Notre Dame d’Afrique. French designers of “indigenous” art played an important role in Algeria. In particular Edouard Herzig of Algiers, whose work during the Jonnart era I discussed earlier, was a pervasive presence in 1925. He was now designing in several media and, according to the Algiers critic Edmond Gojon, doing so “in the tradition of Islam: algebra, geometry, mathematics.” 81 Herzig’s patterns were executed in carpets, in copper ware, furniture, embroidery, and even the metal jewelry of the semidesert regions.82 The jewelry, designed for execution by Kabyle artisans, responded to the Arts Decos brief for modernity of vision. In an extraordinary passage Gojon viewed it as a liberation from an oppressive history: One cannot but applaud the influence exercised over our Arab workers by a valued Orientalist. Thus a barbaric art becomes more supple and purified. . . . There was the sound of slavery in this heavy Kabyle jewelry, as weighty as pieces of armor. . . .

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figure 97 Léon Cauvy, Carpets and Their Manufacture, mural, Algerian section, Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts, 1925.

Under the hammer of our modern artisans, these jewels have been freed from an insulting symbolism . . . earrings, arm and foot bracelets . . . cease being a sumptuous torture. All the while conserving their hereditary splendor, they have become more seductive, given the spiritual ennobling conferred upon them by French grace.83

French design liberates jewelry from association with slavery—either the implied subjection of Berber women or a broader association with the shackles of the slave trade. Yet one can hardly imagine this “improved” Berber jewelry appealing to French purchasers more than the “genuine article.” While Herzig’s carpet designs were inspired by floral motifs in old book illuminations, his patterns for clothing exhibited by the Myrbor Studios of Paris had a more evident “orientation toward the future,” as Gojon put it: “Muslim art applied to fashion here casts o¤ its ritual forms. The eternal motifs that it o¤ers take on a new accent, transposed onto a shawl, a scarf, a dress whose modernism is itself inspired by the forms of the gandourah [a sleeveless tunic worn under the burnous] . . . or the caftan.”

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Even though Herzig’s clothing is no longer available to study, there was an influential precedent for his intent in metropolitan fashion, in Paul Poiret’s Orientalism, introduced to the French before World War I. If the Algerian pavilion did less to advance indigenous interests than the pavilions of the two protectorate states, it did integrate the arts of painting and the miniature with decorative arts proper. Two prominent members of the School of Algiers, Léon Cauvy and André Suréda, were commissioned to paint murals inside the pavilion. Cauvy executed twelve murals representing the Algerian arts industries: rather than have live exponents demonstrate the carpet weaving, copper beating, and so forth (as in previous expositions), the Arts Decos environment called for them to be illustrated (Fig. 97). Cauvy’s murals, running around the upper walls like a frieze, so caught the attention of Governor-General Maurice Violette of Algeria that he had them reinstalled in the ceremonial hall of his Summer Palace in Algiers (see Chapter 6). The Algerian organizers gave the illuminated miniature, an art unique to their country in the Maghreb of the 1920s, a special place. Among the visual arts Barrucand saw assembled on the banks of the Seine, he seemed most enthusiastic about the illuminations of the Racim brothers: “The beautiful ornamented inscriptions of Omar Racim leave those of the other sections [i.e. Herzig’s] far behind. In them the artist is able to enclose the mystery of thought in the elegance of the arabesque.” 84 The work of Mohammed and Omar Racim appears in the chapter that follows as the pinnacle of the movement toward cultural self-determination on the part of Maghrebian artists. The paradox is that it was a movement facilitated in crucial respects by the colonial experience. Mohammed Racim emerged from the very milieu of the antiquarian study of the decorative arts tradition promoted by Governor-General Jonnart and the Office of Indigenous Arts he devised to promote a productive “association” with Algerian indigenous subjects.

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9 Mammeri and Racim,

Painters of the Maghreb

Two Paths

Maghrebian artists of the early twentieth century who chose the medium of painting, rather than decorative arts, rapidly advanced to visibility. No longer near-anonymous artisans, they could aspire to the privileges painting could bring: recognition, brisk sales, publications. The assessment of indigenous pictorial art is shot through with the complexities of the colonial situation. The arts of painting and photography were colonial imports, whose practice was central to representing the colonized and hence bringing them into the purview of Europeans. To control such representations was to shape perceptions of colonized peoples, their country, their traditions. An indigenous person behind the camera or at the easel might redress, if only for a moment, the superficialities and prejudices informing the typical Orientalist picture. For a Maghrebian addressing the French such a corrective had considerable possibility—as long as the work itself was professionally competent and the picture was ratified by exhibition and disseminated by publication. Yet indigenous Maghrebians adopted the practice of mimetic painting almost as slowly as that of photography.1 For religious reasons there was virtually no recent tradition of painting scenes and figures, aside from court portraitists to the beys of Tunis (linked to the Ottoman court in Istanbul).2 Both mural work and painting in oils on canvas were done almost exclusively by Europeans. The Al-

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gerians Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim were among the first practitioners of painting to be recognized by the French, from 1920 on. If from today’s perspective their work symbolizes Maghrebian self-affirmation in the face of the colonial presence, it also raises a question: How might a nonEuropean artist fashion the visual tropes of painting in the modernist era and negotiate between Western aesthetic models and the desiderata of local cultures and traditions? When these two young Algerians from privileged backgrounds took up the art of painting in about 1915, each followed a di¤erent cultural option. Mammeri chose emulation—modeling his manner of painting closely on a dominant European mode, the perspectival landscape view. He painted the Moroccan cities of Fez and Rabat seen from a distance, the streetscapes and rooftops of their old casbahs, and he generally avoided the figure.3 Displaying a fine compositional competence and an irreproachable grasp of single-point perspective, Mammeri summarized detail in a racy geometric manner that he shared with certain colonial painters of the 1920s. From the outset he was encouraged by the administration of General Lyautey’s new Protectorate of Morocco, which promoted his exhibitions in Paris as the fruit of the French “civilizing mission” and a newly respectful association with the Muslim elite. Thus the sense that Mammeri was co-opted by colonial authorities mingles with admiration of his e¤ort to prove that a North African could excel at the colonizer’s mode of expression. The miniaturist Racim, in contrast, chose what might best be described as an indigenous neotraditionalism. His language of expression was a source of both admiration and uncertainty among the French: the Persian and Mughal miniature, modified in ways that accommodated Western modes of seeing. He painted the frames of his tempera miniatures with great learning, in traditional arabesque decoration, but the pictures themselves, with their vistas of old Algiers and scenes of precolonial Muslim life, construct a perspectival picture space. The result was a hybrid, a cross-cultural marriage of manners, that spoke, apparently more persuasively than Mammeri’s, to di¤erent constituencies. Racim, founder of a school of miniaturists, was embraced successively by the colonial regime, by Algerian nationalists after the war of independence, and later by the pan-Arab Institut du Monde Arabe, which in 1992 mounted a retrospective of his work.4 Mammeri, the “emulator,” in contrast, though he exhibited frequently in the 1920s, has hardly been studied since the demise of the Moroccan and Algerian colonial regimes in the 1950s. In using such terms as “emulation,” “hybridity,” and “ambivalence,” I make reference to the critiques of colonial identity elaborated by Homi Bhabha.5 He o¤ers useful ways of discriminating finely the play of allegiances in a practice of representation. In the cases of both Racim and Mammeri, I wish to estimate the extent to which indigenous practice converges with European models, swerves away from them, demurs, and sets its sights on alternative models. I investigate indigenous practice in order to reveal its positive affiliations yet also to recognize the grit of a nascent resistance (however implicit it may be in the political context of an accommodation, even identification, with the colonizer). The interstitial space of the colonial mimic, the gap between the ideal of exact modeling and

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the actual impossibility of assimilating the self to the European other, is a space supremely open to interpretation. And in cases where visual documents are relatively abundant but expressions of intent rare (if not entirely absent), the task of interpretation is all the more urgent.

The Path of Emulation: Azouaou Mammeri

The prominent arts administrator Prosper Ricard, in describing contemporary Algerian painting for the 1930 Guide bleu, found only two artists worthy of specific mention, both of them Muslims: “One, M. Racim of Algiers, preserves in his magnificent illuminations the technique, the patience, and the imagination of the Persian school of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, adapted to Algerine and Andalusian subjects. The other, M. Azouaou Mammeri . . . a child of the Kabylian mountains, is in contrast a strikingly modern artist, concerned with questions of light, color, . . . and construction; he makes a clear break from all the old traditions of Orientalism.” 6 That ringing endorsement shows how a specialist in Islamic art and architecture could much prefer indigenous work to the cultural expressions of French colonial amateurs or the latter-day Orientalists whose work filled the annual Salons in Algiers. Of those, Ricard wrote merely that the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Villa Abd-el-Tif “attract numerous French artists, among whom certain have generated a good deal of interest.” Ricard’s fidelity to his two former protégés—he helped both Algerian artists at crucial moments in their careers—also expresses, more broadly, a fascination for indigenous cultures that had its roots in the associationist regimes of Jonnart and Lyautey. Under those two French governors Mammeri’s career as a teacher and artist took wing. He was born into a privileged family of hereditary caïdats among the Aït-Yenni at Taourirt-Mimoun, in the mountains of Kabylia south of Algiers.7 This region of Algeria was historically much favored for government educational programs for the indigenous, such as the short-lived school for artists mentioned previously. Mammeri’s biographers, Jean and Jérôme Tharaud, who were prominent literary travelers in colonial North Africa, record that he studied under “an old French schoolmaster, become almost Kabyle himself after thirty years in the region.” 8 Very likely that teacher was Verdy, whose training of dozens of future Muslim schoolteachers from 1883 to 1906 angered settlers.9 Mammeri qualified for the teachers’ training college outside Algiers, the Ecole normale de Bouzaréah, spent three years there, and taught at a series of isolated schools from 1910 to 1913. A speaker of Kabyle, Arabic, and French, Mammeri was an évolué, to use the term the French favored to describe (usually elite) indigenous people who adopted elements of the colonists’ culture. A loaded term redolent of social and racial Darwinism, évolué also implied that in “evolving” toward the culture of the metropole, the indigenous moved toward modernity.10 Certainly the Jonnart and, more particularly, Lyautey administrations, with their colonial policies of association, wished to foster the indigenous elite. In the cultural correlate of associationist policy, the French language was the

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“gift” that gave Maghrebians access to European modes of knowledge, to be maintained beside the Arabic, which provided social cohesion. Mammeri can be said to have acquired a second cultural good, drawing and painting in the French manner, a tool of visual communication that addressed primarily Europeans. How Mammeri came to practice oil painting is an intriguing question that modifies the reading of his art of emulation. Precise information is hard to come by. Although drawing would have been part of the syllabus at Mammeri’s secondary school and most likely, the Ecole normale, his exposure to painting was more unpredictable. According to Louis-Eugène Angéli, Mammeri was initially self-taught, and after his graduation from teachers’ college and return to Taourirt-Mimoun, he sent a sample painting to the inspector of artistic education in Algeria, the ubiquitous Prosper Ricard. Ricard commended Mammeri to two French painters then working at Taourirt-Mimoun, one of them Edouard Herzig, the Orientalist painter and designer who worked with Ricard. Herzig apparently o¤ered fruitful lessons. In 1913, when Mammeri want to a new posting at La Gouraya on the coast near Bougie, he encountered the young Abd-el-Tifian Léon Carré, who had settled in Algeria a few years earlier with his wife, Ketty. According to Angéli, Carré gave Mammeri friendly instruction in oil painting for eight months.11 Their association may also have been fueled by Carré’s interest in Moorish culture, already established by his illustration of the recently published book Jardin des Caresses. In the account of the Tharaud brothers, Carré’s intervention was an epiphany, in which the European provided the gift of painting, like some divine fire, to the native.12 But visual evidence is hard to detect: Carré as a landscapist was a kind of latter-day Pissarro, and it is hard to see much of his fluid style or brushwork (see Chapter 6) in Mammeri’s blockier, more dryly executed work. If anything, Mammeri’s work looks more like Herzig’s—but then the earliest photographs are of Mammeri’s later works, from about 1917, after he had immigrated to Morocco. He quit Algeria in 1916, enabled by the teaching profession to make that great shift in his life. Some authors suggest that he found the colonial authority in Algeria oppressive. His destination was the ancient Moroccan imperial city of Fez, where his cousin Mohammed Mammeri was a prominent teacher. Mohammed became tutor to the sultan’s three sons and eventually an influential vizier when the youngest of them, Mohammed ben Youssef, ascended the throne in 1927 as Mohammed V, the sultan who in 1957 became king of an independent Morocco.13 Mohammed Mammeri had apparently written to Azouaou extolling the beauties of Fez, where, in contrast to an Algeria transformed by settler colonialism, Muslim life retained its full splendor.14 In the Tharauds’ words, Azouaou Mammeri found there “a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants where Arabs were not ‘wogs’ ( bicots) but possessed money, prestige, and power; where everyone went to the mosque; where the purest Arabic was spoken; where one saw elegantly clad men and women who lived in houses far more luxurious than those he had been able to see in Algiers!” 15 With his Al-

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figure 98 Azouaou Mammeri, The Fountain, crayon, ca. 1917.

gerian passport and French connections Mammeri prospered: he apparently began a small primary school to teach the children of the Fassi elite in French. Primary school teaching remained his main employment until 1919, so that his status as an artist was that of an amateur. In that year, however, the Moroccan authorities, recognizing his artistic skills, appointed him drawing master at the College Franco-Musulman in Rabat. Mammeri’s complex attitudes toward the colonial process are indicated in several short articles he wrote for the French government’s magazine France-Maroc, which, we have seen, was an important instrument of associationist culture (often publishing articles by Moroccans), art scholarship, and propaganda.16 The articles are illustrated by awkward but forceful crayon drawings—Mammeri’s earliest published artwork, which caught the attention of Marshal Lyautey himself (Fig. 98).17 Treating the traditional life of Fez, its architecture and its schools, they give an idea of the sensitive mission of the cross-cultural broker Mammeri, who had traversed borders between Algeria and Morocco, between Islam and the Catholic roumi (as the Europeans were called in Arabic), between the Arabic language and the French. From the perspective of the Fassi, one may speculate, Mammeri might have seemed a representative of French interests. It is important to recall that in Fez just five years earlier, in 1912, part of the small European population had been massacred. (That event had precipitated the French invasion.) The first article, recounting a typical day in the kind of bicultural primary school that had proved so contentious in Algeria, suggests Mammeri’s acceptance of modern French culture as superior. The Moroccan boys’ morning begins with two hours of Koranic lessons from a “severe” teacher, or faïh,

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who sits with his students on traditional mats and teaches with handheld chalkboards. The afternoon French class, in a di¤erent room replete with benches and maps of France, is run by a “gentle Frenchman,” a culturally sensitive soul who can “speak Arabic and eats . . . without asking for a chair.” Mammeri implies that the boys prefer the tales of La Fontaine and their lessons in arithmetic to the Koranic class, concluding, “Thus the image of . . . noble France floats above these little heads being guided on the path of civilization and progress.” 18 Yet Mammeri’s drawings contradict this conclusion, in that all of them picture traditional elements of the school: boys with the faïh in Moroccan garb and boys with schoolboys’ pigtails playing in the courtyard. To that extent Mammeri follows the strategy of most Orientalist art addressing a European audience: focusing on indigenous traditions, he pretends the invader is absent. He writes and draws, however, from the vantage of a participant rather than an ethnographer, and the rationale for his work is more to proselytize and teach than to record the picturesque. The artist-teacher’s second article sympathetically explains a traditional Koranic (rather than bicultural) school for the French readership. Not uncritically, Mammeri details a pedagogy that he argues provides the fundamental moral and religious education of all Muslim men, as well as ensuring “universal” literacy (for males, not females).19 These illustrated articles form essential background to several paintings on the subject that featured in Mammeri’s first one-man exhibition in Paris, in 1921 at the Galerie Feuillets d’art “under the high patronage of Marshal Lyautey.” 20 One drawing records an important early oil that I have traced to the Cleveland Museum of Art (Fig. 99).21 Despite a certain sti¤ness in the drawing of the figures (I assume Mammeri had had little exposure to life drawing), Interior of a Koranic School (Intérieur d’une école coranique) engages its subject in a sober and convincing way. The suprisingly young bearded faïh and the cluster of boys working at their writing boards are engrossed in their task, all save one who directs a piercing glance toward the artist and viewer—this boy with short black hair symbolizes intellectual alertness, the productive educational process Mammeri understood so well. The exhibition in 1921 was the second of Mammeri’s Parisian shows. In the 1917 Exhibition of Moroccan Arts at the Pavillon de Marsan, discussed in Chapter 8, he had shown two small landscapes in oils of Fez. Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Luxembourg Museum, so admired them that he showed them to the minister of the colonies and the proindigenous French president Georges Clémenceau, who agreed to their purchase for the state collections.22 Judging by a later reproduction, one of them showed the distant city of Fez seen beyond low wooded hills, with no figures apparent. It is an agreeable composition of interlocking planes of muted color.23 Mammeri’s scenes of Muslim religious life, taxed with a certain “artificiality” by critics like the Tharauds and Bénédite, nonetheless attracted appreciative comments: “These compositions, which have the grace of things born to a fresh mind . . . appear to me like dreams made true. . . . All these young boys assembled around a Muslim master . . . have the gestures and thoughts of the most veridi-

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figure 99 Azouaou Mammeri, Interior of a Koranic School, oil on canvas, ca. 1917–18.

cal Islam.” 24 Such comments suggest a sympathy for la France musulmane in metropolitan France in the aftermath of World War I, in which Moroccan and other colonial soldiers had served with great distinction on the Western Front. But among emergent indigenous political movements of the interwar years (whether the reformist theological movement of the oulémas or Ahmad Messali Hajd’s radical Etoile Nord-africaine) the Koranic school was considered a social institution instrumental in organizing resistance to colonial rule.25 Thus in 1921 Mammeri quietly promoted to a tolerant and receptive French elite an aspect of traditional society that later political conditions (intensified by Abd el-Krim’s anticolonial War of the Rif in 1925–26) would make more controversial. Certainly in 1930, the time of the much-debated centenary of Algeria (see Chapter 10), another French critic rec-

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ognized the importance of Mammeri’s Koranic Class while casting aspersions on the students and depreciating the institution itself. For Pierre Angel, “the sti¤ness of certain poses contributes to the truthfulness of the whole. And the somewhat absent look of the master, dominating these little round heads in which as yet untroubled minds doze, is interestingly opposed to the naively questioning eye of the young pupil in the foreground. All the others remain absorbed, as if turned in on themselves, already claimed by a world they cannot escape.”26 The partiality of this colonial reading, which sees the teacher as “absent,” the students’ minds as “untroubled,” and the boy looking out as “naive,” is striking in its denigration of the picture ’s subject. The current rediscovery of Mammeri’s work by art experts from the Arab world encourages the reading of grains of resistance in his work. The Museum of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris recently purchased Interior of the Karouiine Mosque, Fez (Intérieur de la mosquée kairouiine à Fès). For the curator Brahim Alaoui, himself a Moroccan, the interest of this image is its presentation of Islamic piety from the perspective of a practicing Muslim.27 It is possible to recognize precise signs of Islamic observance, such as the red and green colors of the devotional flags and the way the imam occupies the niche of the mihrab, turning away from, rather than facing, the viewer. That is hardly a picturesque device of the Orientalist tradition—in its severity it contrasts with Gérôme ’s or Leighton’s views of Turkish or Egyptian mosque interiors that, despite their architectural detail, stress gaudy costume and show the worshipers in frontal poses. The preference for frontality often led to worshipers’ being shown incorrectly, facing away from the mihrab—an error the Turkish painter Hamdy Bey, in contrast, usually avoided. Visiting mosques was and is forbidden to nonbelievers in Morocco; yet Alaoui believes Mammeri could have painted this scene because of his high standing as a member of an “important marabout family” whose own piety was unimpeachable. Paintings such as this and the Interior of a Koranic School (See Fig. 99) suggest that Mammeri positioned himself before his French audience as a man of faith who, fascinated by the European pictorial language, used it to improve the comprehension of Maghrebian culture. Alert French critics were flattered by Mammeri’s strategy of emulation, yet aware of its contentiousness. “This is the first time that a Muslim artist o¤ers us an exhibition of painting, and of painting fully conceived with our Western vision and methods,” wrote Bénédite (his first claim probably erroneous). He recalled his own “stupefaction” on learning, in 1917 at the Pavillon de Marsan, that Mammeri’s Fez landscapes had been signed by an Arab artist. Aware that oil painting hardly existed in the artist’s culture of origin, Bénédite explained how Mammeri, a practicing Muslim, had obtained a virtual theological dispensation to paint in the vicinity of Fez: His scruples led him to consult the most learned tolba [young male religious scholars] concerning the liberties he might be accused of taking, and they agreed with his interpretation of the famous passage of the Koran banning the reproduction of images. What is forbidden is to reproduce images that “cast a shadow,” that is to say,

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sculpted figures, which could become idols. In any case the ban in force in the ancient days of idolatry would, according to Islam’s open minds, no longer apply to the art of sculpture as it is generally conceived in modern times.28

Bénédite noted that Mammeri’s advent marked a significant stage in the “ascent . . . of Muslim minds toward European culture,” along with distinguished contributions in medicine and the sciences recently made by certain Algerians and Tunisians. Countering the supposition that religious belief had closed the domain of art to Arabs, Bénédite wrote that Mammeri had “the courage to leave familiar pathways, and to show his coreligionists the pathway to the future.” 29 There is evidence that cultural sensitivities may have made Mammeri generally reluctant to paint the human image close-up, at least in his earlier career.30 He was essentially a landscapist, and some of his surviving views resemble the typical images of tourist photography; others share elements with contemporary French colonial painting. View of Fez (Vue de Fez, Fig. 100) was one of the early canvases by Mammeri to achieve the accolade of purchase by the French government. This forbidding image in fact shows one of the notable picturesque sites in Fez; photographers like those from the French Service of Historical Monuments used the same crumbling ramparts to frame the panorama of the city (Fig. 101). Prosper Ricard subsequently used this view to illustrate his 1924 book Les merveilles de l’autre France, in which he evoked the “northern panorama of Fez, seen from the top of the Hill of the Merinids,” with its “cascade of terraces . . . from which the green koubbas [pyramidal roofs] of the sanctuaries and the tall minarets of the mosques emerge.” The leitmotif of both the painting and the photograph is the “salient of the old defensive wall of the Almohad dynasty, mutilated but still standing, and as such, a powerful symbol of the thousand-year-old city.” 31 In this passage, Ricard, a man charged by colonial authorities with overseeing Moroccan indigenous art and its traditions, betrays a passion for Moroccan antiquity and history that Mammeri shared, albeit for di¤erent reasons, as I have already mentioned—a congruence that also links Mohammed Racim with his French supporters. By 1921 the Tharauds and Bénédite, no doubt having learned of Mammeri’s desire to experience Maghrebian culture in all its richness in conversations with the artist himself, suggested that it had led him to immigrate to Morocco. It was commonly thought (and still is) that Morocco, far more than Algeria, managed to preserve a large part of its traditional culture as well as its ancient architectural fabric.32 The power retained by the sultan’s makhzen, which forced an accommodation with the French, and Lyautey’s progressive urbanism (with its nouvelles villes, new towns built adjacent to, rather than replacing, existing towns) ensured that result. Yet the visual conformity to European criteria of the picturesque exhibited in Mammeri’s exact and technically conservative View of Fez complicates interpretation. To what extent could Mammeri be seen as a creature of the French presence—educated in the French system, taught painting by Herzig and Carré, supported as both teacher and artist by the Lyautey regime? His actual painting,

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figure 100 Azouaou Mammeri, View of Fez, oil on canvas, ca. 1920.

unlike that of Mohammed Racim, had no engagement with indigenous traditions of image making. Mammeri risks being seen as a cultural apostate, a mere Francophile imitator with powerful patrons. Certainly one progressive French critic, writing of Mammeri’s inclusion in a wide-ranging exhibition in Paris, Morocco Seen by Contemporary Artists (held in 1922 to coincide with the National Colonial Exposition of Marseille)33 viewed his Occidentalism with suspicion. Contrasting an earlier display of fauvelike landscapes by the young Tunisian painters Terzi ben Hasnaoui and Mohammed ben Macri Roached at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Gustave Kahn wrote: “This is not the first time we have been shown new Arab art inspired by our methods. At Bernheim-Jeune, the fine painter Antoine Villard . . . showed us entertaining decorative pages by his indigenous students. . . . But those youthful productions clearly derived from Oriental art. M. Mammeri paints in a completely Occidental manner, armed with precepts nourished by the Salon [de la Société] des Artistes Français. And that’s a shame.” 34 Mammeri’s “Occidental manner” here implies a denial of roots, a wholehearted embrace of European visuality. The way out of this interpretative impasse, however, lies

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figure 101 Fez from the tombs of the Merinids, 1922.

in recognizing the di¤erences that can be masked by an apparent visual equivalency. Extravisual questions of the context of production and of reception are crucial in establishing such a play of possible di¤erences.35 A colonial subject painting in a realist mode—especially in 1921, when many painters associated with the conservative, neorealist “Return to Order” movement were eschewing avant-gardism anyway—demonstrated his cultural accomplishment in terms recognized by the new authority. And Mammeri received accolades from the French, some patronizing, some not. In addition, it is quite likely that for him and his presumably small indigenous audience the language of mimesis was a satisfactory and respectful way of documenting observable truth. I have argued elsewhere that a preference for realist painting is marked among today’s Islamic collectors of Orientalist art. Such an attitude may have been emerging in Mammeri’s day.36 During the 1920s Mammeri’s painting developed away from the harshly detailed description of landscape in the View of Fez to a more measured summary that connects with modernist practice.

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figure 102 Azouaou Mammeri, The “Montée des Rats” at Fez, oil on canvas, ca. 1920.

When he moved from Fez to Rabat in 1919, he left the center of traditional culture for the new seat of French government, undergoing transformation with the addition of a new town near the medina. Mammeri again elected to paint the streets and terraces of that ancient part of the city. His “Montée des rats” in Fez (La “Montée des rats,” à Fès), with its play of strong tones in relief and its severe planarity, exemplifies his aesthetic (Fig. 102). In 1921 Mammeri began exhibiting such work in his old home of Algiers, earning the approval of local critics like Victor Barrucand: “The prodigious feeling for values and oppositions, the austerity of the impression, the weighty value of the planes commend his views of Rabat, which display a primitive purity and a monastic intensity. This is the real Morocco, and a good deal better than it was in Benjamin Constant. . . . The Salon des Orientalistes o¤ers . . . [nothing] better suited to its brief

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than the work of this indigenous painter, who wants no more than to copy what he sees, but who does so in such a way that you couldn’t mistake his manner for anyone else ’s.” 37 The process of describing Mammeri’s paintings by employing a standard language of art criticism—Barrucand’s “values” and “primitive purity,” or the “feeling for linear and aerial perspective” and the “envelope” admired by Bénédite in Paris 38—were crucial in inducting Mammeri’s work into the art world, giving it status despite the artist’s indigeneity. Approving his “pagan joy in seeing,” one critic even likened the Mammeris to Camille Corot’s famous impressions of Italy from the 1820s and 1830s. Virtually no one, however, likened Mammeri’s work to paintings that very likely conditioned his: those of one of the more progressive Orientalists, Bernard Boutet de Monvel. A racy exponent of art colonial, a regular of Parisian Salons who began visiting Morocco during World War I, Boutet de Monvel first exhibited together with Mammeri in 1918 at the Hotel Excelsior in Casablanca.39 In the early 1920s he purchased a number of Mammeri’s landscapes of Rabat.40 A painter of heavily robed Moroccan figures arrayed symmetrically in marketplaces, and of the severe architecture of Moroccan fortified casbahs also studied by Jacques Majorelle, Monvel had a style much like Mammeri’s own, as Barrucand described it in 1923: “In a precise, well-outlined manner, M. Mammeri’s is an Orientalism unconcerned with the romance of the sun. It takes e¤ect by geometric lines and the contrast of flat tints.” 41 An excellent example of Mammeri’s work in this later manner is the hypnotic View of MoulayIdriss (Vue de Moulay-Idriss; see Plate 13). The view of the city, dramatically placed in a gorge, reminds one of El Greco’s famous image of the city of Toledo. In fact Mammeri had traveled to paint in Toledo on a bourse Hispano-Mauresque in 1924. Then again, this physical vantage point overlooking Moulay-Idriss was one favored by photographers like those who worked for Ricard. Mammeri framed the view with a dark repoussoir of angular rocks and silhouetted cactus plants, while in the shadows, two heavily draped figures stand immobile, like mysterious guardians of the holy city, which was (and is) o¤-limits to nonbelievers.42 A little history of the site helps establish a range of resonances for this painting. Moulay-Idriss is dedicated to Moulay Idriss El Akbar, who in the eighth century escaped his Abassid rivals in Arabia and founded the first Arab realm in the Maghreb. His son Moulay Idriss El Azhar established the city of Fez. In the foreground of the painting, rendered with great precision and giving every sign of its careful upkeep, is the zaouïa (religious establishment) of Moulay Idriss, “a sacred place, forbidden to infidels, in which the saint’s tomb, a mosque, and Koranic schools are located and whose priests are Idrissid Cherifs, descendants of the illustrious ancestor.” 43 The picture focuses precisely on the sacred precinct’s greenish copper roofs. Not only was MoulayIdriss a religious center famous well beyond Morocco, but it was also situated in the Zerhoun, a region where the autochthonous Berber presence continued to be strong. For such reasons the view may have had added ethnic and religious resonance for the Berber Kabyle, Azouaou Mammeri. Paint-

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figure 103 Si Azouaou Mammeri, Muslim artist and drawing teacher . . . Rabat, 1921.

ing emerges as a celebration, a commemoration of a place and a way of life presented, not as touristic in a territorial, predatory sense (as one might say of much Orientalist art by Europeans), but as participatory, awash with specific associations, cultural memories, and even a sense of belonging. The extent to which Mammeri was able to integrate his realist painting with his broader life is evident in his returning to serve his traditional community as caïd, or administrator, to the Aït-Yenni people in Kabylia from 1922 to 1927. These are years when the French interest in his art was at its height, when he was showing in group exhibits at the Algiers Salon and the 1922 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille and in a solo show at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. According to Mammeri’s son, at Taourirt-Mimoun his portraits “excited interest and admiration among local people,” 44 a memory confirmed in 1925 by Bénédite, who described how Mammeri would receive his constituents, “palette in hand, on the doorstep of his studio, to hear their reports or their complaints,” or they

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would “salute” him deferentially when they encountered him set up en plein air before his portable easel.45 This is Mammeri the skilled cultural broker who had himself photographed for the French masscirculation weekly L’Illustration, which devoted a two-page article to him in 1921 (Fig. 103).46 He appears in Arab costume, seated with palette and paintbrush in hand before his easel and canvas. A chaplet of prayer-beads connotes religiosity, while an ornamented Moroccan tablecloth and the fine metalwork globe of an incense burner exemplify traditional Maghrebian artistry. There is nothing of the grimy bohemia standard in French artists’ portraits, but rather an impeccable toilette and discreet signs of wealth. Oriental identity and occidental activity combine in the person of one man, viewed in impassive profile and dubbed for the occasion “First Muslim Painter.” It is as if Mammeri wished to forestall any impression of cultural apostasy that might arise from the sight of his occidentalist paintings. His very e¤ort to use that system of expression, to master its language, can be considered empowering, an accession to arenas of status usually proscribed the “native.” We have seen that Mammeri did accede rapidly to success and recognition: at least three one-man shows between 1921 and 1931, extensive critical coverage, biographical articles. Yet holding the post of caïd may have counted against Mammeri in nationalist indigenous circles in Algeria and may help explain, Pouillon suggests, his return to Morocco in 1927.47 There he took up official posts in Fez and Rabat before a one-man show in Rabat “earned him the position of inspector of indigenous arts in Marrakech” in 1929.48 Thus began the final Morocco-based phase of his career, through to his retirement in 1948 (he died back in Kabylia in 1954). His presence in Marrakech and the growth of his own family gave him a new confidence with the human figure. His large Cheikhates (Les Cheikhates; location unknown) shows a group of male and female entertainers gathered in a private house. One critic attributed surprising elements like the strong gaslight and cast shadow of the dancer to Mammeri’s familiarity with the local scene. If Mammeri bettered the garish productions of traveling Orientalists with his Moroccan landscapes and scenes of women at home and men at the market, he did so “because he lives among them and understands them.” 49 In other words, Mammeri had beaten the colonizers at their own visual game. It proved impossible, however, to extricate such plaudits from the knowledge that Mammeri had been promoted by the Franco-Moroccan administration and had chosen a path, as an artist, that suited the status quo of the colonial regime in matters cultural.

The Path of the Hybrid: Mohammed Racim

Mohammed Racim never had that problem. The language of expression he chose elicited both admiration and uncertainty from the French: the traditional Islamic miniature, modified in ways that accommodated Western modes of seeing. The road to success in European terms was harder for Racim

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than for Mammeri, but his reputation has lasted longer. Unlike Mammeri, who has virtually disappeared from the history of art, Mohammed Racim became a major figure in Algerian culture from the 1930s until his death in 1975. In contrast to his countryman Mammeri, Mohammed Racim did what an “indigenous” man was supposed to do when it came to art: practice the Islamic decorative arts, and with distinction. He was born into an Algerine family of artisans of Turkish origin, whose precolonial prosperity had been undermined by the French regime ’s confiscation of property.50 By 1880 Racim’s father had reestablished a wood-carving and copper-working business in the Casbah of Algiers; his father’s brother engraved decorated tombstones. The Racims won commissions for decorating public buildings and the pavilions of French colonial exhibitions; indeed Arsène Alexandre mentioned the “calligraphies of the Racim brothers” in his 1905 report on the indigenous arts in Algeria. Mohammed Racim was born in 1896 and raised “in an art milieu frequented by erudite people and indigenous notables.” 51 Like his older brother, Omar, he was schooled to enter the family workshop, being sent, as Mustapha Orif explains, to “a school designated ‘for the indigenous,’ where he followed studies strongly oriented toward manual work, developing his drawing above all.” Completing this schooling in 1910, Racim evidently was noticed for his exceptional work by Prosper Ricard of Jonnart’s new Service of Indigenous Arts. Ricard o¤ered Racim a position as draftsman in the service ’s Cabinet de dessin. Racim recalled: “From the age of fourteen, I spent part of my days making copies and composing carpets, Arab embroideries, ornaments on copper, and sculpted wood destined to furnish models for schools, the workshops of Algeria.” 52 Racim’s participation in this state-sponsored program of cultural revival gives his identity a subaltern element early on. His visual research into Maghrebian decorative art was fostered by French colonial interests, albeit of an associationist, even Arabophile cast. This condition of tutelage was nevertheless matched by Racim’s personal heritage, his family background of artisanal excellence stretching back to the era of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers. His position as a historical actor bespeaks a complex confluence of interests. The indigenous neotraditionalism of his art making gave him the means to navigate many of its potential pitfalls. Racim seemed drawn by the European concept of the artist, as an escape from the routine work that racialist ideas about ability assigned the indigenous—as Orif has noted, creative roles at the Cabinet de dessin were reserved for Beaux-Arts–trained Frenchmen like Herzig. Racim’s first attempts at painting were criticized for “having the principal fault of a love of detail, pushed almost to a mania,” whereas the high art of painting, as the French conceived it, required breadth of scale. Racim discovered Persian miniatures at this time: an art remote in time and place from contemporary Algeria, which was virtually without a local tradition of painting. He first saw such miniatures after Ricard’s departure for Morocco in 1914, in a volume at the Cabinet de dessin: “I observed that they contained a large quantity of details . . . and asked myself if what constituted a defect in

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painting might not be a positive quality in the art of illumination.” Racim’s first essays in miniature painting were guided by technical advice from his uncle and the encouragement of the eminent Orientalist Dinet. With Dinet a second plank of European tutelage was put in place—an Orientalist painting devoted to narrating the lives of Algerians, using the language of realist mimesis. According to Racim, Dinet’s intervention was decisive for his career. But before I turn to the figural miniatures that best express Racim’s aesthetic hybridity, I want to give an account of his illumination work. Dinet o¤ered Racim his first commission, to design fifteen full-page decorative medallions containing Koranic inscriptions in Arabic. These were to ornament the Vie de Mohammed, prophète d’Allah, being prepared by Sliman ben Ibrahim and Dinet (whose thirty color plates reproducing paintings I discuss in Chapter 4). Racim’s illuminations, also printed in color, follow tradition in being ornamented frames for specific suras, or verses of the Koran (see Plate 14). Stemming from the artistry of the Arabic calligraphers, such illumination is the oldest of the Islamic arts, carrying with it the religious prestige of the transcribed holy word. Racim’s abiding interest in such illuminations (which he continued to produce into the 1940s) parallels that of his elder brother. Omar Racim not only practiced such calligraphy almost exclusively, but early on devoted his life to religion and politics. He became a hezzah, or reciter of the Koran, at the mosque and in 1903 was one of those who welcomed the politically contentious Egyptian reformer Sheik Mohammed Abdou to Algiers. In 1912 Omar made a trip to Egypt and Syria, bringing back with him various Korans and specimens of Arabic illumination.53 By 1913 he was publishing political tracts,54 and during World War I he was arrested by the French security services for his political activities. He was initially banished, then sentenced to prison “in perpetuity.” Helped no doubt by the interventions of his brother Mohammed (who agitated for Omar’s release, making gifts of miniatures to people in influential posts), he was later given amnesty and rehabilitated, to the extent of being o¤ered work at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he ran courses on illumination for indigenous students. Omar Racim was “always the ‘political’ member of the family, while his younger brother got on well in French ‘progressivist’ milieux.” 55 In this family and in the broader Algerian context, Racim’s involvement in the Vie de Mohammed and his continuing illumination work can be seen as a moderate ’s affirmation of Islam, as well as the revival of an art very little practiced in the Maghreb. From the outset Racim was sensitive to the traditions of illumination from di¤erent parts of the Islamic world and sought to di¤erentiate them in his titles: thus his second exhibition, in 1918, contained an Illumination in Egyptian Style (Enluminure de style égyptien) and an Illumination in Persian Style (Enluminure de style persan).56 Racim’s titles indicate his awareness of being a latecomer, the practitioner of an art without an indigenous tradition whose revival was based on the study of classical sources. Illumination was Racim’s bread and butter during the eight years he spent in Paris (1924–32) working on the page decorations for Henri Piazza’s massive edition, in twelve volumes, of the Thousand

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and One Nights in the Mardrus translation. Léon Carré (Mammeri’s old teacher) did the figurative illustrations, Racim the countless page decorations (Fig. 104), a task, he later recalled with bitterness, that had precluded creative work on miniature painting. Dinet certainly facilitated the transition from works of textual illumination to the art of miniatures. According to Racim, in 1916 “Dinet’s presence was important to me: in this painter’s work the documentary side and the sense of color delighted me—these were the two qualities I most wanted to acquire. I hoped to use the image to fix the memory of Algerian costumes on the point of vanishing, as well as scenes of an Arab life in the process of transformation.” Dinet’s subject matter, though largely contemporary—scenes of indigenous life near Bou-Saâda, key moments from the religious calendar—also included illustrations of desert folklore. Apart from his rather lurid palette, Dinet rejected the tenets of Parisian avant-gardism and worked in a realist, documentary, and perspectivally correct manner not uncommon among French colonial artists. Racim, while learning from such images, declared he had “decided to take inspiration from the mise en page of the Persians and to apply their technique”—a stylistic preference that definitively privileges the oriental over the occidental. The first time Racim’s work garnered published comment was at the 1919 Salon of the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists (where Mammeri also exhibited from 1922). He exhibited a pair of Koranic illuminations, as well as miniatures like his Persian Hunt (Chasse persane), structured in the Persian manner (Fig. 105). Raoul d’Artenac of La Dépêche algérienne welcomed Racim’s “elegant arabesques” and “prodigious prolixity,” praising him for reviving the traditions of Persian and Egyptian illumination and predicting (accurately, it turned out), “Here is a young master who could form a school and give life to an art that is soon likely to disappear.” For Edmond Gojon, Racim “brilliantly discredits those who pretend that art dies out in Muslim countries.”57 Those repudiations of conservative theories of cultural decline mesh with Jonnart’s official policy of encouraging indigenous arts. Like Mammeri, Racim must have seemed to some a living justification of their hopes for a productive culture of association. Mustapha Orif argues persuasively that Racim was guided in his program of nostalgic recovery of a precolonial past by the thinking and publications of the Comité du Vieil Alger. Since its founding in January 1905, this surprising lobbying group of academics, public servants, and enlightened businessmen had been revaluing the indigenous heritage by attempting to safeguard the surviving precolonial buildings and monuments of Algiers. It was established after Henri Klein, a young correspondent for La Dépêche algérienne, undertook a press campaign against the destruction of Turkish buildings and a poor appreciation of local history. Klein appealed to the heritage of Algiers as the Roman settlement named Icosium, as well as a site of old French heroism. (It was there, for example, that Charles V’s attack on the Ottoman Regency had failed to take the corsair capital in 1541.) In 1905 Klein’s campaign was rewarded by an initial grant from a retired French officer, which set o¤ a spate of subscriptions to the fledgling society (of which Klein was secretary): from Governor-General Jonnart; the mayor; the deputy of

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figure 104 Mohammed Racim, frontispiece for Les mille nuits et une nuit, 1930.

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figure 105 Mohammed Racim, Persian Hunt, gouache heightened with gold, ca. 1920.

Algiers; writers like Barrucand and Alexandre; the artists Dinet, Rochegrosse, Mme Ben Aben, and Herzig; and senior civil servants, magistrates, and businessmen. Most of the Comité du Vieil Alger’s work over the next decade was campaigning (with mixed success) to preserve the Turkish heritage: to protect or restore Moorish buildings, renew the tile work of public fountains, erect monuments, and affix commemorative plaques in the streets of Algiers. Its statutes called for it to “safeguard everything that gives a picturesque attraction to our city, and discover ways of fighting the banality that new constructions give it.” 58 The many lectures and walking tours the committee organized to sites of architectural or historical merit formed the bulk of Klein’s fascinating annual, the Feuillets d’El-

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Djezaïr. Beginning publication in 1910, these annuals are contemporaneous with Racim’s early work at the Cabinet de dessin, and as Orif suggests, he was very likely taken by the Feuillets, “in which the stories of a rais, . . . a dey, . . . a saint, or a building were told.” In return, it seems likely that the first buyers of Racim’s works were members of the Comité du Vieil Alger. The tendency of the colonizer to o¤er packaged notions of national heritage back to the colonized is one that Racim both imbibed and had to contend with.59 His personal strategic historical consciousness is nevertheless illuminated in his later comment: “I hoped to use the image to fix the memory of Algerian costumes on the point of vanishing, as well as scenes of an Arab life in the process of transformation.” Connoisseurs in Paris helped Racim enrich his knowledge of Oriental miniatures. His publisher, Piazza, was instrumental in introducing Racim during the 1920s to a group of collectors and scholars of Persian and Mughal miniatures. Known already to Orientalists like Delacroix and Ingres, Persian miniatures had been shown at intervals in the great expositions, and by the 1893 Muslim Art Exhibition, collections were held by connoisseurs like Louis Gonse and Hakky Bey. After 1900 Oriental miniatures were displayed more often, with exhibitions in Paris in 1903, 1907, and 1912.60 Indeed Racim’s identification with the Persian miniature might even be seen as an implantation of Western connoisseurship. But one must guard against arguments that reduce Racim too much to the position of subaltern. One could argue with equal force that he instrumentalized the Parisian collectors, just as he had used the information-gathering resources of the Cabinet de dessin and the Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr to extend his knowledge of Turkish history and heritage in Algiers. After Gabriel Esquer’s monumental Iconographie historique de l’Algérie was published in 1929, Racim probably used it in a similar way.61 In his 1960 book on Racim, which reworks an article for the prestigious Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Georges Marçais (professor of Islamic art and architecture at the University of Algiers) stresses the artist’s profound sense of what he had lost to the colonial era. In Algiers, he wrote, the public memory of the “historic days of the corsairs . . . [was] not completely lost.” Racim’s images of women, such as Casbah Terraces (Les terrasses de la casbah, Fig. 106) or The Day after the Wedding (Le lendemain du mariage), do more than pay homage to Delacroix’s Women of Algiers and the iconography of Orientalism. Marçais affirms: “These are the marriage feasts at which he was present with his father, or those intimate gatherings of women that he witnessed as a small boy.” 62 Racim’s images of women, like those of his coreligionist and countryman Mammeri, rewrite the degrading protocols of Orientalist painting. When out in the street, women of high standing are shown with the full veil; when pictured in their own interiors or on rooftop terraces, their faces are revealed, albeit on miniature scale. A precise grasp of manners and gesture pervades these scenes of gently smiling figures. Clearly Racim, unlike most French Orientalists, had never studied the live model, and for that reason his image of the female body is stiffly decorous, closer, indeed, to the seventeenth-century Mughal models he admired than to the academic figure.

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figure 106 Mohammed Racim, Casbah Terraces, gouache heightened with gold, n.d.

Perspective is a great marker of hybridity in Racim’s work. As Marçais notes, “Living in the twentieth century, Mohammed Racim could not pretend to the complete absence of . . . laws of perspective that the Persian miniaturists did not possess. He had to find . . . artifices that rendered perspective implicit without imposing it on our attention. This he achieved by placing the horizon very high, . . . by recalling the convergence of lines, . . . by the paving of a courtyard or the carpets in a room.”63 Yet Racim seldom employs a perspective that reads as correct to the point of transparency. In some of his early compositions, such as his miniature The Hunt (La Chasse) in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, the horizon is so high that the figures of horsemen are laid out up the space with little diminution of scale—an appropriation of classical Persian compositions. More usually Racim employs a bird’s-eye perspective to contain a panoramic view. In such works, subtle distortions of perspective are evident. In Casbah Terraces the foreground is tipped up sharply toward the viewer. Beyond the four women, in the vista of Casbah rooftops descending to the old Algiers port, the view slips down and out, curving back up to a horizon of hills and a sunset that seems

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figure 107 Bayot, Terraces of Algiers, lithograph, 1837.

the only perspectivally solid element in the picture. Racim’s lavish foreground evokes a-perspectival Mughal miniatures, while his panorama refers to the European topographical tradition. That tradition is exemplified in an early view of a comparable motif by the artist Bayot (Fig. 107), from Berbrugger’s classic volume Algérie historique, pittoresque, et monumentale (1843), surely available in the Algiers National Library, if not the Cabinet de dessin itself.64 Racim uses “perspective as symbolic form” (Panofsky’s phrase): his refusal to draw in irreproachable perspective (as in Bayot) richly asserts his Maghrebian painterly identity. The worthy emulator Mammeri took pleasure in reiterating his mastery of perspective, while the virtuoso hybrid Racim enjoyed teasing its codes. Despite Racim’s working in a medium that was marginal in the hierarchy of European visual arts, a public in Algiers began to form for this artist who exemplified simultaneously a preservationist mentality and, more clearly than Mammeri, the possibility of exalting the indigenous. The breakthrough year was 1923. Exhibiting at the Salon of the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, Racim was awarded a grant from the municipality of Algiers, and the medal of the Society of French Oriental-

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ist Painters of Paris (linked with the colony through Dinet, Rochegrosse, and many others). The jury for Racim’s awards included local Orientalists and figures from the Algiers arts establishment.65 Press coverage was extensive, with warm appreciations in L’Afrique du Nord illustrée and La Dépêche algérienne, whose critic Barrucand, previously a supporter of Mammeri, claimed, “Nobody today, not even in Tehran, composes the faithful rhythms of a Persian miniature better than he.” 66 Barrucand’s perspective is once again worth singling out. Considered a “militant indigenophile” by some colonists,67 Barrucand was receptive both to the miniature as an art form and to the historicist material in which Racim specialized. In 1924 he wrote the following appreciation of miniatures on the themes of Moorish Granada and old Algiers: The Oriental miniature . . . has found in our North Africa a representative who will make his mark. M. Mohammed Racim exhibits at the Orientalists two admirable compositions, distinguished by their sense of spectacle, their luxury, and their tradition. The Splendor of the Granada Caliphate (Splendeur du Khalifat de Grenade), with its surround of Andalusian verses, is at once visionary and nostalgic, while the Moorish Idyll (Idylle maure) of old Algiers is equally a page of precious visual poetry. The ornamented presentation of the first sura of the Koran is a marvel of coloration and ritual exactitude. For this vitrine alone, the exhibition of Algerian artists deserves to be called Orientalist.68

For Barrucand, Racim’s work exemplified an “Orientalist” art better than the e¤orts of any European artist traveler, with their hackneyed perspectives. Notwithstanding praise from such a quarter, one must suppose that the Algerian colonial authorities found nothing subversive in Racim’s work: like Mammeri and the Moroccan administration (but less energetically), they used Racim’s art to exemplify government aims at the next great Parisian exposition, the Arts Decos in 1925. Racims of the preceding generation had showed at expositions, but only as decorators or traditional arts manufacturers. When Mohammed and Omar Racim were included in the Algerian hall of the North African pavilion, they were presented as exponents of the newly licensed art of the miniature.69 It is worth recalling Barrucand’s expression of pride in what he considered the gem of the Algerian contingent at the Arts Decos: “The beautiful ornamented inscriptions of Omar Racim leave those of the other sections far behind.” One must assume that Omar had been not only released from prison but also rehabilitated by the regime of the newly appointed progressive, Governor-General Violette. Edmond Gojon, while praising Mohammed Racim’s work, expressed a desire to see “more durable monuments” come from his brush.70 Gojon’s ambivalence about the value of the miniature exemplifies the responses that dogged Racim before he was awarded the Grand Prix Artistique de

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l’Algérie in 1933. That was the first such award to an “indigène.” Soon after, Racim was named professor of drawing at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, where he inspired an entire generation of Algerian artists in miniature painting. François Pouillon has written, “The heart of Orientalist artifice . . . consists . . . in presenting a society as virgin—as if at the moment of unveiling—with the corruption of history and of contact with the foreigner systematically erased.” 71 Racim’s work redefines that convention. The subjects of his miniature history paintings are all situated specifically, in the time before the French invasion of North Africa, in the heroic days of the corsairs of the Barbary Coast, and the still earlier Moorish caliphate of Andalusia. In his reconstruction of those far-o¤ times, everything was new: time had not yet eroded, nor the European invaders struck at, the pristine polychromed buildings and their exquisite details. A little history of precolonial Algeria is needed here.72 Racim’s particular love is the splendor of the corsairs, the state-sanctioned privateers of Algiers whose profession was the systematic pillaging of European and thus Christian shipping in the Mediterranean. The most famous corsairs were the brothers Barbarossa (“Redbeard”), of Levantine origin. They were called by the people of Algiers to fight against the Spanish, who since 1492 had been a growing force along the North African littoral and by 1516 threatened Algiers. The Spanish had built a fortress called the Peñon on the largest of the port’s islets, which gave the city its name (El-Djezaïr = Algiers; djezaïra = island). The elder Barbarossa failed to take the Peñon but consolidated his strength by forming alliances along the Barbary Coast. In 1529 his brother Khaïr Ed Dine succeeded in destroying the Peñon with the aid of the sultan of Constantinople, who placed Algiers under Ottoman protection. Barbarossa fortified the port and made Algiers a sort of military republic, led after his death by a series of outstanding corsair beys. Placed under increasingly direct Ottoman control, the Barbary state of Algiers went on to flourish for almost three centuries on the proceeds of its maritime activity, whether described as brigandage or holy war. In its heyday during the seventeenth century Algiers held up to thirty thousand European captives, slaves used to man its galleys and serve its households and hostages held for ransom. The great Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes was ransomed by his family after five years’ captivity, a tale that makes a fascinating episode in his Don Quixote.73 Following Orientalist convention (even stereotypy) from the other side, Racim’s work avoids such unsavory topics. Instead it abounds with brisk martial feeling and positive images of the corsair capital, the famous triangle of its white buildings rising up from the blue sea, a topography that seems to have been inspired by the many old views and maps of Algiers—all made from a vantage point at sea—that had been published in Europe. Racim must have closely studied the Turkish and Barbary galleys recorded in old books and engravings (Fig. 108). He meticulously details such craft in works like Galleys Fleeing before the Storm or the remarkable Naval Battle (Bataille navale, Fig. 109). Racim’s erudition is evident in this image, where a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon struggles

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figure 108 Barbary Galley, Flemish engraving, seventeenth century.

figure 109 Mohammed Racim, Naval Battle, gouache heightened with gold, ca. 1932.

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with a Barbary galleass flying the distinctive Turkish colors. The painting depicts the fiercest rivals in the Mediterranean, the sailors of the Catholic kings of Spain who, having expelled the Moors from Andalusia, were now losing control of the Barbary Coast to their Turkish-led allies.74 In such a scene Racim went far beyond the Islamic miniature, reworking models probably studied in the museums of Europe, in particular the Dutch masters of marine painting who occasionally depicted such combats.75 A visual sophisticate, he evidently used his sources pragmatically. Racim’s early interest in Barbarossa had been cemented by a failed commission to illustrate the life of the “Bey of Beys.” 76 The artist went on to paint Barbarossa in a variety of miniatures—as commander on the forecastle of a gilded galliot; as protector of the city (in his two-page miniature History of Islam); and as the subject of a posthumous portrait, inscribed “Barbarossa, Founder of the Algerian State.” Here is unequivocal heroizing, with all the schemata of political icon making. From the Maghrebian perspective, a figure who for many was the “Scourge of Christendom” is the founding father of a state that had begun to take on the lineaments of nationhood as a result of Khaïr Ed Dine ’s rule. It is easy to see how Algerian nationalists came to prize such imagery before and after they ousted the French in 1962. Similar in inspiration is the portrait of the late-eighteenth-century figure Rais Hamidou, in The Rais (Le raïs; see Plate 15). Georges Marçais o¤ers a “folkloric” explanation of such images: “The rais . . . is a master of a corsair ship, a member of the powerful corporation . . . on which the fortune of Algiers rests. Traditional rivals of the Turks who make up the militia . . . among [the rais] one finds native-born Berbers [like Hamidou] and Levantines like Barbarossa . . . and people from European countries who, . . . thanks to a more or less sincere conversion, have embraced the adventurous but lucrative career of Barbary pirate.” 77 Hamidou stands before an exact reconstruction of Algiers harbor, a figure of great dignity, a dynamic leader acting under the aegis of the sovereign Algerian nation. The exalted character of Racim’s portraits of the rais is all the more evident given the fear these captains inspired in Europe. In these works Racim betrays a fondness for images of strong patriarchal leadership. But even as he reveals a nationalist aspiration, he employs a Western iconography to express it: the full-length portrait for military leaders that originated with Renaissance painters like Titian. That is the double bind Benedict Anderson detected: in colonial situations Western technologies of communication (painting is one of them) normalize and intensify ideologies of nationhood around key concepts and historiographical figures.78 In reviews of Racim’s exhibitions in Algiers and Paris the French critics, who broadly approved his work, as has been seen, seemed not to detect the political resistance that is apparent from a postcolonial pers5pective. After all, Racim repudiated colonial modernity by using documents to reconstruct Moorish buildings demolished by the French and to people them with figures of a respectful ethnic exactitude. Such was the fabric of Racim’s imaginary counter-nation. And in heroizing Barbarossa, the rais, or the Andalusian caliphs, he deals in images of nations as embodied by their leaders.

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But “nation” must be understood broadly here—whether it comprised the smallish Regency of Algiers, ultimately under imperial Ottoman protection, or the much grander Maghrebian cultural and political unity, which once stretched all the way from Tripoli to the palaces of Granada and Toledo. The nationalists of the Etoile Nord-africaine movement (initially banned because of its close association with the anticolonial French Communist Party) called for complete independence from colonial rule for all the nations of the Maghreb—not only Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, but also Tripolitania (Libya), which had been annexed by the Italians. The leading polemicist, Ferhat Abbas, used the nom de plume Abencerage—after a great Moorish family of Granada—in 1931 to sign his Jeune Algérien, a text that codified his modernizing, pro-bilingual, yet Islamic movement (modeled on the Young Turks of Kemal Atatürk). Even the famous slogan of the popular Algerian reformist theologian Abdelhamid Ben Badis in 1931—“Arabic is my language, Algeria my country, Islam my religion” 79—conveys the importance of transnational cultural and religious considerations in the consciousness of Algerian colonial subjects in Racim’s era. Although Racim was himself a cosmopolitan political moderate who was close to the French culturati and had married a Swede, his art suggests that he shared some of the nascent Algerian cultural nationalism of the day. In 1932 an indigenous Arabic journal associated with the Islamic reformist movement characterized Racim in politicized terms as an “Algerian Muslim painter who has raised the head of Muslim and Arab Algeria with pride, thanks to the inspiring beauty of his art and his original paintings, in which he sets out the most brilliant and most beautiful pages of Islamic civilization, pages of glory and pride in this world.” 80 Three decades later, with the revolution of 1962 and the ousting of the French, nationalist appreciations of Racim proliferated, as Pouillon has shown by citing the writings of Bachir Hadj Ali and later authors. For Bachir, Racim’s Casbah Terraces, as reproduced in La Nouvelle Critique, reflected the recent period of turmoil: “This painting at once constitutes an accusation against colonialism and proves . . . that all national art produced under the occupation is politically engaged art.” 81 Dreaming away the modern colonial reality of twentiethcentury Algiers, Racim issued an invitation to recapture, in images of the past, a cultural focus that might outlast the reality of colonial occupation.

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10 Colonial Museology in Algiers

T

he paintings of two indigenous évolués were a small a¤air, a marginal matter in overall views of North African culture provided by the French. In the most significant collection of painting assembled in a French overseas possession—that of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers—Racim and Mammeri were but curious footnotes to the grand narrative of French art. When that museum opened in 1930 and for decades afterward, it was far from being an instrument of bicultural association. On the contrary, it privileged European vision in the forum of elite French culture—a forum that virtually excluded indigenous participation. Rather than propose a history of art on a model of equal representation for the diverse peoples of Algeria, the Algiers museum upheld French art as the one great exemplar of civilization. The museum was an instrument—at best, to educate the indigenous, but primarily to disseminate imperial largesse to colonials remote from the metropole. The Algiers museum and its context make a fitting close to this book on painting in North Africa from the 1880s into the modern era. The museum was a key monument of the French celebration of the centenary of Algeria. The great International Colonial Exposition at Vincennes (on the eastern edge of Paris) was itself pushed back to 1931 by its commissioner, Marshal Lyautey, “to avoid any

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interference with the grandiose ceremonies envisaged in 1930 for the Centenary of French Algeria.” 1 Although the Vincennes exposition has deservedly been the subject of much study, few scholars have inquired into its predecessor on North African soil.2 The Vincennes fair left one permanent monument in Paris, the Museum of the Colonies (now the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts).3 But a more considerable built legacy—a whole suite of museums and smaller cultural centers, at the heart of which is the Algiers museum, foremost among all state representations of Orientalism— remained after the centenary of Algeria.4

The Centenary of French Algeria

The panoply of Algerian museums is inseparable from the political context of the centenary for which they were built. Plans had been developing at a government level since 1922, and as the prominent historian Charles-Robert Ageron has shown, they were a political football for much of the decade.5 The centenary meshed the sense of French grandeur in imperial achievement with the vexed question of political representation for a disenfranchised indigenous population. The main liberal vision of the centenary was that of Governor-General Maurice Violette, a left-leaning appointee who had made his reputation by exposing administrative abuses in French Indochina in 1913. From 1925 until late 1927 (when, forced from his post in Algiers, he returned to Paris to serve in the Chamber of Deputies) Violette pressed for new laws that would give a greater political voice to the marginalized indigenous majority of Algerians. The version of the statut indigène (legislation on the status of the indigenous) in force since 1919 precluded voting by all indigenous Algerians (except Jews); it imposed double the usual single year’s military service and limited travel outside Algeria. Although the growing number of indigenous Algerians who could prove their competence in spoken and written French could apply for naturalization as French citizens, fewer than seven hundred of them pursued that option between 1919 and 1925. (As Patricia Lorcin has pointed out, naturalization meant abandoning the tenets of Islamic law—a form of apostasy that discouraged many.)6 Thus most indigenous Algerians were unable to participate in electing the three senators and six deputies who represented their country in the parliament in Paris. Moderate indigenous movements like that of Ferhat Abbas’s Jeunes Algériens, pursuing modernization and francophony, campaigned for the creation of an equal number of indigenous deputies and senators. It took a “Frenchman from France” like Violette to acknowledge the frustration of the évolués: There are in Algeria one hundred thousand indigenous people on whom one can count absolutely. . . . It would be a mortal error to continue to treat these men as subjects. A lawyer or businessman who knows he is in appearance and coi¤ure

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almost indistinguishable from the European . . . judges himself humiliated when his full civil and political capacity is doubted. Six out of ten such men are ready to adopt the French homeland [patrie] without an afterthought, but if the French homeland refuses them, . . . they will find a homeland for themselves, and we will have been responsible for it.7

Prophetic words, but for most French Algerians the indigenous vote was to be resisted at all costs. They reasoned that if the indigenous were given equal rights, they would outvote the settlers, whose position would become untenable. In Paris French-Algerian interests easily blocked all but the most insignificant improvements in political representation for the indigenous. The painter Etienne Dinet, who by the 1920s was known as both the most prominent Orientalist in Algeria and a steadfast supporter of indigenous interests, had the ear of Governor-General Violette during his brief tenure.8 Dinet comments on several issues related to the coming centenary, confiding to his sister after Violette ’s dismissal: As for the centenary itself . . . I am certain that no honest reform in favor of the Muslims will be made. Success in the eyes of the world is assured (except in its treatment of the Muslims) because France has realized an admirable work, but all the hearts of truly honest Muslims will be profoundly sickened. . . . The centenary should be the occasion for reforms cementing the union of the French colonists’ Muslim brothers by the blood that all these heroes shed side by side during the war. . . . If it is not, Bolshevism will conquer the ten to fifteen million Muslims in North Africa.9

The reforms Dinet had in mind are evident in Violette ’s 1928 bill in Paris calling for the celebration of the centenary “as the liberation of the Barbary States; let us not speak of conquest,” he advised the Chamber of Deputies. Violette proposed creating centenary schools and hospitals, abrogating the law on indigeneity, equalizing military service, and electing just two indigenous deputies (one Arab, one Kabyle) to the Chamber in Paris.10 The centenary that eventuated was far from such a conception. As presided over by André Tardieu (French minister of the interior) and his newly appointed governor-general Pierre Bordes, it had a triumphalist ethos (Fig. 110). The centenary sought to demonstrate to Algerians, the metropole, and the world that the French had wrested a vast country from misery, ignorance, and political anarchy and had made it the hyperproductive jewel in a new French imperium. Incessantly drawing parallels with North Africa as the ancient breadbasket of the Roman Empire, the centenary was in a sense the apotheosis of the colonial novelist and polemicist Louis Bertrand’s campaign, conducted in his writings since at least 1900. Bertrand, now a member of the Académie Française, in 1930 published a novel

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to mark the centenary (Le roman de la conquête). His earlier Villes d’or, in the meantime, was cited as authority by the celebration’s proponents: “The French Africa of today is Roman Africa. . . . As Frenchmen, we can only rejoice that it is so. Returning to Africa, we have done nothing more than recuperate a lost province of latinity.” 11 According to the logic of latinity, the Regency of Algiers, so dear to Racim, was indigent. The rhetoric of French triumphalism infiltrated even the respected Revue des deux mondes in Paris: “The Arab, the intruder, the invader, has brought into North Africa only misery, ruin, decomposition, and death. As Latins, descendants of its first and unique civilizers, inheritors of their e¤ort, we represent the highest and most ancient Africa. We have not conquered; we have taken back what has been wrenched from us.” 12 Such writing, with its parallels to the antisemitic language of the Fascist regimes in Italy (whose claims in colonizing Tripolitania, or modern Libya, took similar lines), is an extreme version of the thinking di¤used by the centenary propaganda machine. Ageron has shown that out of a budget of over ninety million francs, the centenary earmarked six million for propaganda, using the press, radio, books, conferences, and the visual media of posters and stamps.13 Two of the visual propaganda images show the more moderate, conciliatory face of the centenary as promoted by its commissioner, Gustave Mercier. The commemorative medal designed by the Orientalist sculptor Pierre-Marie Poisson (Fig. 111) shows two powerfully masculine figures, a Kabyle chief and a French colonist in a topee, shaking hands before a pillar formed of Roman lictors’ fasces topped with the bonnet rouge, French symbol of liberty. Thus the image, with antiquity as a backdrop, recalls the principles of fraternity and liberty of the French Revolution and expresses the mutual respect in which, as Mercier’s report puts it, the steady gaze of the two men “says that each knows what he owes to the other.” 14 The most widely distributed of five large centenary posters, by Dormoy, also uses this image of fraternity. (A version of Cauvy’s poster [see Fig. 63] was another popular centenary image.) One hundred and twenty-five thousand copies of Dormoy’s poster were printed; the maquette is illustrated in Figure 112. In this paean to Algerian agricultural production, another helmetted colonist stands before a bearded indigenous farmer, against a backdrop of blue sky and wheat fields worked by a burnous-clad figure on a late-model tractor. Pictorially the colonist dominates the Algerian, a symbol for the way the French, historically, had appropriated and worked (with indigenous manpower) almost all the arable land. The foreground cornucopia of grapes, olives, wheat, tomatoes, citrus, and stone fruit is common in the iconography of the centenary. The main set piece of the celebrations was the Exposition of Oran, the second largest city in Algeria. Drawing on the well-worn precedent of metropolitan expositions and colonial fairs, it emphasized agricultural produce, mining, and new machinery for colonial work in the Algerian provinces, French Indochina, and West Africa. The centenary’s grand narrative of colonial mise en valeur and development was also evident in the new radio transmitter at Les Eucalyptus, outside Algiers, one

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figure 110 The Monument aux morts, Algiers. Boy Scouts salute the fallen of World War I, 1930.

figure 111 Pierre-Marie Poisson, Centenary of French Algeria medal, 1930.

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figure 112 Dormoy, Algeria, Land of Great Agricultural Production, maquette for centenary poster, 1930.

of the most powerful in the world, designed to send reports of the festivities as far afield as Hanoi and Washington.15 The greatest irritant to the indigenous population was apparently the raft of temporary festivities for the Algerian tour of French President Gaston Doumergue. Despite the warnings of authorities like Louis Massignon, the organizers of the centenary pressed ahead with a program of “fireworks, illuminations, nautical jousts, galas, and carousels,” a visit by the French fleet, and extensive military reenactments.16 Indigenous involvement in various ceremonies was sought, and in some cases ob-

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figure 113 Indigenous Chiefs Await the President of the French Republic, 1930.

tained (Fig. 113).17 Mercier’s official report was illustrated with equestrian fantasias and French and native soldiers in the costumes of 1830. The one party that planned a protest and boycott of the centenary, the Communist-aligned and Paris-based Etoile Nord-africaine, had been outlawed in 1929. Well before the festivities Dinet condemned the official flattery of the indigenous leadership: “It is not by dubbing all the Bach-Aghas who are illiterate in French and Arabic Grand Knights of the Legion of Honor for ‘exceptional service ’ that we will revive the prestige of France!” 18 The tangible benefits of the centenary for indigenous Algerians were slim: five million francs’ worth of works, less than the budget for propaganda. The main project, seen by the government as providing both cultural recognition and the hope of earnings, was the creation of workshops for the production of indigenous art in Kabylia. Experience dating back to the Jonnart regime must have assured the French that such schools, dedicated to pottery and weaving, were politically productive. The remaining funds were used to build a few housing estates for the elderly in Algiers and Oran, and to provide a few subventions to hospitals and mosques. As for gestures toward indigenous rights, little occurred beyond the reinstatement of two traditional titles for Arab leaders and the dismantling of a court considered biased. Given the paucity of these reforms, the military reenactments were all the more o¤ensive. As the reformist Muslim theologian Ben Badis put it: “A century would have

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figure 114 The Salle Pierre Bordes, concert hall in Algiers, 1930.

been enough to heal the wounds, but today heartless men seek to resuscitate these distant memories and to revive hatred and rancor. All these military marches and vain parades in which the pride of the vanquisher finds satisfaction constitute a supreme attack on our dignity and an insult to the memory of our glorious fathers.” 19 The largest sum in the budget was allocated for constructing the permanent cultural institutions that would commemorate the centenary. The Salle Pierre Bordes, a state-of-the-art concert hall in Algiers, was one of them (Fig. 114), but more than fifteen million francs was spent building museums in the three great centers, Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. That of Oran, the Demaeght Museum, combined a museum of fine arts (housing both antiquities and European paintings) with new facilities for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the municipal library. Its grandiose structure cost more than five million francs to erect. In Constantine, after a failed attempt to wrest a Turkish palace from the army administration, the new Gustave Mercier Museum was built. It had a historical and archaeological focus.20 The Algiers museum complemented the others. It exhibited modern French painting and sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This modernist brief of the Algiers museum, however, needs to be seen against the flurry of museological works undertaken in Algiers for the centenary. Existing historical collections at the Mustapha Museum were improved, and the installation of the Bardo Museum, emphasizing prehistory and Al-

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figure 115 Installation of the Armée d’Afrique, Casbah Museum, 1930.

gerian ethnography, was completed. Based on the famous Bardo Palace museum in Tunis, the Bardo Museum was housed in a gracious Turkish villa purchased by the government in 1926. Finally, the new Museum of the Casbah was installed in a deconsecrated mosque to display souvenirs of the original Armée d’Afrique and the “great indigenous families” that had assisted the French (Fig. 115). Equivalent displays were planned for the metropole: at the Petit Palais in Paris important paintings from Versailles and the Louvre vied with paraphernalia lent by the descendants of the French high command. Also in Paris, this time in the Louvre itself, Raymond Escholier organized a major retrospective of Delacroix’s art.21

Prehistory of the Museum of Fine Arts

The National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers was more than a creation of the centenary that funded its construction, however. It was the result of a late-nineteenth-century proposal that paralleled the e¤orts of many regional towns in mainland France to endow themselves with such monuments to self-improvement and civic identity.22 But in the vexatious environment of a settler culture established by military rule, it had taken some sixty years to set up the first museum in Algiers, the Mustapha Museum, devoted to Roman antiquities and Islamic objets d’art. During the liberal governor Cam-

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bon’s administration, about 1897, the new Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists called for a museum of painting and sculpture. At the time, a diverse collection of pictures was scattered—in the town hall, the municipal theater, and the Society of Fine Arts, “a hall with a rough and repellent character, somewhat like a barn.” 23 As the author of the first catalogue of the Municipal Museum recalled in 1911, “the inadequate space, the lack of security for the pictures, and the bad light prevented this embryo from developing. Because word of these limitations had been conveyed to the minister of public instruction and fine arts [in Paris], Algiers was systematically excluded during the annual distribution of works acquired by the state.” 24 The author understands the French government’s policy on transferring works of art to provincial museums, which, as Daniel Sherman has shown, since the Napoleonic era had served the ideological function of disseminating enlightenment to Frenchmen far from the capital. To qualify for the transfers a town needed a museum building meeting professional standards of security, lighting, and conservation. Under the Third Republic a team of inspectors toured France assessing museums: very likely the Algiers municipal collection had been inspected under this system and found wanting.25 When Arsène Alexandre reported on the Algerian arts in 1905, he devoted two pages to the as yet unbuilt museum of painting and sculpture, suggesting the grounds of the Palais d’Eté as a site and, surprisingly, stressing the aesthetic hazards of accepting state transfers of contemporary works.26 In 1908 the campaign for a fine arts museum gathered weight with the petitioning of municipal authorities by members of the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists. They lamented that the capital of French North Africa—center of government and tourism—had no museum and was thus deprived of gifts from the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and generous donors. They emphasized the loss of a potential market: “Winter tourists, on somber and morose days, have no distraction and are confined to their hotels.” And they pointed to another, future, audience: “A museum is completely indispensable to the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts and is one of the most powerful ways of imbuing the neo-French generations with the spirit of our race and, as a result, joining the mother country and her adopted children.” 27 Such arguments for cultural reconciliation had an e¤ect: Mayor Altairac of Algiers and his council moved in February 1908 to purchase and renovate the old Campement Militaire, an army administration building in the downtown Rue de Constantine. When the work was completed, the building was inaugurated on 30 May 1908, with the mayor and Léonce Bénédite presiding.28 Bénédite had traveled from Paris primarily in his capacity as curator of the Luxembourg Museum, representing the French state and remarking in his address that the state would no longer show toward Algiers the “prudent parsimony” it had in the past.29 Bénédite ’s presence at the birth of the Algiers museum indicates yet again his sway over the institutions of Orientalism. His prediction about state largesse proved right: the Algiers Municipal Museum’s catalogue in 1911 listed some one hundred and ten paintings, with a full quarter of the works

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“gifts of the state,” including classical canvases attributed to Paris Bordone and Claude Lorrain, some second-string Barbizon painters, and academic Orientalists such as Hippolyte Lazerges and Victor Prouvé (with his redoubtable Sardanapalus, discussed in Chapter 6). State transfers of contemporary art were avoided, following Alexandre ’s advice. Works on French subjects were lent by the local Fine Arts Society, while the Comité du Vieil Alger lent one of several paintings of the Mosque of Sidi Abd-Er-Rahman, by Alfred Chataud. The second major gifting body to the Algiers Municipal Museum was the Paris Society of French Orientalist Painters, which donated over a dozen works. Bénédite had surely organized both this donation and that of the state, making him responsible for almost a third of the collections of the embryonic museum. Local artists or regular visitors of note such as Dinet, J.-L. Antoni, Charles Cottet, Maxime Noiré, Georges Rochegrosse, and José Silbert had also personally presented works.30 E¤orts were made, consonant with long-standing French tradition, to represent key monuments of classical art at the Municipal Museum: modest city funds made it possible to buy casts of antique statuary from the Louvre and Greek medals from the British Museum. With the addition of drawings, prints, photographs, art books, and a collection of casts of French sculpture from the twelfth to the fourteenth century funded by the director of fine arts in Paris,31 the heterodox Algiers museum collection was in place, even if quartered provisionally on a site that, according to the mayor, would one day see “monuments of fine architecture . . . destined to house the library, the museum, the école des beaux-arts, and the future conservatory of music.” 32 In 1930 the Algiers Municipal Museum did become the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers.

Alazard and the Centenary Building Tant vaudra le conservateur, tant vaudra le musée. – a r s e` n e a l e x a n d r e , Reflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 1907

In the meantime, however, a casino was built on the Algiers Municipal Museum site, symptomatic of the building campaigns and values brought on by the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. The fine arts continued to be a minor a¤air in the capital until the centenary, with its propagandist initiatives. Officers in charge of the centenary budget, urged on by the dynamic new curator of the museum, Jean Alazard, assumed the financial burden. That action made the new Algiers National Museum of Fine Arts a reality. Alazard is a substantial figure in the history of twentieth-century colonial art. He is known to specialists in Orientalism for his careful history, L’Orient et la peinture française au XIXe siècle, d’Eugène Delacroix à Auguste Renoir, unrivaled before the publication of Philippe Jullian’s book in the 1970s.

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figure 116 Regnier and Guion, National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, 1930.

Alazard’s book was in fact a by-product of his assembling, in record time, a representative collection of French Orientalist art for the centenary celebrations, crowned by the opening of the Algiers museum in 1930. Unlike his predecessors at the Algiers Municipal Museum, Alazard was a professional scholar of proven credentials. He is still remembered for his thesis on the Florentine portrait from Botticelli to Bronzino. First published in 1924, it was issued in an American edition as recently as 1968.33 Alazard published eighteen books, ranging wide over Italian art, with significant publications on Orientalism and a surprising sideline in political essays.34 In about 1922 he left the Institut Français in Florence to take up a post lecturing in the history of art at the University of Algiers. He soon involved himself with the contemporary Abd-el-Tif artists and thus with issues of Orientalism.35 In 1926 he was made curator of the Algiers Municipal Museum and began to campaign for a new building. In 1927, supported by the Friends of the Algiers Fine Arts Museum, Alazard began negotiating with M. Brunel, the financial director of the Algerian government who soon became a senior official

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for the centenary, and the mayor of Algiers.36 Brunel supported the project, and Violette approved the provision of five million francs for the new museum late that year, quite possibly with some hesitation, given Alazard’s Francophile interests. The prestigious site selected for the new museum was calculated to have maximum impact: above the Jardin d’Essai at Hamma, a place popular with tourists and painters ever since the days of Fromentin (Fig. 116). The official architects were the local firm of Regnier and Guion that since 1914 had overseen the improvement and restoration of the Jardin d’Essai. Above the familiar section, with its avenues of figs, dragon palms, and other vegetation, the architects had installed a French garden, with lawns, ornamental ponds, and flower beds. They sited the museum overlooking this new French garden, giving it “marvelous views over the whole of this magnificent national park.” 37 The National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers rises above the formal gardens like a massive Italian villa—a European monument to European painting. Paul Guion employed a typical 1930s BeauxArts plan for a museum building, with a central portico and pavilions at either end. Unornamented, its rectilinear windows severe, it could almost be called neo-Greek in inspiration,38 a resonance that makes sense given the centenary’s mythologizing of the Latin heritage of France in the Mediterranean. The building’s overall statement is one of grandeur, restrained modernity, and permanence—French Algeria without end. (Few among the French, however, would have concurred with the saying popular among the indigenous at the centenary: “The French are celebrating the first centenary of French Algeria. They will not celebrate a second.”)39 The building did make a few gestures to local architecture. The two narrow lower floors, each with a seventy-meter-long sculpture gallery, back onto a cli¤ and support the main floor, which extends into the hillside. That upper floor contains the painting galleries, library, and offices. Between the central library and the wings are two large courtyards containing “Moroccan gardens,” behind a colonnade and pergola from which there are spectacular views of the Bay of Algiers (Fig. 117).40 In this courtyard zone Guion made use of Mediterranean architectural vocabularies. The peristyle invokes ancient Roman pleasure gardens; the orientalizing columns, an invented order, have elements of primitive Doric and neo-Egyptian design in the capitals; the polychrome tiles used to decorate the shafts of the columns are a North African reference, as is the extensive tile work (by the FrenchAlgerian ceramist Delduc) of the museum’s floors, the mosaic on the ground floor, for example, inspired by the patterns of Berber carpets (Fig. 118). Such historicizing references were subsumed in the restrained modernity of a building aiming at a state-of-the-art technical installation. Regnier and Guion, admirers of Auguste Perret, employed a steel-frame structure with stone and concrete cladding. Skylights, electric lighting, and a system of filtered and heated air were installed;41 ornament and decorative detail were kept to a minimum so that “paintings and sculptures alone hold the gaze,” as the curator put it.42 The museum is far from the florid Jonnart style of prewar Algiers or the more refined arabisances

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figure 117 Paul Guion, design for the terrace of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, ca. 1928.

figure 118 Hall of plaster casts, National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, in 1948.

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of Lyautey’s protectorate, discussed in Chapter 8. The ethos of the Algerian centenary, which stressed technological modernity, glancing backward toward the Latin heritage and scanting indigenous interests, made arabisances an implausible option. One visitor from Paris declared the museum “one of the most noble public monuments of North Africa. Its style is at once resolutely modern and Oriental, yet with nothing of that bazaar frippery that official architects often arrive at.” 43

Alazard’s Collections

Jean Alazard, in his various pronouncements on the Algiers museum, conceived the French community as its principal (if not only) beneficiary.44 He mentioned no other potential constituencies, either among the indigenous population or among the numerous settlers in Algeria from Italy, Spain, and Malta. In its prewar petition the Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, more inclusively, had targeted the “adopted children” of the mother country as well as the “neo-French generations.” And Commissioner Mercier declared the museum an opportunity for the “new Algerian generations . . . to imbue themselves with the traditions of the French spirit, and European travelers to interest themselves in the vestiges of our past.” 45 Other voices spoke of alternative visions. Victor Barrucand, for example, proposed a more exclusively North African focus that would include indigenous art: “Our Algiers museum must now seek its way in the documentary past—including the manifestations of old indigenous painting; in the labor of contemporaries, and in the character of the country magnified by the vision of artists. In my opinion the museum of Algiers should not resemble others; North Africa wants to find within it the luminous revelation of its own sensibility.” 46 The collection Alazard assembled between 1927 and 1930, however, imposed the idea of a museum of French art as appropriate for the colony. It being financially impossible, he reasoned, to collect works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,47 he focused on building a modern collection. In it three emphases emerged: modern French painting after 1850 (with a special focus on impressionism); French sculpture from the later nineteenth century to 1930, and French Orientalism to 1930. Although the uneven collections of the old Algiers Municipal Museum required “a harsh weeding out,” 48 they did contain the mixture of French landscape and Orientalism that Bénédite, about 1911, had established as a logical collecting focus for Algiers. In both his curating and writing Alazard assumed the mantle of Bénédite (who had died in 1925) and continued to apply his historiographical model in purchasing the works of Orientalists.49 The heart of the collection is a run of later-nineteenth-century French landscapes, from the Barbizon painters through the impressionists. Théodore Rousseau’s Corner of a Forest (Coin d’un fôret) is followed chronologically by a more substantial Gustave Courbet, The Old Bridge (Le vieux pont), purchased from a 1929 exhibition in Paris. Landscapes by Camille Corot and Stanislas Lepine established the lyric view of the French countryside, and the art of portraiture was well represented

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figure 119 Claude Monet, Rocks at Belle-Ile, oil on canvas, 1886.

by Henri Fantin-Latour and Gustave Ricard. Fully two rooms were devoted to impressionism, an area in which Alazard had to purchase extensively. Beginning with two impressive views of French ports by the “ancestors” Eugène-Louis Boudin and Johan Jongkind, Alazard presented his pièce de résistance, an 1886 Rocks at Belle-Ile (Les rochers de Belle-Ile), a scene of stormy weather painted by the “animator of impressionism,” Claude Monet (Fig. 119).50 The Monet sat with Alfred Sisley’s Bridge at Moret, Winter (Le pont de Moret, e¤et d’hiver) and Camille Pissarro’s Woman at the Window (Femme à la fenêtre)—all key works in the collection. To these were added a small Renoir landscape of Cagnes, a Berthe Morisot interior, and a well-constructed view of the Seine by Armand Guillaumin. Neo-impressionism was represented by Henri-Edmond Cross, Paul Signac, and Maximilien Luce rather than by Georges Seurat; the suite of modernists closes with a minor Gauguin oil, Brittany Landscape (Paysage de Bretagne), and a “rather blurry” late pastel of dancers by Degas that, according to Barrucand, would hardly enable one to form an exact idea of Degas’s “cruel yet witty spirit.” 51 From today’s perspective Alazard’s collection of French art after 1900 seems highly conservative; yet it was comparable to that of the Luxembourg and of other leading museums. The avant-garde, from the fauves through the cubists to the surrealists, was avoided entirely. Alazard referred to them obliquely when he wrote that “many bizarre things” were excluded in preference for works “inspired

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figure 120 Antoine Bourdelle, La France, at National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, in 1948.

by the French tradition.” 52 Thus one finds an Interior (Intérieur) by Pierre Bonnard, a large sketch by Maurice Denis for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (1912), and a small Cagnes landscape of Renoir’s garden from the period of Matisse ’s apparent dotage in the early 1920s. There were numerous works by popular artists of the School of Paris from the 1920s like Maurice Utrillo, Maurice de Vlaminck, Henry de Waroquier, Jacqueline Marval, and Suzanne Valadon. In a telltale discussion of his extensive collection of the “national art” of sculpture, Alazard compared the “audacious” tendencies of modern painting unfavorably with the calm sense of tradition in new French statuary, which “hardly participates at all in that unhinging of sensibilities and intellects” evident in recent painting.53 For one visitor to the Algiers museum, “the gallery of sculpture is the grand attraction. . . . It would be difficult to find in France the equivalent of this collection in which the most vigorous bronzes . . . by Rodin, Bourdelle, Maillol, Despiau . . . would be presented in a more impressive ordering or a more flattering light.” 54 There were two groups by Antoine-Louis Barye and a selection of Rodins, his “admirable Age of Bronze (L’âge d’arain), Meditation (Méditation), Springtime (Printemps), and good busts and several works of smaller dimensions.” 55 The centerpiece of the gallery was Antoine Bourdelle ’s massive Heracles (Héraklès), a monument to French ideas of antique valor in an expressionist idiom. Bourdelle ’s vigilant statue France (La France) was installed at the museum’s entrance (Fig. 120). As contemporary photographs show, an extensive cast

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collection occupied the entire ground floor, with Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Rodin’s Saint John the Baptist (Saint Jean Baptiste; see Fig. 118) prominently in view.56 The link between such works and the “Latin heritage” of Roman statuary assembled in the museums of Mustapha and Constantine (or at the archaeological sites Djemila and Cherchell) formed part of the curator’s rationale for the focus on sculpture.57 The Islamic community in the Maghreb had never had a tradition of figurative sculpture, the medium to which the Koran’s theological injunction against image making most surely applied. One can imagine the discomfort of an observant Muslim in galleries of figurative works. But the French in Algeria had long imposed three-dimensional monuments in more public spaces, starting with the statue of the duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement (1845) and finishing with the various monuments to the Armée d’Afrique and the fallen military installed for the centenary celebrations.58 How Alazard could have assembled such an impressive collection in so little time is an interesting question, whose answer reveals the close rapport between the colonial art institution and the metropolitan art nexus, both commercial and bureaucratic. Records at the Centre des Archives d’OutreMer show that by mid-1928 the centenary budget had made available to Alazard the substantial sum of one million francs for the purchase of artworks.59 Eventual purchases totaled more than a million and a half francs, and in the four years following the centenary, substantial further funds must have been allocated.60 To bridge the physical and communications gap between Algiers and Paris, Alazard asked the director of fine arts to recommend a panel of experts in Paris to identify works for purchase. Those experts (senior museum men and advisors to the Luxembourg Museum) encouraged dealers to give the fledgling museum good prices. Alazard was careful to legitimate his recommendations through that panel: “I believe that when one is charged with constituting the collections of a museum, it is best to surround oneself with authorities; this establishes tranquillity for oneself and, what is more, ensures acceptance on the part of the public, so often ill informed.” 61 So, for example, in extolling his important Monet seascape to Commissioner Mercier, Alazard quoted Raymond Koechlin, president of the Council of National Museums, who advised: “I would be very happy for you to acquire it. The sea is truly admirable; at the price you quoted, it is not dear; it would have a great impact in any gallery” (his emphasis).62 The prices Alazard paid reflect his aesthetic priorities. The top eight purchases accounted for twothirds of his initial centenary budget of one million francs. Only two works exceeded one hundred thousand francs in value: Delacroix’s Giaour Pursuing the Abductors of His Mistress (Le giaour pursuivant les ravisseurs de sa maîtresse, one hundred forty thousand francs) and the Monet seascape (one hundred thirty thousand francs). His other major purchases, in descending order, were FantinLatour, Courbet, Pissarro, Rodin, and Gauguin (fifty thousand francs each) and Alexandre Decamps, Gustave Ricard, Berthe Morisot, and Henri-Edmond Cross.63 The curator mobilized two other major

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figure 121 François Barry, Inauguration of the Statue of the Duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers, 1846, oil on canvas, n.d.

sources in assembling his collection: gifts of private patrons, and state deposits. The guarantee of the new building and the sense of occasion provided by the centenary garnered gifts from prominent figures associated with Orientalism, like Baron Arthur de Chassériau, now president of the Society of French Orientalist Painters. Wealthy individual Parisians with interests in Algeria also assisted, for example, the comte de Polignac, who gave both contemporary and rococo works, and the banker M. David-Weill.64 Finally, prominent members of the Algiers community were donors: Frédéric Lung, a friend of Dinet’s and patron of the Abd-el-Tifians, gave Albert Besnard’s Fountain at Kouba (Fontaine de Kouba), and other donations followed.65 Alazard also accelerated the program of state deposits by petitioning the Louvre and Versailles for old masters and historical works that had a special relevance to Algiers. Thus François Barry’s Inauguration of the Statue of the Duc d’Orléans in the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers, 1846 (an 1860s picture celebrating an earlier event; Fig. 121). From the Château de Versailles, it was unveiled in a cannily organized interim exhibition of new gifts and purchases that seems to have encouraged the release of further funds. Barrucand applauded the policy, concluding of the Barry: “See how this canvas, unnoticed at Versailles, suddenly takes on value when returned to Algiers, where it both illustrates and is incorporated into its history. . . . How many other works of North African inspiration or fabrication sleep in the museums of France?” 66 The growing collection of Orientalists di¤erentiated the Algiers museum from any other. Alazard, taking his cue from Bénédite, acknowledged this as “one of the original features of the Al-

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giers museum: for surely it is here, at the doorstep of African exoticism, that one should be able to study the diverse tendencies of Orientalism.” 67 Museums are instruments of instruction, so that a museum in a North African location that was to foster memory and self-awareness demanded North African subjects. Here again the Algiers museum replicated in an exotic context the collecting preferences of nineteenth-century French provincial museums, which commonly solicited works from Paris touching on the history of their region. The sense in which Algiers was a “national” museum is relevant here. Alazard sought and obtained that official designation, upgrading the museum from “municipal” to “national,” a status requiring the approval of both Algerian and Parisian authorities.68 It meant the museum was one of the prestigious French “Musées nationaux,” a group that exists to this day. To that extent it symbolizes how Algeria, legalistically, was an extension of French territory overseas. But the designation “national” also meant that the Algiers museum represented the “nation.” If that nation is France, the museum’s obligation to provide a history of French art is understood. If it is French Algeria, however, Orientalism’s preeminent role becomes clearer: e¤ectively Alazard, in seeking the change in status and name, stated that the aesthetic record of the French cultural presence in Algeria was, simply, the painted European vision of North African peoples and places. The designation “Musée National” was retained even after the Algerian war of independence and the flight of the French (who repatriated much of the collection, ultimately restored to Algeria in the late 1960s owing to the e¤orts of the pro-independence pied-noir director who replaced Alazard, Jean de Maisonseul).69 Severed from the French Musées nationaux, the institution now stood for the fine arts in the newly independent Republic of Algeria. In 1930, however, the North African component was confined, as Barrucand said, to French works “of North African inspiration or fabrication.” Two important historical exhibitions were timed for the opening of the museum by President Doumergue in May 1930: Alazard’s own Peintres de l’Orient au XIXeme siècle and the documentary Exposition historique du Centenaire, assembled by the head of the National Library of Algeria, Gabriel Esquer.70 For the first of them Alazard had envisaged “a Delacroix room, a Chassériau room, a Fromentin room, a Dehodencq room, and a Renoir room.” 71 Those rooms were the focus for the eighty works assembled for the temporary exhibition, although the “Renoir room” was reduced to just two small oils (Algiers Garden [ Jardin d’Alger], lent by the artist’s son, and Algerian Figures [Types algériens; see Fig. 16], lent by Durand-Ruel). Monsieur Auguste, Narcisse Berchère, Decamps, Gustave Guillaumet, Albert Lebourg, Prosper Marilhat, and Henri Regnault also figured prominently. In his purchases Alazard tried to assemble much the same canon of master Orientalists. Almost half of his centenary purchases of paintings were Oriental subjects, less expensive than the works of the impressionists. He spent a large sum on Delacroix’s Giaour to begin the collection but for Decamps and Marilhat was unable at first to obtain works of “exotic” inspiration. Chassériau’s and Fro-

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mentin’s cases were happier thanks to both a group of drawings Chassériau made on his trip to Algeria in 1846 and Fromentin’s Fountain at Kouba and Souvenir of Algeria (Souvenir de l’Algérie), with Arab horses running before a ruined Roman aqueduct. Dehodencq was well represented in the permanent collection by three paintings and five drawings formerly owned by Gabriel Séailles and a Negro Dance (Danse nègre) given by the Louvre.72 Alazard was frank about second-rate museum possessions: his one Regnault, a drawn study of prayer in a mosque, he considered “precise and cold.” The impressionist Lebourg was a strong point of the Algiers collection. Following Bénédite, Alazard was convinced of his importance and managed to obtain several small yet typical Algerian Lebourgs, probably from the family after the artist’s death in 1928. As for the Orientalist Renoir, one of the two temporary exhibition pictures, the familiar panel with studies of Algerian figures, was apparently given to the museum by Durand-Ruel through the intervention of Koechlin.73 Alazard included the work of contemporary Orientalists resident in the country under the title of School of Algiers: “Undeniably there is already a pictorial tradition in Algeria. I am thinking of Etienne Dinet, who became the painter of Bou-Saâda, of Rochegrosse, of Suréda, of Antoni . . . or that curious lover of scintillating visions, Maxime Noiré. I am thinking of Albert Besnard who, before crossing India, traveled through Algeria. . . . For thirty years Orientalism has been renewing itself. The Villa Abd-el-Tif, of which the museum o¤ers a complete history, has contributed much to this renewal.”74 In e¤ect Alazard employed the School of Algiers in the museum to summarize the history of recent French painting. The Villa Abd-el-Tif was central to that venture: since its inception in 1908, one or two of the best works by each of its residents had been allocated to the Municipal Museum.75 Equally influential was the modernist painter Albert Marquet, who, having married a French Algerian author, Marcelle Marby, often painted views of the ports of Algiers and Bougie on his frequent visits to Algeria (Fig. 122). Alazard later recognized that Marquet’s technique “has seduced many young artists in Algeria” and that any definition of the School of Algiers would have to accord him a generous place.76 An interesting minority position among the School of Algiers artists whose works Alazard purchased in 1930 was that of two women inspired directly by Islamic decorative arts. Both were relatives of artists: as noted in Chapter 6, Ketty Carré had first traveled to Algiers when her husband, Léon, won the Abd-el-Tif scholarship. As early as 1912 she purchased traditional textiles from southern Algeria and the Sudan.77 Ketty Carré’s small-scale paintings have a clear affiliation to Léon’s work as an illustrator, from his 1912 Jardin des caresses to The Thousand and One Nights, on which the couple ’s friend Mohammed Racim collaborated. The typical work by Ketty Carré is a gouache figuring an interior of women’s apartments or courtyards with fountains, a milieu of “mosaics and tiled paving, divans and beds, floral faiences, amber rosaries, . . . exotic birds, and rush mats.” 78 Using vivid poster colors, she paints such places with both a decorative sense of fabric patterns and an ability to render crisply delineated surfaces in perspective. Her mastery of the details of traditional costume and dec-

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figure 122 Albert Marquet, The Admiralty Dock at Algiers, oil on canvas, ca. 1930.

orative arts shows a sympathy with the aims of Racim. Yet her skilled figure drawing and perspective and the reserve of her decorative sense give works like her Courtesan (La courtisane; see Plate 16) a di¤erent, more opulent appeal. Alazard bought Arab Woman in a Garden (Femme arabe dans un jardin) for his museum and exhibited two gouache oriental scenes in Brussels in 1931.79 Carré had the vigorous support of Barrucand, who saw her as a savior of North African art: “The gouaches of Ketty Carré are the most oriental and incisive works North Africa has produced. . . . Her rare pieces are considered, meditated poems, as expressive and naive as a smile. They flatter our attention by a secondary exoticism, not that of direct observation, but that of spiritual transposition. . . . [Hers is] a personal, rounded, and refined art that uses details and accessories only to symbolize the idea or to set it on the page in an ingenious fashion.” 80 A woman with a higher official profile in Algiers (yet perhaps less admired among tastemakers) was Yvonne Herzig (later Kleiss-Herzig). Not an émigré like Carré, she was a pied-noir artist, born in Kabylia, the daughter of the painter and designer Edouard Herzig. Trained by Cauvy at the Algiers Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she was thus a second-generation School of Algiers artist, despite traveling to Paris in 1913 for further study.81 A regular at the Salon of the Society of Algerian and Ori-

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entalist Artists, she had exhibited decorative art alongside her father’s easel paintings as early as 1912.82 Kleiss-Herzig won prizes and scholarships through the 1920s, becoming the sole female winner of the prestigious Grand Prix Artistique de l’Algérie in 1928 (five years before Racim).83 Her subject matter of semiclad women and pet exotic animals in Turkish courtyards is similar to Ketty Carré’s, even if her gouaches are blanched in tone, their technique more pristine, their execution more redolent of academic drawing skills. Although the distance from a women’s Orientalism so in sympathy with Islamic art to the collecting of indigenous Algerian painters would not seem far, Jean Alazard was hardly a member of the indigenophile camp, and the brief of the centenary museum, as he expressed it, required no gestures toward the indigenous. He could claim that traditional decorative arts were the province of the Bardo and Mustapha Museums; only Algerian art that approached French “fine art” might merit inclusion in the art museum. In his final round of purchases a few months before the museum’s opening, Alazard included a single modest canvas by Azouaou Mammeri, Arab House (Maison arabe). His commitment to Mohammed Racim, who had the solid support of the Algiers cognoscenti, was greater: he paid the considerable sum of ten thousand francs for a group of Racim miniatures.84 Although the status of miniatures as fine art had been contested, Alazard could incorporate them with the drawings and other graphic works he collected. The Racims included the significant Barbarossa and His Fleet before Algiers (Barberousse et sa flotte devant Alger) and The Caliph and His Entourage (Le caliphe et sa suite).85 An additional Racim and a Mammeri were transferred to the Demaeght Museum in Oran in early 1930, and by 1937 Racim’s early Hunt Scene (Scène de chasse) was in the Algiers collection.86 Orif plausibly suggests the centenary purchases were made to placate the indigenous camp that was so angered by the celebrations, but there was perhaps more to it than that: Alazard was favorable to both artists in his writings of the day.87 The fate of Dinet, that critic of the centenary, was still less auspicious. Alazard declined to purchase a single canvas of his for the new museum.88 A small number of Dinets had previously been donated to the Municipal Museum, but competition from the embryonic Dinet Museum may have discouraged further purchases. François Pouillon has revealed the vicissitudes of e¤orts to establish a Dinet museum, proposed for a location in the Algiers Casbah soon after the artist’s death in 1929 by a committee led by Jeanne Dinet Rollince (who was married to a French general). The future location was soon changed to Bou-Saâda at the insistence of Sliman ben Ibrahim, Dinet’s sole beneficiary. But a museum as such was not built in Sliman’s lifetime, and Sliman gradually sold o¤ the memorabilia and collections. The Dinet Museum finally opened in 1993 at Bou-Saâda (only to be trashed soon after, probably by the Armed Islamic Group).89 As Pouillon conjectures, Alazard was no supporter of Dinet’s art and opposed the establishment of a museum of Orientalism that would rival his own. In all likelihood Alazard’s pro-impressionist aesthetic made him uncomfortable with the academic precision of Dinet’s technique, and, no great

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indigenophile, he was probably also unsympathetic to the artist’s politics. Alazard actually transferred one Dinet, Old Arab Women (Vieilles femmes arabes), which the artist himself had donated to the Municipal Museum before 1911, to the Demaeght Museum in Oran in 1930.90 Given the immense cortege that had assembled just months before the centenary to bury Dinet in his Bou-Saâda koubba, or sepulchre, according to the Islamic rite, such neglect seems even more extraordinary. Numerous French citizens, officers, and dignitaries were present on that occasion, along with thousands of indigenous Algerians moved by the death of the first French convert to Islam to have accomplished the hadj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.91 Governor-General Pierre Bordes himself delivered the eulogy, whose text, widely di¤used, presents Dinet’s conversion without rancor—indeed as a model of the “Franco-Muslim” identity that for most Frenchmen remained hypothetical: A great French artist, the painter Etienne Dinet, has died a Muslim in faith. . . . He who consecrated his life and his talent to magnifying this country and its indigenous people has the right to a public homage at the moment he comes to sleep his final sleep. Dinet’s conversion to Islam in no way touched his patriotic faith. Just as he remained Dinet in becoming Nasr’Edine, the great friend of Islam remained a son of France. Never did he separate the duties which devolved upon him from this double personality. And surely that is the supreme lesson we should draw from his life.92

The perspective of the eulogy makes all the more remarkable Alazard’s inability to accord Dinet, that symbol of bicultural reconciliation, more than a small place in his museum of fine arts. As we have seen, Dinet was pessimistic about the centenary after the sacking of Maurice Violette. He would agree to participate only by serving on the Commission on Muslim Arts (along with Prosper Ricard), and he regretted doing even that. In any event, he died before witnessing the “ugliness” and “ignominy” he feared in the centenary.93 One may ask finally just what kind of institution the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers was. Neither ugly nor ignominious, it was instead a focus for cultural life planted in an equivocal setting. For thirty years the Algiers museum had been of small account, a municipal a¤air with insubstantial collections and no dedicated space. It was not only provincial (in the prejudicial sense), but also colonial. The transformations of the centenary rapidly led to a quite di¤erent institution: in all of France (colonies and metropole included) the latest and most glamorous structure built as an art gallery at a time when there were still relatively few. The high level of professionalism in the planning and execution of the project resulted from the close rapport between central and colonial authorities. A genuine monument, with distinction in both its design and siting, the Algiers museum had the potential to be an icon for a new society.

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Its failures stemmed from the narrow audience the institution recognized and produced. Both the building and its collections embody all the prejudices of the mission civilatrice. If something like a politics of multiculturalism had been available at the time, one can readily imagine a very di¤erent program for the museum (even in the same classicizing, modernist building)—one that might not have repudiated the claims of French painting, strongly represented by Alazard, but would have lessened the place of French sculpture out of cultural sympathy for Algerian Muslims. The proportion of Spanish and Andalusian art would have been increased, as would displays representing the Italian and Maltese communities. Above all, generous spaces would have been given over to the indigenous visual arts, in a way that contemporary scholarship had not yet conceived. Such changes, however, would have required modifying the very French notion of beaux-arts—painting, sculpture, and graphics—to include not only miniature painting but also calligraphy, inscriptions, and the best in inlaid furniture, carpets, and jewelry. Rapidly the culturally specific fine art museum would have been replaced by a more universal museum where the presentation of the ancient and the indigenous arts is equal to that of European fine art. But in 1930 the logic of French museology meant that those relics were represented separately, at the refurbished Bardo and Mustapha Museums; given lower status; and displayed like ethnographic material. Thus one sees more clearly the Francophile nature of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers, which, one imagines, was seldom visited by audiences other than those the texts of the day implicitly courted: the French and pied-noir middle classes, tourists to Algiers, and groups of indigenous schoolchildren exposed to the benefits of modern European culture. How the museum developed after its inception, in the decades leading up to and following the struggles of decolonization, awaits detailed study. What is plain, however, is the exceptionally strong hand given the curator, Jean Alazard, who actively held his post until his death in 1961. With regular curatorial gestures toward the more easygoing among contemporary School of Paris and School of Algiers artists, Alazard remained true to the centenary brief, building art collections for an Algeria that was French.94

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Conclusion

T

o propose some concluding reflections on this history of Orientalist art, let me return to the notion of the spy satellite, both authorial and anachronistic, mentioned in the first pages of my introduction. A satellite gives ubiquity of vision, but its cameras need always to have direction, and its images require interpretation. Stationed over the northern Mediterranean, its lens would be directed toward Algiers and Paris with equal clarity. Strange perturbations would have been visible in the prosperous colony in 1930, as people rushed into the unaccustomed activity of the centenary. New roads were carved into the mountains, great buildings of cement and steel thrown up in the capital—concert halls, museums, apartment blocks. A close-up of the building site at Hamma reveals Jean Alazard, sunburned and bustling, directing the completion of the Algiers museum. Wooden crates are seen being unloaded on the docks of Algiers: inside are varnished oil paintings, patinated bronze sculptures. The crates are trucked up to Hamma by Algerian workers, men who care less than usual about the things inside—foreign, even blasphemous things, not destined for them; things made by and for the French. Working for the French centenary prompts a resentment that constricts the chest. The satellite observes that indigenous people lie low during the festival year of 1930.

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Piercing the rain clouds over Vincennes, in eastern Paris, the camera sees another vast construction site. Around the banks of Lake Daumesnil, the muddy beginnings of the International Colonial Exposition can be discerned. Foundations are laid for the ultramodern Cité des Informations, and the more stately Museum of the Colonies, which will receive an astonishing facade of relief carvings of exotic and colonial scenes by the sculptor Alfred Janniot. Dozens of colonial pavilions in lath and stucco go up slowly, their visual extravagance exceeding that of any pavilions built in the past: the plaster-cast fantasy of Angkor Wat; the symbolic bullock horns of the Malagasy tower. In the thatch-roofed enclave of French West Africa, French artisans endow the huts with carved and painted “native” decorations, drawn by the architect L. A. Fichet. Elsewhere, skilled workers from Indochina supply architectural details. Quarters are made ready for the hundreds of colonial performers to come. Although the mustachioed, aging figure of Hubert Lyautey, exposition commissioner and supposed conciliator, is seldom visible on the site, his influence is everywhere evident. At Vincennes, unlike Algiers, the French are much concerned with the trappings of indigenous culture. But to no avail, this courting of indigenous interests. Like the camera-toting agents doing surveillance for the French police, the satellite observes activity in other parts of Paris. Members of the French Communist Party, among them a number of leading surrealists, having judged the colonial exposition, organize a counterexposition, La vérité aux colonies, with funds from the Communist International. Housed in a monument to Communist radicality—Melnikov’s Soviet pavilion, left over from the 1925 Arts Decos exposition—the counterexposition opens in late September 1931. It o¤ers a large display of indigenous artworks, kitsch European religious objects ridiculed as “fetishes,” documentation of French atrocities in the colonies, and placards from Marx and Lenin denouncing the oppression of one people by another.1 Although surrealists like André Breton and Paul Eluard were the main authors of the radical tracts Ne visitez pas l’exposition coloniale and Premier bilan de l’exposition coloniale, indigenous activists were cosignatories (though unnamed for reasons of safety). Young intellectuals from Senegal, Indochina, the French Antilles, and Algeria, many of them members of the Communists’ Union intercoloniale, helped distribute such texts near the approaches to “Lyauteyville” (as a lampoon named the exposition). Other indigenous activists composed even more virulently anticolonial pamphlets. Such protests expose the exposition as an exercise in propaganda like the Algerian centenary. A significant moment in the formation of independence movements among the French colonies, the anticolonial protest against the exposition anticipates the decolonization of the 1950s. I shift the picture now from exhibition and protest activity to the fine arts at the Vincennes exposition. At once a culmination and a résumé of the period and the policies studied in this book, the roll call of artists, curators, and critics present could stand as aide-mémoire to the main actors, issues, and institutions in this history of French Orientalism. The three main fine arts displays at Vincennes were housed in the Palace of Contemporary Colonial Fine Arts, designed by the architect

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figure 123 Charles Halley, Palace of Contemporary Colonial Fine Arts, Paris Exposition, 1931.

Charles Halley with a black modernist peristyle (Fig. 123), and the other two in the Museum of the Colonies. That second building, retained after the exposition, is now the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. In the Museum of the Colonies there was a large scholarly exhibit of objects, prints, and memorabilia documenting the history of the French colonies from their origins as well as a “Historical Retrospective of Orientalist Art,” displaying museum art selected by Gaston Bernheim de Villers in collaboration with Jean Alazard from Algiers.2 The protagonists of the first two chapters of this book were amply represented in the retrospective: Delacroix, with his great Rubensian fragment the Lion Hunt from the Bordeaux Museum, the Montpellier Fantasia, and two dozen watercolors; and Fromentin, that ever-eager proselytizer of the Orient, with eight characteristic hunts and landscapes. Chassériau was present in canvases lent by his family, Belly in his Louvre Pilgrims Going to Mecca. Marilhat, Géricault, Dehodencq, Lebourg, and Guillaumet were all on display, some in works lent by the new Algiers museum. (Alazard was doubtless delighted to advertise its existence.) Renoir appeared, firmly ensconced in the Orientalist canon. By 1931 he was recognized as the only major impressionist to have painted in the East, and his Orientalist oeuvre was finally becoming known. Jean Alazard had just devoted the final chapter of his new monograph on the movement to Renoir, and the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery had bought and sold the work of this artist, whose status (following his death in 1919) had risen to new heights in the 1920s.3 In the Museum of the Colonies were nine canvases, from all phases of Renoir’s career, including the

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early Madame Stora in Algerian Costume, his 1875 copy of Delacroix’s Jewish Wedding, a palmstudded Jardin d’Essai, and several figures from the 1881–82 voyages, as well as two monumental paintings of Oriental dancers produced in 1909 for the industrialist Maurice Gangnat. The general revisionist flavor of Bernheim’s exhibit continued, as it had at the National Colonial Exposition of Marseille in 1906, with the inclusion of historically questionable but visually ravishing works by Cézanne (Le nègre Scipione), Corot (Femme orientale), Degas (Cotton Traders in New Orleans), Manet (the Louvre Odalisque, in Chinese ink), and Rodin (with his 1906 drawings of the Cambodian dancers of King Sisowath). Gauguin was also there in force, as we shall see. Lyautey’s administration had assigned responsibility for the contemporary colonial arts at the Palace of Fine Arts to the twin exhibiting societies, the Society of French Orientalist Painters and the Colonial Society of French Artists (or Coloniale). That assignment proves the continuing relevance of the Orientalist Painters, with which much of the first half of this book is concerned. The society’s first president, Léonce Bénédite, the leading theoretician and historian of the movement as well as its most active promoter in the museums, had died in 1925. The society’s own exhibitions had been sporadic since 1920, but its new president, Baron Arthur de Chassériau, made sure its leading members were well represented in 1931. By then, however, the Coloniale was the preponderant force, with some three hundred members on its books, and with Bernheim de Villers as its influential treasurer. The diet of contemporary painting and sculpture selected by these societies for the Palace of Fine Arts includes the usual group of academic Orientalists, but also School of Algiers artists, discussed in earlier chapters, who had become prominent in the 1920s: Cauvy, the Carrés, Dufresne, Suréda, and Migonney, as well as numerous recipients of Villa Abd-el-Tif and other scholarships in the 1920s. Among these Jeanne Thil, an Ecole-trained cubist of considerable originality, and Paul-Elie Dubois, the talented figure painter of the Touareg of the Hoggar Plateau in remote southern Algeria, were given a variety of decorative and didactic commissions in other pavilions. Indigenous Algerian artists were present, with two landscapes by Lyautey’s favorite, Azouaou Mammeri, as well as two crystalline miniatures by Mohammed Racim and books he had decorated (illustrated by Dinet and Léon Carré) for the publisher Piazza. And here the first generation of indigenous painters, sculptors, and lacquer artists trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Hanoi (established by the French in 1925) was introduced—but exhibited primarily in the Indochinese pavilion, not the Palace of Fine Arts.4 Notable by his absence, however, was Henri Matisse, whom one might reasonably expect to have been present. Matisse ’s Moroccan works had been ignored by the colonial art establishment before the 1920s, presumably because they were too radical visually and had also been quickly dispersed among private collections (see Chapter 7). It is nevertheless significant that when a Matisse was finally purchased for the Luxembourg Museum in 1923, it had an Orientalizing subject, and the purchaser was Léonce Bénédite himself.5 The Odalisque aux culottes rouges (Odalisque in Red Trousers) had exemplified Matisse ’s version of the “return-to-order” visual language that few artists escaped after

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the 1914–18 war. When Matisse used a language of comparatively meticulous visual description, it was indeed a “return” after years of experiment in non-normative color, the simplifying draftsmanship of expressive distortion, and decorative abstraction. The decorative remains crucial in Matisse ’s odalisques of the 1920s, but his realism is heightened by a new sense of tangible, rational space; the use of local color; and a mellifluous descriptive brushwork. That visual language cemented Matisse ’s popularity with a much broader art public than previously. Just as Picasso’s “neoclassical” nudes of the early 1920s reassured a generation skeptical of his cubist experiments (a skepticism shared by two French Algerian aficionados of Orientalism, Victor Barrucand and Jean Alazard), so Matisse ’s Nice-period pictures brought him closer to mainstream aesthetics. Matisse ’s run-of-the-mill odalisques of the twenties di¤er little (apart from his virtuosity and sometimes bizarre palette) from versions of that stock subject by solid School of Algiers painters like Jean Bouchaud and Marius de Buzon. But Matisse ’s style around 1920 was inspired by Gustave Courbet, Renoir, and Ingres, whereas Bouchaud and de Buzon are academic painters touched by late impressionism. Like most Orientalist and colonial artists, they had never had a fauve or cubist baptism of fire: there never was a “return” to the academic order of their work, for it was a feature they had never abandoned. Matisse ’s backtracking in the twenties was exceptional: in his long career, it was a temporary swerve away from decades of pictorial research, which began again with his murals for the Barnes Foundation after 1930. In the aftermath of Matisse ’s three highly successful one-man retrospectives of 1930 and 1931 (the last was at the Galerie Georges Petit), it is all the more surprising that the Palace of Fine Arts at Vincennes lacked even one picture by this distinguished leader of French art. There were numerous odalisques in French collections (including that of the prominent dealer Paul Guillaume) that exemplified Matisse ’s new quietism. The electrifying sensations of the early Moroccan Triptych or the Riffian and Moroccan Café of 1912–13 remained in the obscurity of Soviet museums (which had impounded Ivan Morosov’s and Sergei Shchukin’s collections in 1917). Surely Senator Henri Bérenger (fine arts commissioner at Vincennes) could have borrowed the two Tangier pictures from the late Marcel Sembat’s collection at the Grenoble museum. That neither he nor the curators from the two Orientalist exhibition societies did confirms that even a mild version of fauvist graphic dissolution and plenitude of color in 1931 was o¤ the agenda for official views of Orientalism. The nearest comparable works, by Charles Dufresne, Raoul Dufy, Maurice Denis, and René Piot, were shown, however, with equanimity. The relationship between progressive and mainstream versions of the exotic was played out at Vincennes during a dispute about the relative status of Paul Gauguin and Etienne Dinet. That dispute encapsulates historical constructions of French exoticism, suggesting how pro-modernist scholarship, in favoring an artist like Gauguin, has caricatured the breadth of the Orientalist movement. This book serves in part to redress that imbalance.

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The behind-the-scenes dispute reveals how colonial museology could align conservative criticism with the North African colonial lobby, against a more moderate metropolitan criticism that supported the modernist canon. Nineteen-thirty-one was the second year in which Paul Gauguin was included in a retrospective of the Orientalist movement. In Chapter 4, I briefly consider Gauguin’s “nativist” painting from Tahiti and the Marquesas in apposition to the comparable venture of Etienne Dinet, who lived as a religious convert among the Berbers of Bou-Saâda. Dinet was not actually excluded from the Vincennes retrospective: three large works from French collections were selected by his sister. He was slighted rather by placement, especially in comparison with Gauguin: Bernheim, expanding his gesture of 1906 at Marseille, assembled thirteen Gauguin canvases drawn from private collections and one from the Louvre. He added woodcuts and a carved head—eighteen works in all. The largest of them—the monumental Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going?— was shipped from the Stang collection of Oslo.6 The day following the gala opening at the Museum of the Colonies, the prominent conservative critic Camille Mauclair wrote to Marshal Lyautey, protesting in “astonishment and chagrin” the placement of Dinet. His three paintings, according to Mauclair (a longtime supporter of the artist), were “relegated to the staircases and isolated when highly questionable works [i.e. Gauguin’s] were favored.” Mauclair argued that Dinet, “knowing and expressing to the full the Arab soul, . . . merits better.” Recalling that this was Lyautey’s own view, Mauclair called on him to improve the placement of the late Nasr’Edine Dinet.7 Lyautey acted on the complaint, forwarding the letter to the exhibition organizers and engendering a fractious reply from Bernheim, who protested that he was being asked “to do the impossible.” Dinet’s large canvases “were unable to find a place among all these great masterpieces,” he said, naming Delacroix and Gauguin. “If we agreed to include any Dinets in our retrospective,” Bernheim continued, “it was at the request of M. Camille Mauclair, to whom we have already made this first concession.” 8 Ultimately, Bernheim shifted one Dinet to a better position, but Jeanne Dinet Rollince’s vehement protest to the director of fine arts continued the fray. (It no doubt helped that Jeanne Dinet Rollince was married to a French general.)9 Ultimately a separate retrospective for the deceased Orientalist was organized for the colonial exposition, housed in the Palace of Fine Arts. Lyautey’s attendance at the opening, along with that of French President Gaston Doumergue himself, “gave rise to a touching ceremony in the presence of Mme Dinet Rollince, the sister of the artist.” 10 The press welcomed the exhibition of sixty canvases, the veteran Arsène Alexandre locating the “genius” of this “perfect artist,” “a ‘colonial’ in the very best sense of the word,” precisely in the profundity of his participation in indigenous life: “This duality made of him a personality full of gentleness, of gravity and elevation, and it gave an accent of truth to his pictures, whose delicate and scrupulous métier ensures that they will last.” 11 But Dinet’s works, rather than last, were relegated by Euro-American art scholarship and mu-

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seum practice to the dustbin of history for the next sixty years. The 1931 exhibition confirmed Gauguin as the model for measuring French exoticism: one of limited visual experimentation in a precubist avant-garde. The mass of literature on Gauguin, Delacroix, and (more recently) Matisse as traveler painters demonstrates that the model still holds. This book, however, moves away from the paradigm (while still devoting chapters to the likes of Renoir and Matisse). It is the mass of less distinguished artists who most accurately characterize Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon; they are the ones who must be reintroduced into art history. That is why Dinet is an iconic figure. This is not in virtue of his aesthetics, which play directly into the hands of a cultural conservative like Mauclair. Dinet’s rainbow-palette realism has just enough color to seem modern to a Mauclair or an Alexandre, and more than enough tangibility to satisfy their memories of the French school and the returnto-order agenda of the 1920s. Once again, it was an order Dinet had never left. Rather, his life and the singular character of his subjects make him important. He mixes an unexampled concern for ethnographic detail with a political sympathy in which he states, more explicitly and unambiguously than Gauguin or Matisse, his admiration for—and partial identification with—the Other. Dinet is the product par excellence of the colonial cultural network. For someone interested in mapping that network, as I have mapped it in this book, it is revealing to follow the tracks of a person who moved smoothly between colonial and metropolitan worlds, crisscrossing the Mediterranean, acting as liaison with curator-writers like Bénédite, indigenous artists like Racim, storytellers like Sliman ben Ibrahim, even governors-general like Violette. The case of Gauguin, who ended up fleeing and fighting the colonial authority in the Marquesas, is fascinating because it rubbed both against and with the colonial grain. Renoir and Matisse were peintres d’escale, who scarcely engaged with that authority or its politics and moved with relative ease along lines largely determined by the tourism of the day. Dinet, on the contrary, sympathetic to the Algerians but understanding officialdom, worked with colonial authority. He furthered indigenous interests with more tangible success during his life, and he was posthumously appointed the quasi-official artist of independent Algeria. The imponderable, however, is this: that still earlier than he, Gauguin (with respect to Oceanian sculpture) and then Matisse (with respect to Islamic decorative art and African sculpture) promoted the taste for those artifacts as art. In particular, Matisse ’s assimilation of such arts into his own painting and sculpture, in heterogeneous aesthetic solutions that have proved enormously popular, has promoted and furthered those non-Western arts to a bourgeois Western audience. Hence his continuing relevance to the history of cross-cultural exchanges, quite apart from the specific interest of the case studies in Orientalism that Matisse ’s ventures in Biskra and Tangier richly provide.

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Notes

Introduction 1. See for example texts like Elisabeth Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif: Un demi-siècle de vie artistique en Algérie, 1907–1962 (Paris: Association Abd-el-Tif, 1998); and Visions de l’Algérie heureuse, ed. David Darmon et al. for the Cercle algérianiste, exh. cat. (Versailles: Editions Galion, 1992). 2. See my “Post-colonial Taste? Non-Western Markets for Orientalist Painting,” in Roger Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, exh. cat. (Sydney: The Art Gallery of New South Wales, distributed by Thames and Hudson, 1997), 32–40. 3. I have in mind two texts of the 1980s, Linda Nochlin’s deservedly influential essay “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (May 1983): 118–31, 187–91; and Rana Kabbani’s Europe’s Myths of Orient (London: Pandora, 1986); the Edward Said text is Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin, 1995), with an afterword. 4. See the essays in Homi K. Bhabha, The Loca-

tion of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 5. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 60. 6. Ary Renan, “La peinture orientaliste,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3d ser., 11 (January 1894): 43. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this book are my own. 7. Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Chapter One 1. See Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1961), nos. 22, 23, 53. Baudelaire had made a sixmonth voyage as a teenager to the island of Réunion o¤ the Madagascar coast; as an adult he seldom left the city of Paris.

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2. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, La critique d’art de Théophile Gautier (Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 1985), n.p. [1]. Gautier’s critical production over four decades, covering painting, sculpture, architecture, drama, and music, was “astonishingly large, even granted his well-known facility,” as Michael Cli¤ord Spencer writes in The Art Criticism of Théophile Gautier (Geneva: Droz, 1969), 2. During the Second Empire a positive review from Gautier could launch a career. 3. Gautier, “Exposition de 1859,” in Voyage en Algérie, ed. Denise Brahimi (Paris: La Boîte à documents, 1989), 196. 4. See Said, Orientalism, 100. 5. Gautier, “Salon de 1849,” in Voyage en Algérie, 183. 6. For details, see Zeyneb Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), chap. 1. 7. “It was here that Bab-Azoun stood in former time, with its jagged battlements, its machicolations, its barbicans, its moucharabiehs, its hooks for planting the heads or impaling the bodies of victims. . . . One cannot too strongly deplore these aimless, useless demolitions, which deprive a city of its physiognomy” (Théophile Gautier, “Alger extramuros” [1846], in Voyage en Algérie, 65). 8. Gautier, “Exposition de 1859,” in Voyage en Algérie, 193. 9. Bandelaire wrote of Vernet’s vast Battle of Isly (Bataille d’Isly): “I hate an art which is improvised to the roll of the drum, I hate canvases splashed over at the gallop, I hate painting manufactured to the sound of pistol-shots, since I hate the army, the police-force— everything, in fact, that trains its arms in a peaceful place” (Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in Art in Paris, 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, 1965), 185. 10. See Gabriel Esquer, Iconographie historique de l’Algérie depuis le XVIe siècle jusqu’en 1871,

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12–19

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

3 vols. (Paris: Collection du centenaire de l’Algérie/Plon, 1929), 1: plate CCCIX. For discussions linking this Fromentin to the later avant-garde, see Gary Tinterow and Henri Loyrette, The Origins of Impressionism, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 386–88; and Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 72. Meyer Schapiro, “Fromentin as a Critic,” Partisan Review 16, no. 1 (January 1949): 50. Un été dans le Sahara was published in installments in 1854 and as a volume in 1857; Une année dans le Sahel was published in installments in 1858 and as a volume in 1859; both were republished with a preface by Fromentin in 1874; see Eugène Fromentin, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Guy Sagnes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1984), 13–183 and 187–365. Théophile Gautier, “ ‘Un été dans le Sahara,’ par Eugène Fromentin,” L’Artiste (1 March 1857), in Voyage en Algérie, 150. On Salzmann, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann and His Times,” October, no. 18 (fall 1981): 90–106. Elisabeth Cardonne, introduction to Eugène Fromentin, Une année dans le Sahel, ed. Cardonne (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 10, 11–12. Fromentin, Sahel, in Oeuvres complètes, 320–21. See Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924), trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), esp. chap. 6. Sahel, in Oeuvres complètes, 322. Ibid., 321. Gautier, “Salon de 1849,” in Voyage en Algérie, 176. See Han F. Vermeulen, “Origins and Institutionalization of Ethnography and Ethnology in Europe and the USA, 1771–1845,” in Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology, ed. Vermeulen and Arturo Alvarez Roldan (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 43–44.

23. As quoted in ibid., 50. 24. Emile Galichon, “M. Gérôme, peintre ethnographe,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1st ser., 24, no. 2 (February 1868): 150; Galichon, while praising “the myriad details of costume or furnishing by which the artist interests us in his toiles ethnographiques,” holds that the key is the artist’s knack for capturing “the true physiognomy of a people.” See the brief but useful discussion of “l’art ethnographique” in Christine Peltre, L’atelier du voyage: Les peintres en Orient au XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 58–61. 25. Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 11th ed., s.v. “ethnology and ethnography.” See also Geza de Rohan-Csermak, “Ethnographie,” in Encyclopaedia Universalis 8 (Paris, 1993), 992–95. 26. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995). 27. Fromentin, Sahara, in Oeuvres complètes, 176. 28. For a systematic study of rapports between Fromentin’s painting and his narratives, see James Thompson and Barbara Wright, La vie et l’oeuvre d’Eugène Fromentin, Les Orientalistes, 6 (Paris: ACR Edition, ca. 1987). 29. Cardonne, introduction to Fromentin, Sahel, 26, quoting Sahel and Fromentin’s personal correspondence. 30. Fromentin, Sahel, in Oeuvres complètes, 323. 31. See Malcolm Warner, “The Question of Faith: Orientalism, Christianity, and Islam,” in The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, ed. MaryAnne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1984), 34. 32. Fromentin, Sahara, in Oeuvres complètes, 47. 33. Ibid., 48. 34. Lorcin, Imperial Identities. For a sense of how complex issues of race can be in the reading of Orientalist painting, see the exemplary Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “‘Whose colour was not black nor white nor grey, but an extraneous mixture, which no pen can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: As-

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

pasie and Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios,” Art History 22, no. 5 (December 1999): 676– 704. Fromentin, Sahel, in Oeuvres complètes, 199– 200. See Charles-Robert Ageron, L’anticolonialisme en France de 1871 à 1914 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973). The significance of Castagnary’s critique of Orientalism was suggested in the first booklength study of the movement, Jean Alazard, L’Orient et la peinture française au XIXe siècle, d’Eugène Delacroix à Auguste Renoir (Paris: Plon, Collection du centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930), 79–84. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Année 1857,” in Salons 1, 1857–1870 (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1892), 1:31. Gustave Courbet, letter of 25 December 1861, Le Courier du dimanche, trans. in Linda Nochlin, ed., Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848– 1900: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cli¤s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 35. Castagnary, “Année 1857,” in Salons 1:31–32. Castagnary, “Année 1863,” in Salons 1:153. Said, Orientalism, 2–3; see also 210 and 261 (on the congress). Castagnary, “Année 1864,” in Salons 1:210. Ibid., 211. Castagnary is referring, not to the Almeh illustrated, but to one in the Dayton Museum of Art. For an extensive discussion, see Castagnary, “Année 1868,” in Salons 1:292–94. On Regnault’s Execution of a Janissary, see Geneviève Lacambre, Les oubliés du Caire: Ingres, Courbet, Monet, Rodin, Gauguin. Chefs-d’oeuvre des musées du Caire, exh. cat. (Paris: Association Française d’Action Artistique, Musée d’Orsay, and Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), 167. Gautier, quoted in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 120. On this phase of Regnault’s work, see Hollis Clayson, “Regnault’s Wartime Orientalism,” in Orientalism’s Interlocutors, ed. Mary Roberts and Jill

Notes to Pages

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285

48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

286

Beaulieu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). In 1879 Castagnary was appointed state councillor to the Conseil des Beaux-Arts; in 1881 he became a committee member of the Monuments historiques and was appointed director-general of cults by Gambetta in 1882; see Jean-Paul Bouillon et al., eds., La promenade du critique influent: Anthologie de la critique d’art en France, 1850–1900 (Paris: Hazan, 1990), 61. Castagnary, “Année 1876,” in Salons 2, 1872– 1879, 348. Ibid., 249–50. Guy Sagnes is satisfied that the authorship is properly ascribed to Fromentin; see Fromentin, Oeuvres complètes, 1220–28 and 1727–28. Fromentin, Les maîtres d’autrefois, in Oeuvres complètes, 716. Zola’s indi¤erence to Orientalism had a negative slant, as might be expected of the naturalist writer and fervent supporter of Manet. In 1866 Zola had criticized Fromentin’s wooden manner and his failure to stand comparison with Delacroix: “He has been to Africa and has brought back delightful mantelpiece subjects. One could eat o¤ his Bedouins’ plates, they are so clean” (Emile Zola, “Salon de 1866,” L’Evénement, in Fromentin, Oeuvres complètes, 1594). In 1876 he protested Fromentin’s critique of the impressionists and reproached the artist for himself painting “a false Orient, adapted to bourgeois taste. His Orient is banal and his Arabs resemble those at the carnival” (Emile Zola, “Lettres de Paris,” Le Messager de l’Europe, in ibid., 1595). Fromentin, as quoted by Louis Emile Edmond Duranty in La nouvelle peinture: A propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les Galeries Durand-Ruel (Paris: E. Dentu, 1876), trans. as “The New Painting” in Charles S. Mo¤ett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 38.

Notes to Pages

27–33

55. Ibid. 56. On the emperor’s visit and the events of the later 1860s in Algeria, see Annie ReyGoldzeiguer, “La France coloniale de 1830 à 1870,” in Jean Meyer et al., Histoire de la France coloniale, vol. 1, Des origines à 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), chaps. 16–17; and Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 76–92. 57. One admirer of Fromentin, the duc d’Aumale (King Louis-Philippe ’s son and the victor against Abd-el-Kader) collected images of “traditional” Arabs as well as topographical images of his Algerian campaigns. Aumale’s collection also encompassed Delacroix (two of the great Moroccan Albums), Alexandre Decamps (ten oils), and many works by Dauzats, Prosper Marilhat, and Vernet. See Nicole Garnier, Delacroix au Maroc: L’orientalisme au Musée Condé (Chantilly: Musée Condé, 1992); and Lara Nicholls, “Nineteenth Century Orientalism at the Musée Condé: The Duc d’Aumale ’s Taste for an Algerian Past in Second Empire France,” master’s thesis, University of Melbourne, 1999. 58. Duranty, “The New Painting:” in Mo¤ett et al., The New Painting, 38. 59. See Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings in the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 2, for a dense yet nuanced discussion of Duranty’s text.

Chapter Two 1. I base this section on a lecture I presented in Brisbane in conjunction with the exhibition Renoir: Master Impressionist (exh. cat. by John House et al. [Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery; and Sydney: Art Exhibitions Australia, 1994]). My thanks to John House, Kathy Adler, and Colin Bailey for their expertise on Renoir. For more detail on Renoir’s Algerian pictures, see Roger Benjamin, with an essay by David Prochaska, Renoir and Al-

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

geria (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Roger Marx, once Castagnary’s protégé at the Directorate of Fine Arts, became an influential critic, curator, and arts administrator. He was an early defender of Gauguin and the Nabis and promoted the new decorative arts; see Bouillon et al., eds., La promenade du critique influent, 357–59. Cézanne to Joachim Gasquet, quoted in Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art, trans. John Goodman (New York, London, Paris: Abbeville Press, 1998), 241 n.7. On the pre-Algerian Renoirs, see Werner Schnell, “Renoirs Versuch, über den Orient in den Salon zu kommen,” in Begegnungen: Festschrift für Peter Anselm Riedl zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Klaus Geuthlein and Franz Matsche (Worms, 1993), 216–31. Claude Monet, quoted in François ThiébaultSisson, “Claude Monet: An Interview,” trans. from Le Temps, 27 November 1900, in Monet: A Retrospective, ed. Charles F. Stuckey (Sydney and London: Bay Books, 1985), 204–5. “Naturally he had taken his color box with him, and, during his two years of garrison in Algeria, he brushed as many studies as he mounted guard duty. Africa completed his education as a colorist. It taught him to ‘see into the shadows,’ to follow in them the vivid decomposition of light, to make that trembling atmosphere float around objects, and to circle them like an aureole” (Hughes Le Roux, “Silhouettes Parisiennes: L’Exposition de Claude Monet,” Gil Blas, 3 March 1889). See David Prochaska, “History as Literature, Literature as History: Cagayous of Algiers,” American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996): 703. S. A., “Petites expositions: Les peintres orientalistes à la Galerie Durand-Ruel,” Chronique des Arts, no. 10 (9 March 1895): 83.

8. Quoted in Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, trans. Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver (London: Collins, 1962), 211 (as cited in The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, ed. Stevens, 222). 9. See Prosper Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France: Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (Paris: Hachette, 1924), 16. 10. Illustrated in Léonce Bénédite, Albert Lebourg (Paris: Editions Georges Petit, 1923), 64. 11. Roger Marx, “Artistes contemporains. Albert Lebourg,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3d ser., 30 (December 1903): 461. 12. Camille Pissarro, letter of 15 March 1887, in Pissarro, Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald (London: Kegan Paul, 1943), 102. 13. Alazard, L’Orient et la peinture française, 195–96. 14. Renoir is in fact encouraging the patron, Mme Béraud, to visit him: “The Arabs are charming people,” he continues. “I confess I am very happy and that when one has seen Algeria one loves it. . . . I will find you a house in Paradise, at Mustapha Inférieur” (Renoir, letter to Mme Béraud, Café du Helder, Champ de manoeuvres à Mustapha, Algiers, from Archives Durand-Ruel [Drouot sale 11 June 1980, lot 92], courtesy John House). 15. Samuel Cox, Search for Winter Sunbeams in the Riviera, Corsica, Algiers, and Spain (London and New York: Sampson Low and Appleton, 1869), 140. 16. Ibid., 139. 17. Roughly translatable as “a feather-duster garden by a plume-hatted painter”: Draner, “Une visite aux impressionnistes,” Le Charivari, 9 March 1882, illustrated in Mo¤ett et al., The New Painting, 387. 18. Renoir, letter to Paul Bérard, Algiers, 1881, trans. in Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters (New York: Abrams, 1984), 105. 19. Renoir, letter to Paul Durand-Ruel, Algiers, March 1882, in Lionello Venturi, Les archives de l’impressionnisme: Lettres de Renoir, Monet,

Notes to Pages

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287

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

288

Pissarro, Sisley, et autres, vol. 1 (New York: B. Franklin, 1968), 124–25; cf. the translation in White, Renoir, 125. Ibid. Renoir, in Ambroise Vollard, Renoir: An Intimate Record, trans. Harold L. van Doren and Randolph T. Weaver (New York, 1934), 109, as quoted by Rebecca Moholt, “Images of Childhood,” in A Passion for Renoir: Sterling and Francine Clark Collect, 1916–1951 (New York: Abrams; and Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1996), 66. This account of the néo-Français draws upon Lorcin, Imperial Identities, chap. 9. Albert André, Avant-propos to Renoir’s Atelier/L’Atelier de Renoir (1931), rev. and trans. ed. (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1989), xxxvii. Alazard, L’Orient et la peinture française, 196. Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, 212. See Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2d ed. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), 55, 62, 76. In 1880, when five Algerian subjects by Lebourg complemented his landscapes of Normandy and Paris, Roger Marx observed, “It was the privilege of these works, once returned to Paris, to establish the artist’s reputation” (Marx, “Albert Lebourg,” 461). See Jean de Tarade, “Deuxième visite aux peintres indépendants,” L’Europe artiste, 4 May 1879, 1–2, trans. from Ruth Berson, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874– 1886. . . . Documentation, vol. 1, Reviews (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 245. Elie de Mont., “Cinquième exposition des impressionnistes, 10, rue des Pyramides,” La Civilisation, 20 April 1880, in Berson, ed., 302; George Japy, “Les impressionnistes,” Le Soir, 3 April 1880, in ibid., 294. Catalogue of 1882, nos. 157 and 143 (see Berson, ed. The New Painting, vol. 2, Exhib-

Notes to Pages

43–52

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

ited Works, 210, 211); for reviews, see idem, The New Painting, 1:382, 385. Marx, “Albert Lebourg,” 458, 461. Ibid., 460. See Bénédite, Albert Lebourg, 74– 76. On Seignemartin, see ibid., 70– 73, where Bénédite cites Lebourg’s own testimony on the Lyonnais’s influence; Peltre concurs with this view of events (Orientalism in Art, 241–42). The gift of sixty-six works by Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and others dates to 1893. After long negotiations between officials like Bénédite and Director of Fine Arts Henri Roujon, Caillebotte ’s heirs, and the executor of his will (Auguste Renoir), a total of thirty-eight works were accepted in late 1896 and put on display at the Luxembourg Museum in 1897 (thereby inciting an official protest from the Académie des Beaux-Arts). Recent scholarship shows that Bénédite, contrary to previous accounts that presented him as an obstructing force, was the one official who tried to retain the entire bequest. His failure to do so was linked to exiguities of space, to the Luxembourg’s policy of hanging only three works per artist, and to his (and his colleagues’) considering certain works too minor for display in the national museum. (That view was shared by some of the impressionists concerned, notably Renoir and Sisley.) See Pierre Vaisse, “Le legs Caillebotte,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art française (1983): 201–8; and Marie Berthaut, “Le legs Caillebotte: Vérités et contre-vérités,” in Bulletin, ibid., 209–39. See Léonce Bénédite, “La collection Caillebotte et l’école impressionniste,” L’Artiste 64, no. 8 (August 1894): 124–33, his unsigned “Legs Caillebotte,” La Chronique des Arts, no. 16 (18 April 1896): 144–45, “Musées nationaux: Musée du Luxembourg,” Revue encyclopédique 7 (28 August 1897): 729–32,

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

and his “Collection Caillebotte au Musée du Luxembourg,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3d ser., 17 (1 March 1897): 249–58. Bénédite, “La collection Caillebotte au Musée du Luxembourg,” 255. Bénédite, “La collection Caillebotte et l’école impressionniste,” 129. Léonce Bénédite, “Art et Orient: L’oeuvre d’Etienne Dinet,” Art et décoration 14 (1903): 308. It is unlikely so meticulous a technician as Dinet, trained by the academicians Tony Robert-Fleury and William Bouguereau and inspired by Jules Bastien-Lepage, would have wholly approved of the impressionists, even though the colorism of his mature palette would be unthinkable without their example; his cynical perceptions of the avant-garde are pursued in François Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, peintre en Islam: L’Algérie et l’héritage colonial (Paris: Balland, 1997), 141–49. Gustave Guillaumet, Tableaux algériens: Ouvrage illustré de douze eaux-fortes de Guillaumet (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1888). The essays were published in the Nouvelle revue between October 1879 and November 1884; paperback editions appeared after 1888. Léonce Bénédite, “Exposition rétrospective: Guillaumet (Gustave),” Société des peintres orientalistes français (Paris: Galeries DurandRuel, 15 February–4 March 1899), 16; in his earlier “Peinture orientaliste et Gustave Guillaumet,” La Nouvelle revue 50 (15 January 1888): 333–34, Bénédite quoted the Tableaux algériens extensively. Bénédite, “Exposition rétrospective: Guillaumet,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1899 catalogue, 16. Illustrated in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 19. Guillaumet, Tableaux algériens, 48 (an etching of the work from the Luxembourg Museum appears opp. 46).

46. E. Durand-Gréville, “Gustave Guillaumet,” L’Artiste 57, no. 1 (May 1887): 351. 47. Roger Marx, “Le Salon de 1889,” Le Voltaire, 1 May 1889. 48. Léonce Bénédite, “Avertissement,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français (Paris: Galeries Durand-Ruel, 21 January–12 February 1895), 16. 49. Bénédite, “Art et Orient,” 310. 50. Antoine de La Rochefoucauld, “Exposition d’art musulman,” Le Coeur, September– October 1893, n.p.

Chapter Three 1. See Pierre Vaisse, “Salons, expositions, et sociétés d’artistes en France, 1871–1914,” in Saloni, gallerie, musei e loro influenza sullo sviluppo dell’arte dei secoli XIX e XX, ed. Francis Haskell (Bologna: Comité international d’histoire de l’art, 1979), 141–55. 2. The broad inspiration for my approach is the work of Pierre Bourdieu, not only in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), but also his Homo academicus (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1984). A brief study of the Orientalist Painters may be found in Lynne Thornton, “La Société des peintres orientalistes français et la Villa Abd-el-Tif,” in Nicholas Bancel et al., Images et colonies: Iconographie et propagande coloniale sur l’Afrique française de 1880 à 1962 (Paris: Association de connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine, 1993), 48–49. 3. On the issue of belatedness and colonial nostalgia, see Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Ali Behdad, Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1994).

Notes to Pages

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289

4. The case of the scholar Champollion, the driving force behind the Musée d’Egypte established at the Louvre in 1826, is an example; see Todd B. Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), chap. 1. 5. Léonce Bénédite, “La chinoiserie en France au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des arts décoratifs 7, no. 8 (February 1887): 245–53; 8, no. 6 (December 1887): 180–83; and 8, no. 12 (May 1888): 370–82. 6. See Bénédite, “La peinture orientaliste et Gustave Guillaumet,” and Léonce Bénédite, “La peinture orientaliste aux salons de 1890,” L’Artiste 60, no. 2 (August 1890): 81–90. 7. Léonce Bénédite, “A Etienne Dinet,” preface to Etienne Dinet and Sliman Ben Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie arabe (Paris: Henri Piazza, 1908), n.p. [ii]. 8. Ibid. 9. For bibliography, see André Dezarrois, “Léonce Bénédite,” Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne, no. 719 (June 1925): 177–80; and Constance Naubert-Riser, “Léonce Bénédite,” in Bouillon et al., La promenade du critique influent, 408–10. 10. See Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 75– 78; and Caroline Mathieu, 1889: La Tour Ei¤el et l’Exposition universelle (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1989). 11. See Pol-Neveu, “Le village canaque,” La Revue de l’Exposition universelle de 1889 1 (1889): 250–56; more generally, see Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), on the artist’s amateur ethnography and social activity in Tahiti; and Elizabeth C. Childs, “The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography in the Fin de Siècle,” in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience, ed. Lynda

290

Notes to Pages

58–62

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 50–70, on Gauguin’s experience at the 1889 exposition and his use of colonial photography. Léon Dussert, “Le palais algérien,” La Revue de l’Exposition universelle de 1889 1 (1889): 205. “Groupe I: Oeuvres d’art,” in Exposition de 1889: Section de l’Algérie. Catalogue officiel des exposants (Paris and Algiers, 1889), 17. Point’s trajectory from Orientalist exoticism to symbolist mythography links him to other painters, like Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (also Algerian-born) and Emile Bernard, who sensed a common ground in both genres’ avoidance of the “painting of modern life.” Both painters are examined further in Chapter 4. Léonce Bénédite, “Première exposition rétrospective et actuelle des peintres orientalistes français,” in Exposition de l’art musulman, catalogue officiel, Palais de l’Industrie (Paris: Bellier, October–December 1893), 156–95. In his essay (156–68) Bénédite adapts his 1888 article on Guillaumet. Léonce Bénédite, “Avertissement,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français (Paris: Galeries Durand-Ruel, 21 January–12 February 1895), 3; reprinted as “Les peintres orientalistes français,” L’Artiste 65, no. 10 (December 1895): 421–24. Paul Mantz, “Exposition universelle de 1889—la peinture française,” 4 parts, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (July–November 1889); Roger Marx, Exposition centennale de l’art français, 1800–1900 (Paris: E. Lévy, 1902). Bénédite, “Première exposition . . . des peintres orientalistes,” in Exposition de l’art musulman, 159. Léonce Bénédite, “Les peintres orientalistes français,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3d ser., 21, no. 501 (March 1899): 241. See Raymond F. Betts, The “Scramble” for Africa: Causes and Dimensions of Empire (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1966).

21. Bénédite, “Premier exposition . . . des peintres orientalistes,” 167. 22. See Georges Marye, “Première exposition d’art musulman,” in Exposition de l’art musulman (1893), 9–15. The exhibition was of more moment than Jean Soustiel and Lynne Thornton suggest in their “Influence des miniatures orientales sur les illustrateurs et les peintres, en France au début du XXe siècle,” Art et curiosité, January–February 1974, 29–34, where they dismiss it as unscholarly compared with the 1903 Pavillon de Marsan exhibition curated by Gaston Migéon. The 1893 exhibition may have been less scholarly, but its massive scale and the press it garnered gave it considerable public impact. 23. Gonse ’s miniatures are detailed in the catalogue, 146–48, and discussed in Pauline Savarini, “L’Exposition d’art musulman,” Nouvelle revue 85 (1 December 1893): 611. My thanks to Karyn Esielonis for this and other references. 24. Eugène Etienne, letter to Raymond Poincaré, minister of public instruction and fine arts, 10 June 1893, Archives Nationales F 17 13064. 25. Thomas Grimm, “La Conquête d’Orient,” Petit Journal, 6 November 1893, lamented that France had lost the initiative to the British (whose Indian Museum had opened in 1879), the Austro-Hungarians (whose Oriental Museum dated to 1873), and even BosniaHerzegovina, where fruitful e¤orts had been made to organize new decorative arts production around Islamic models and master craftsmen. 26. Marye, “Première exposition d’art musulman,” 10, cf. Marye ’s unsigned manuscript “Note sur l’exposition de l’art musulman,” Arch. Nat. F 17 13064. For a contemporary snapshot of the antagonism of the petty French colonists and the Algerian local press toward the “bicots” (a derogatory slang term for indigenous Algerians) see Isabelle Eberhardt, “Native Exploits,” in Departures: Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Karim Hamdy

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

and Laura Rice (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1994), 73– 77. On ethnographic collecting and museology in Britain at this time, see the exemplary Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and the Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). Tamar Garb, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). As quoted in Société des peintres orientalistes français (Paris: Grand Palais, 2–28 February 1913), 4. See Said, Orientalism, 2–3, 210, 261–62; see also “Congrès des Orientalistes,” Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, no. 30 (18 September 1897): 287. Bénédite, “Les Peintres orientalistes français” (1899), 244; Bénédite lists thirteen original members (Maurice Bompard, Paul and Amadée Bu¤et, Charles Cottet, Adolphe Chudant, Etienne Dinet, L. A. Girardot, Paul Leroy, Alexandre Lunois, Joseph de la Nézière, Marius Perret, Maurice Potter, and Henri Vollet) in his Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (London: Pitman and Son, 1910), 204–5. André Cariou, “Bande Noire,” in The Dictionary of Art (New York: Grove, 1996), 3:156. See Gabriel Bonvalot, De Paris au Tonkin à travers le Tibet inconnu (Paris, 1892). Léonce Bénédite, “Avertissement,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1895 catalogue, 7. See “La Mission Bonvalot,” L’Illustration, no. 2830 (22 May 1897): 412. On Fashoda, see James J. Cooke, New French Imperialism, 1880–1910: The Third Republic and Colonial Expansion (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1973), 81–97; see also Charles Michel, “Notice sur Maurice Potter,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français (Paris:

Notes to Pages

62–67

291

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

292

Galeries Durand-Ruel, 15 February–3 March 1900), 7–8. See Bénédite, “Avertissement,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1900 catalogue, 4; see also Bénédite, “Un peintre explorateur: Maurice Potter,” Revue de l’art ancien et moderne 7 (1900): 267–80. Salons were held annually until 1914; after World War I, Salons were held only sporadically. The society further declined with the death of Bénédite in 1925 and the success in the 1920s of the rival Société Coloniale des Artistes Français; it exhibited every two or three years during the 1920s and 1930s. The latest catalogue I have found is dated 1943. See Bénédite, “La peinture orientaliste aux salons de 1890,” 90. See Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, cat. nos. 59, 60; see also Gabriel Séailles, “Alfred Dehodencq,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1895 catalogue, 19–24; Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq: Histoire d’un coloriste (Paris: Librairie Ollendorf, ca. 1890). See Léonce Bénédite, “Exposition rétrospective,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français (Paris: Galeries Durand-Ruel, 16 February–13 March 1897), 15–17; see also Léonce Bénédite, Théodore Chassériau: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Braun, 1931); and Marc Sandoz, Théodore Chassériau: Catalogue raisonné des peintures et des estampes (Paris: Arts et Métiers graphiques, 1974). The full list of posthumous displays includes Potter (1900), Perret (1902), Gérôme (1904), Cordier (1906), Eugène Girardet (1908), Charles Landelle (1909), and Gasté (1913); on Cordier, see La sculpture ethnographique, Les dossiers du Musée d’Orsay (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1994). Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968). Léo Clarétie, “La vie et les moeurs,” Revue encyclopédique 6 (29 February 1896): 101.

Notes to Pages

67–79

45. François Pouillon has assessed the role of Sliman in Dinet’s life (deciding that Dinet had inflated Sliman’s contribution to his books) in his masterly Deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, peintre en Islam, 55–62, 108–10. See also my review of that book in Art History 22, no. 1 (March 1999): 151–53. 46. Bénédite, “Avertissement,” in Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1899 catalogue, 4. 47. Ibid. 48. The Orientalist Painters’ emblem was later explained by a member as a “hand with fingers outstretched and joined [the Hand of Fatma], the amulet preferred by Muslim people, who believe it wards o¤ malevolent djinns, while the crescent moon and the star accompanying it would attract, to our group and those around it, the blessing of Allah and of his holy Prophet” (José Silbert, “Le Palais des Beaux-Arts,” in Le livre d’or: Exposition nationale coloniale [Marseille, 1922], 52). 49. Les peintres-lithographes: Album spéciale, les peintres orientalistes, ed. Léonce Bénédite et al. (Paris: L’Artiste, 1898), Département des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. 50. See Jean Fargès, “Adolphe Chudant (1860– 1929),” Franche-Comté, Monts Jura et Haute Alsace, no. 21 (August 1929): 152–53. Chudant founded the Union Comtoise des Arts Décoratifs in 1893 and later established and decorated the Musée des Arts appliqués de Besançon. From 1909 he was director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Besançon. My thanks to Matthieu Pinette of the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie of Besançon for the information on Chudant.

Chapter Four 1. Arsène Alexandre, “La vie artistique: Les orientalistes,” Figaro, 2 February 1914. 2. See, for example, L’Assiette au beurre, no. 110 (9 May 1903). This material was first con-

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

sidered in Patricia Leighton, “The White Peril and l’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anti-Colonialism,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30. Raymond Bouyer, “Expositions diverses: Société des peintres orientalistes français,” Bulletin d’art ancien et moderne, no. 491 (11 February 1911): 46. The literary work that best treats this pathology of Orientalism is André Gide ’s Immoraliste (1902), whose protagonist is a young tuberculosis patient sent to Biskra to recover in the dry desert air (see further Chapter 7). “Petites expositions: Les Orientalistes,” Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, no. 8 (19 February 1898): 66. Maillet, “Les orientalistes,” La Lanterne, 3 March 1899. In every case, however, edulcorated exponents of these tendencies did exhibit with the society: thus, Lévy-Dhurmer rather than Moreau (symbolists), René Piot rather than Edouard Vuillard (Nabis), Georgette Agutte rather than Paul Signac (neo-impressionists), Albert Marquet rather than Henri Matisse (fauves), Charles Dufresne rather than Georges Braque (cubists). Thadée Natanson, “Petite gazette d’art,” Revue blanche 12, no. 90 (1 March 1897): 247. Charles Baudelaire, the section titled “Du chic et du poncif,” in “The Salon of 1846,” Art in Paris, 92–93. André Fontainas, “Art moderne: Les orientalistes français,” Mercure de France 25, no. 99 (March 1898): 941–42. On Bretonism, see Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, “Les Données bretonnantes: La prairie de la représentation,” Art History 3, no. 3 (September 1980): 314–44; and Michael Orwicz, “Criticism and Representations of Brittany in the Early Third Republic,” Art Journal 46, no. 4 (1987): 291–98. See “Petites expositions: Les Orientalistes,”

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

Chronique des arts, no. 8 (19 February 1898): 66. Félicien Fagus, “Petite gazette d’art: Les orientalistes,” Revue blanche 18, no. 138 (1 March 1899): 390–91. Fontainas, “Art moderne,” 942. See Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 166–67. Henri Eon, “Expositions: Orientalistes,” La Plume, no. 188 (15 February 1897): 159; see also Maurice Denis, “La définition du néotraditionnisme” (1890), in Théories, 1890– 1910 (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), 4–5. Ary Renan, “La peinture orientaliste,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 52; see also his “Gustave Guillaumet,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 2d ser., 35, no. 5 (May 1887): 404–22. Henri Eon, “Expositions: Orientalistes,” La Plume, no. 188 (15 February 1897): 159. Arsène Alexandre, “Les Orientalistes,” Figaro, 22 January 1896; this view is echoed by Henri Matisse in reminiscences dating to the same period, discussed in Chapter 7. Adolphe Dervaux, “Les expositions: Les peintres orientalistes au Grand Palais,” La Plume, no. 337 (1 May 1903): 541. See E. D., “A travers les Salonnets,” Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne, no. 210 (5 March 1904): 78. Louis Vauxcelles, “La vie artistique,” Gil Blas, 15 February 1910. Le Marocain is illustrated in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 158–59. On Emile Bernard’s Egyptian work, see Peter Rudd’s entries in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 152–53, and his Emile Bernard: The Unwilling Modern, Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney, 1998. Henri Ghéon in L’Ermitage (1901), quoted in Aquarelles orientales d’Emile Bernard, 1893–1904, exh. cat. (Saint-Germain-enLaye: Musée départemental du Prieuré, 1983), 86. Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art, Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics,

Notes to Pages

81–89

293

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

294

vol. 2, trans. F. Simmmonds and G. W. Chrystal (London: Heinemann, 1908), 68. My thanks to Peter Rudd for this citation. Book illustration did much to further popularize texts like the Thousand and One Nights, with spectacular editions by Edmond Dulac and by Léon Carré and Mohammed Racim. See Le livre des mille nuits et une nuit, trans. Jospeh Mardrus, 12 vols. (Paris: Henri Piazza, 1924–32). The Orientalist Painters’ exhibitions regularly included books illustrated by its members. Adolphe Dervaux, “Les Expositions: Les peintres orientalistes au Grand Palais,” La Plume, no. 337 (1 May 1903): 541–43. Ary Renan, “La peinture orientaliste,” 43. René Jean, “Petites expositions: Les peintres orientalistes français,” Chronique des arts, no. 7 (15 February 1913): 50. François Monod, “La 13e exposition des orientalistes,” supplement to Art et décoration 17 (April 1905): 2. For a good account of how theories of race in the nineteeth-century French context were played out in colonial representations, see Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, esp. 48–53; and more generally Lorcin, Imperial Identities. Gauguin eventually became an activist against the French administration of the Marquesas. In the magazine Les Guêpes for 12 June 1899 he wrote: “To colonize means to cultivate a region, to make a hitherto uncultivated country produce things which are useful primarily for the people who inhabit it: a noble goal. But to conquer that country, raise a flag over it, set up a parasitical administration, maintained at enormous cost, by and for the glory of the mother country alone—that is barbarous folly, that is shameful!” (translated and quoted in Eisenman, ibid., 159). Similarly, Pierre Loti campaigned against the evils of Europeanization that from 1890 threatened the integrity of Turkish culture; see Alain Quella-Villéger, Pierre Loti, l’incompris (Paris: Presses de la renaissance, 1986), 296–98.

Notes to Pages

90 –95

34. The sketch that follows draws on Bengt Danielsson, Gauguin in the South Seas, trans. R. Spink (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1965); Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America 77 (July 1989): 119– 28, 161; Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992); and Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt. 35. Bénédite, “Les peintres orientalistes francais” (1899), 246–47. 36. Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt, 147. For a set of trenchant critiques of Eisenman by an art historian (Elizabeth C. Childs), a Pacific anthropologist (Margaret Jolly), and a Maori scholar (Teresia K. Teaiwa) and Eisenman’s response, see “Book Review Forum,” Pacific Studies 23, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2000): 75– 128. 37. See Denise Brahimi and Koudin Benchikou, La vie et l’oeuvre de Etienne Dinet, Les orientalists, 2 (Paris: ACR Edition, 1984), cat. nos. 381, 382, 389, 395; see also 116–27. 38. The English edition is Etienne Dinet and Sliman Ben Ibrahim, The Life of Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, illustrated by E. Dinet; ornamental pages by Mohammed Racim (Paris: Paris Book Club, 1918). For a discussion of this much-reprinted book, see Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 120–24, 137–40. 39. Brahimi and Benchikou, Dinet, cat. nos. 406– 10; plate 124. 40. Ibid., cat. nos. 424–39; see Etienne Dinet and Sliman Ben Ibrahim, Pélerinage à la Maison Sacrée d’Allah (Paris: Hachette, 1930). 41. Etienne Dinet and Sliman Ben Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie arabe (Paris: Henri Piazza, 1908), 13. In a few pictures, Dinet’s illustrations of the supernatural are comparable to Gauguin. These are scenes of the sultan of Djinns’s daughters, winged beauties drawn from the tales of the desert. They are the least successful of Dinet’s oeuvre as their heavy physicality militates against a sense of the di-

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

vine. See Brahimi and Benchikou, Dinet, cat. nos. 303–5, and Dinet and Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie arabe, 69– 73. Bénédite, “La peinture orientaliste aux Salons de 1890,” 83. Bénédite, “Guillaumet,” Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1899 catalogue, 18. Christine Peltre has traced variants of this thesis back at least as far as Horace Vernet’s campaign of painting in Algeria in 1836; see Peltre, L’atelier du voyage, 56–58. Gautier, quoted in Séailles, “Alfred Dehodencq,” in Peintres orientalistes, 1895 catalogue, 22. See Bongie, Exotic Memories. See Pierre Clastres, “On Ethnocide,” Art and Text 28 (March–May 1988): 51–58; for a cogent survey of the shortcomings of such arguments, see Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, chap. 1. Bénédite, “Les peintres orientalistes français” (1899), 240. On the controversial nature of Dinet’s conversion, see Pouillon’s chapter “Dans l’ombre chaude de l’Islam,” Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 111–37. On the limits to the “ethnographic dream” of the participant observer, see Greg Dening, “The Theatricality of Observing and Being Observed: EighteenthCentury Europe ‘Discovers’ the ? Century ‘Pacific,’” in Implicit Understandings, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 451–82. Bénédite, “Etienne Dinet,” L’Art et les artistes 10, no. 58 (January 1910): 163. Ibid., 168. For a thorough assessment of Sliman’s role, see Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 55–62, 108–10. Bénédite, “Etienne Dinet” (1910), 168. Bénédite, “La peinture orientaliste au Salons de 1890,” 84–85; further on this picture, purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the Paris Salon of 1890, see Ursula Prunster, “From Empire’s End: Australians as Orientalists, 1880–1920,” in Benjamin,

54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 43–44, 129–30. Bénédite, “Art et Orient: L’oeuvre d’Etienne Dinet,” 313–14. See François Pouillon, “L’ombre de l’Islam: Les figurations de la pratique religieuse dans la peinture orientaliste du 19e siècle,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 75 (November 1988): 33. Dinet and Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie arabe, 22. For discussions of Eberhardt’s persona and work informed by postcolonial theory, see Hedi Abdel-Jaouad, “Isabelle Eberhardt: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nomad,” Yale French Studies 83 (1993): 93–117; and Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 131–48. Camille Mauclair, “Etienne Dinet,” L’Action africaine 1, no. 3 (March 1912): 5–6; reprinted in Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 163–67. Camille Mauclair, “Les peintres de l’Afrique du Nord, à l’exposition des orientalistes,” L’Action africaine 2, no. 16 (April 1913): 77– 78. Bénédite, “A Etienne Dinet,” in Dinet and Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie arabe, iii. The enthusiastic taking up of Dinet’s art in the independent Algerian republic from the 1960s and its remaining in vogue in Algeria are inscribed in the history of the Musée Dinet. (Finally opened in 1993, it was put to the torch by Islamic fundamentalists soon after.) See François Pouillon, “Legs colonial, patrimoine national: Nasreddine Dinet, peintre de l’indigène algérien,” Cahiers d’études africaines 30, no. 3 (1990): 329–63, and Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, chaps. 9–10. See Roger Benjamin, “Postcolonial Taste: Non-Western Markets for Orientalist Art,” in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 32–40. There are parallels in Aotearoa

Notes to Pages

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295

New Zealand today, where Maori have reclaimed realist portraits of Maori elders done at the turn of the twentieth century as monuments to a “dying” race. See Roger Blackley, Goldie, exh. cat. (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 1997).

6.

Chapter Five 1. The literature on the universal exposition is vast; books on colonial precincts prior to World War I include Philippe Jullian, The Triumph of Art Nouveau: Paris Exhibition, 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); L’Orient des provençaux: Les expositions coloniales, exh. cat. (Marseille: Vieille Charité, 1982); Sylviane Leprun, Le théâtre des colonies: Scénographie, acteurs, et discours de l’imaginaire dans les expositions, 1855–1937 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); and Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa. 2. A recent book (received after this chapter was finalized) by Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000), treats the related issue of interior architectural decor in chap. 6, on the 1931 Musée des Colonies. 3. The term is taken from Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the “AllEmbracing” View, exh. cat. (London: Trefoil, in association with the Barbican Art Gallery, 1988). 4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, s.v. “exhibition.” 5. See Léonce Bénédite, “Avertissement,” in Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français

296

Notes to Pages

105 –109

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

(Paris: Galeries Durand-Ruel, 15 February–3 March 1900), 4. See Narriman El-Kateb-Ben Romdhane, “La Peinture de chevalet en Tunisie de 1894 à 1950,” in Lumiéres tunisiennes (Paris: ParisMusées and Association française d’action artistique, 1995), 14; the pamphlet “Exposition artistique de 1897, Institut de Carthage,” Arch. Nat. F 17 13064; and Léonce Bénédite, “Une tentative de rénovation artistique: Les ‘peintres orientalistes’ et les industries coloniales,” Revue des arts décoratifs, no. 4 (April 1899): 101–2. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 86. Herbert E. Butler, “The Colonial and Foreign Buildings,” in The Paris Exhibition, 1900, ed. D. Croal Thomson (London: Art Journal, 1901), 22. See Çelik, Displaying the Orient, 129. Paris Exposition, 1900 (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1900), 339. L’Illustration (20 July 1867), quoted in Çelik, Displaying the Orient, xvi. Ibid., 130, 215n.80. See Th. Lambert, ed., L’Art décoratif moderne: Exposition universelle de 1900 (Paris, 1900), plate 35, fig. 4. Paris Exposition, 1900 (Hachette), 340. Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France (1989), trans. Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 67. Bennett observes that this hierarchy established “a progressivist taxonomy . . . laminated on to a crudely racist teleological conception of the relations between peoples and races which culminated in the achievements of the metropolitan powers, invariably most impressively displayed in the pavilions of the host country” (Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 95). B. de L., “Le Jury des Beaux-Arts,” La Dépêche coloniale, 27 July 1900. See Catalogue général officiel, Exposition In-

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

ternationale Universelle de 1900, vol. 2, Oeuvres d’art (Paris: Lemercier, 1900), 249–56. The Salle des Beaux-Arts also featured sculpture, architecture, renderings of Islamic monuments, and plans for new buildings, such as the “Project for an Algerian Eden” by a designer with the fitting name of Contestable; see Catalogue général officiel . . . 1900, 2:256. Paris Exposition, 1900 (Hachette), 340. On this issue (in the context of Algerian public buildings, not expositions), see François Pouillon, “La peinture monumentale en Algérie: Un art pédagogique,” Cahiers d’études africaines 141–42, no. 36 (1996): 183–213. The monument, later transferred to the Malagasy capital of Tananarive, is illustrated in Jules Charles-Roux and Scellier de Gisors, Exposition universelle de 1900, section des colonies et pays de protectorat: Album Commemoratif (Paris, 1900), plate 31. Ibid., 263. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1980), trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “panorama”; See further Oetterman, 5–97; and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990), 112–14. In the Panorama Marchand the painter Charles Castellani, a member of the expedition, devised an installation of twelve small dioramas stressing both exotic and political aspects of events: an elephant hunt, the burning of a “rebel” village, impassable rapids and threatening hippopotami on the Oubanghi River, the interview with the Ethiopian negus Ménélik at the journey’s end. The vast ring painting of the panorama itself showed optimistic beginnings: the Embarcation of the Mission on the Oubanghi. See Paris Exposition, 1900 (Hachette), 320.

27. Dioramas in this twentieth-century sense di¤ered from the installations originally bearing that name, the first of which, constructed by Daguerre, seated an audience in front of large diaphanous screens that could be moved to establish di¤erent scenes; see Oetterman, The Panorama, 69–83. 28. Paris Exposition, 1900 (Hachette), 320. 29. Paris Exposition, 1900 (Hachette), 317. 30. Charles Lemire, “L’Exposition Coloniale du Trocadéro,” L’Exposition des colonies et la France coloniale, 5 May 1900, 4. 31. Catalogue général officiel . . . 1900, 257. For an illustrated obituary, see Léonce Bénédite, “Figures d’Extrême-Orient: A propos de l’Exposition posthume des oeuvres de Marius Perret,” Art et décoration 11 (January–June 1902): 69–74. 32. See Catalogue général officiel . . . 1900, 257–58. 33. Alfred Picard, Le bilan d’un siècle (1801– 1900): Exposition universelle internationale de 1900 à Paris 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906), 433–34. For another view of the stereorama, see Rhonda Garelick, “Bayadères, Stéréoramas, and Vahat-Loukoum: Technological Realism in the Age of Empire,” in Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre, ed. Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 294–319. 34. Paris Exposition, 1900 (Hachette), 340. 35. De Natuur (1900), 257, quoted in Leonard de Vries, ed., Victorian Inventions, trans. Barthold Suermondt (London: John Murray, 1971), 123–24. 36. The Diorama de l’Algérie by Charles Galand and Maxime Noiré had seven compartments, including “the Hill of Sfa, with Biskra in the distance and the immensity of the desert, . . . a view of the famous Ravine of Constantine, . . . [and finally] the panorama of Algiers seen from Upper Mustapha” (Paris Exposition, 1900 [Hachette], 340). Noiré was the best-known French painter permanently resident in Algeria. He

Notes to Pages

110 –114

297

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

298

exhibited from time to time with the Orientalists in Paris and was a stalwart of the Algiers-based Société des Artistes algériens et orientalistes. A friend of Isabelle Eberhardt’s (he illustrated the Fasquelle edition of her Notes de Route), Noiré has a reputation that seems hard to credit now in view of his treacly vistas in which human figures are absent; see Marius-Ary Leblond, “Maxime Noiré,” Peintres de races (Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1909), 185–96. On the Maréorama, see De Natuur, in de Vries, Victorian Inventions, 125–26; and Picard, Le bilan d’un siécle, 434; on the Cinéorama, see “Les Attractions: Trocadéro,” Revue universelle 10 (1900): 298–99; and de Vries, Victorian Inventions, 126–27. For reflections on the global collecting of sites and peoples in the most extensive colonial exposition, that of 1931, see the chapter “Le tour du monde en un jour,” in Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 16–69. Le Panorama, 1900: Exposition universelle (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1900), 163. “Panoramas et dioramas: Décoration théâtrale,” in Picard, Le bilan d’un siècle, 434. This work, conserved at Waterloo, Belgium, is illustrated in the multipage frontispiece to Oettermann, The Panorama. See Leprun, Le théâtre des colonies, 17. The caption continued: “To people this decor, charming creatures have come. They are twelve Geishas, singers and instrumentalists. They have left Tokyo and will return there as soon as the Parisian festival is finished” (Le Panorama, 1900, 172– 73). “M. Louis Dumoulin introduces us to a sacred place, to the cemetery where Aziyadé was entombed, and of which M. Pierre Loti has traced such ravishing descriptions” (ibid., 167). See Philippe Burty, preface to Exposition Louis Dumoulin: Tableaux et études de l’ExtrêmeOrient, Japon, Chine, Cochinchine, Malaisie (Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 20 December 1889), 3.

Notes to Pages

114–122

46. See Jules Antoine, “Exposition Louis Dumoulin,” Art et Critique, 28 December 1889, 497–98; my thanks to Karen Esielonis for this reference. 47. See Fernand Blum, “Tableaux et études de Louis Dumoulin, peintre du Ministère de la marine rapportés d’une mission en ExtrêmeOrient en 1888,” in Notices coloniales, publiées . . . à l’occasion de l’Exposition universelle internationale et coloniale de Lyon (Lyon, 1894), xli–xlii. 48. Joseph Dancourt, “L’Andalousie au temps des Maures,” in Le livre d’or de l’Exposition de 1900, vol. 2 (Paris: Edouard Cornély, 1900), 239. I treat this subject at greater length in a forthcoming essay, “Andalusia in the Time of the Moors: Regret and Colonial Presence in Paris, 1900.” 49. “Les Attractions: Trocadéro,” Revue universelle 10 (1900): 298. 50. I owe this suggestion to Adrian Rifkin. 51. Guide Armand Silvestre de Paris et de ses environs et de l’Exposition de 1900 (Paris: Silvestre, 1900), 140. 52. Le Panorama, 1900, 207. 53. John Frederick Lewis, Sketches and Drawings of the Alhambra (London, 1835); and Owen Jones and Jules Gourey, Plans, Elevations, and Sections of the Alhambra (London, 1836– 45), are discussed in Michael Danby, The Islamic Perspective (London: World of Islam Festival Trust, 1983), 27, 43. 54. Dancourt, “L’Andalousie,” 239. 55. Guide Armand Silvestre, 141. 56. See Zeynep Çelik and Leila Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles,” Assemblage, no. 17 (December 1990): 35–59. 57. Dancourt, “L’Andalousie,” 240. 58. Marius-Ary Leblond, “Les expositions: L’Exposition des orientalistes,” La Grande revue 47 (March 1908): 381. 59. See Jules Charles-Roux, Souvenirs du passé: Le cercle artistique de Marseille (Paris: Lemerre, 1906). 60. Pamphlet entitled “No. 1037, Chambre des

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

Députés . . . Projet de Loi relatif à la concession de décorations . . . de l’Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille” (10 July 1907), Arch. Nat. F 12 7577. For a brief discussion of the Marseille expositions, see Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 71–72, 286–87. See Henri Malo, “L’Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille,” La Nouvelle revue, n.s. 43 (1906): 43, 53–54, 56–57. Gaston Deferre, preface to Les orientalistes provençaux: L’Orient des provençaux (Marseille: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, 1982), viii. Jules Charles-Roux, “Nos expositions des Beaux-Arts,” in Charles-Roux et al., Notice officielle et catalogue illustré des expositions des Beaux-Arts, Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille (Paris: Moderne imprimerie, 1906), xix. See the floor plan in Album commemoratif, Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille, 1906 (Marseille, 1906), n.p. See Charles-Roux, in Charles-Roux et al., Notice officielle, xx–xxi. Malo, “L’Exposition . . . de Marseille,” 48. Léonce Bénédite, “L’Exposition de la Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français,” in Charles-Roux et al., Notice officielle, li–liv, lv–lix. Exhibited as Charmeur de perroquets; see Charles-Roux et al., Notice officielle, lviii. Today it is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, at Longchamp. This society merits a study in its own right: it was forming by the time the seventeen Marseille scholarship holders returned to Paris to exhibit in February 1908 at the Galeries Bernheim-Jeune, which hosted a series of Salons up to 1914. The travel scholarships the Coloniale attracted (allied as it was to the Société des Artistes Français) exceeded those managed by the Orientalists. Its heyday was the 1920s, when Bernheim, as treasurer, documented its activities in his Bulletin de la vie moderne. Highly visible at both the 1922 and 1931 exhibitions, where its

70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

members’ works were shown alongside those of the Society of Orientalists, the Coloniale in 1931 had some three hundred members. It continued to exhibit up to World War II. Charles-Roux et al., Notice officielle, xxii, xxvi. “Exposition rétrospective des orientalistes français,” in Charles-Roux et al., Notice officielle, xlii, cat. no. 45, Négresse, property of Prince Alexandre de Wagram. Ibid., xlii, cat. nos. 52, Tête d’Algérienne; 53, Fête au camp (property of Claude Monet); 54, Tête d’Algérienne (property of Jules Strauss). Ibid., cat. nos. 31 and 32. Eugène Charabot and Georges Collot, “Organisation et description de l’Exposition coloniale nationale de 1907: Rapport générale,” Revue coloniale, n.s. 8 (1908): 705–7. See the pamphlet “Exposition nationale d’agriculture coloniale, ouverte du 20 juin au 20 juillet 1905 au Jardin Colonial à Nogentsur-Marne” (Paris: Société française de colonisation et d’agriculture, 1905); Arch. Nat. F 12 7576. Charabot and Collot, “Organisation et description de l’Exposition coloniale nationale de 1907 . . . Suite,” Revue coloniale, n.s. 9 (January 1909): 49. Charabot and Collot, “Organisation et description de l’Exposition coloniale nationale de 1907,” 719. See in particular the argument of Leighten in her “White Peril and L’Art nègre.” Léon Werth, “Les Nègres au Jardin d’acclimatation,” La Grande Revue 74 (August 1912): 609–12.

Chapter Six 1. The account of government traveling scholarships that follows is based largely on Armand Dayot’s “Salon des boursiers de voyage,” Art et décoration 11 (1902): 115–16; “Boursiers de voyage,” Le Journal, 24 Febru-

Notes to Pages

123–130

299

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

300

ary 1902; and his unsigned “Prix du Salon et bourse de voyage,” Le Temps, 6 June 1891. See Arrêté, signed by Minister for Public Instruction and Fine Arts Jules Ferry, and dated 10 May 1881, Arch. Nat. F 21 4109. This plotting of routes is based on the substantial records of the one hundred and sixty boursiers who left France between 1881 and 1901, Arch. Nat. F 21 4115–F 21 4120. On the wider activities of the inspectors, see Daniel J. Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 2. See Dictionnaire de la biographie française 10 (Paris: Letouzey & Ané), 402–3. Dayot describes himself as “a former ‘Algerian’ (married to an Oranaise and former chef de cabinet of M. Petrelle)” in a letter to the governor-general of Algeria, dated 24 April 1929, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, 64.S.30. Jules Ferry was twice minister of public instruction and fine arts: February 1879–November 1881 and February 1883–March 1885; his colonial work included the Bardo Treaty of 1881 (Protectorate of Tunisia), and the start of colonization in Madagascar and the lower Congo. Manuscript letter from Armand Dayot to Minister of Fine Arts, 19 November 1888, Arch. Nat. F 21 4115. From 1895 the artists instituted an annual banquet, and two years later an “Association amicale des Prix du Salon et boursiers de voyage,” which ended up with a pension fund, a considerable library, and so on; see Association amicale des Prix du Salon et boursiers de voyage (Paris: Ministère de l’Instruction publique et des Beaux-Arts, 1908), Arch. Nat. F 21 4109, for a full list of prizewinners from 1874 to 1908. Félix Soulés, letter to Director of Fine Arts, 19 November 1889, Arch. Nat. F 21 4115. For an illustrated account of the various

Notes to Pages

130 –136

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

French missions in East Africa (Lagarde, Bonvalot, Bonchamps, Marchand), see G. L., “Les Missions sur Faschoda,” L’Illustration, no. 2912 (17 December 1898): 390–93. Charles Nicholl, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880–1891 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997). My thanks to Peter Hulme for this citation. Note from the office of the Travaux d’art, 24 September 1896, Arch. Nat. F 21 4118. The account that follows is drawn from Bu¤et’s letters to the Director of Fine Arts, 28 December 1896 and 27 March, 27 August, and 14 September 1897, Arch. Nat. F 21 4115. G. G., “M. Lagarde en Abyssinie,” L’Illustration, no. 2818 (27 February 1897): 160. Dayot, note of 3 December 1899, Arch. Nat. F 21 4118; catalogue of Salon des Artistes Français 1898, no. 355. The work was deposited at the French Senate in 1904, but I have been unable to trace it; see Isabelle Compin et al., Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du musée d’Orsay, vol. 2, Ecole française, annexes et index (Paris: Réunion de musées nationaux, 1986), 217. See Brahimi and Benchikou, La vie et l’oeuvre de Etienne Dinet, 20–21; Lynne Thornton indicates that it took ten days to travel by coach from Algiers to Laghouat; see her sale catalogue, L’Orientalisme (Paris: Gros & Delettrez, 12 March 1999), cat. 170. Dinet’s river landscape was acquired in 1886 by the museum of Pau; see the illustration in Brahimi and Benchikou, La vie et l’oeuvre de Etienne Dinet, 265 (cat. 453). See Jeanne Dinet Rollince, La vie de E. Dinet (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1938), 38. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47. Ibid.; see Brahimi and Benchikou, La vie et l’oeuvre de Etienne Dinet, 185 (cat. 101). On the wells, see Prosper Ricard and J. Dalbanne, Les Guides bleus: Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Malte (Paris: Hachette, 1930), 300–301; and The Journals of André Gide,

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

vol. 1 (1889–1913), trans. and ed. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1947), 63. Dinet Rollince, La vie de E. Dinet, 48. Ibid., 50. Bénédite, “Etienne Dinet” (1910), 166. Acquired for one thousand francs for the Luxembourg, it was transferred in 1951, at Jean Alazard’s request, to the Algiers Museum; see Brahimi and Benchikou, La vie et l’oeuvre de Etienne Dinet, 265. Dinet Rollince, La vie de E. Dinet, 52. See Armand Dayot, “Le Salon des Boursiers de voyage,” Art et décoration 11 (1902): 113–22; and the catalogues (with text by Dayot) Prix du Salon et boursiers de voyage . . . IIIe exposition quinquennale (Paris: Ministère de l’Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts, 1912), and Exposition du cinquantenaire de la fondation des Prix du Salon et bourses de voyage (Paris: Albert Morancé, Grand Palais, 20 February–15 March 1926), BN Estampes. For a richly illustrated account of these journeys, see Emmanuel Hecre et al., Victor Prouvé: Voyages en Tunisie, 1888–1890. Dessins, aquarelles, huiles, exh. cat. (Metz: Editions Serpenoise, 1999), which came to my attention too late to be considered here. See Michael Spens, “Victor (-Emile) Prouvé,” Dictionary of Art, vol. 25, 662–63; and Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-deSiècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 237–38, 253–54. From 1919 to 1940 Prouvé was director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nancy. Madeleine Prouvé, Victor Prouvé (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1958), 25. Guillaumet’s Tableaux algériens first appeared in L’Artiste in 1886 and in book form in 1888; Prouvé mentioned Guillaumet in his letters home to his mother. See FrançoiseThérèse Charpentier, Orient romanesque, Orient pittoresque dans l’oeuvre de jeunesse de Victor-Prouvé (Nancy: Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy, 1977), n.p.

32. Victor Prouvé, letter to his mother, dated Tunis, 29 January 1888, in ibid. 33. See Victor Prouvé et la Tunisie, 1889–1890 (Lunéville: Musée de Lunéville, 1977), n.p. My thanks to Pierre Chanel for this pamphlet. 34. See the illustrated entry by FrançoiseThérèse Charpentier in Gallé, exh. cat., Musée du Luxembourg (Paris: Réunion de musées nationaux, 1985), 262–64. 35. Victor Prouvé, letter to the Director of Fine Arts, Tunis, 11 November 1889, Arch. Nat. F 214115. 36. Ricard and Dalbanne, Guides bleus, 444–47. 37. Prouvé, letters to Director of Fine Arts, Gabès, 12 March and 9 April 1890, Arch. Nat. F 214115. 38. De Gabès à Douïreth, notes de voyage, texte et croquis de V. Prouvé (Nancy: La Lorraine artiste and Crépin-Leblond, 1890). 39. Prouvé, journal entry for 20 January 1890, in Victor Prouvé et la Tunisie, n.p. 40. Journal entry, 21 October 1889, in ibid., where the curator notes that Prouvé doubtless knew the writings of his friend the Lorraine impressionist Charles de Meixmoron de Dombasle. 41. Jules Rais, “Victor Prouvé et ses plus récentes inspirations,” Revue des arts décoratifs 21 (1901): 312–13. 42. Prouvé, De Gabès à Douïreth, 5–6. 43. Ibid., 12, 14–15. 44. Madeleine Prouvé, Victor Prouvé, 47. 45. Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1893 catalogue, 387. La plaine à ksar Médénine (Sud Tunisien)—p[einture], 388; Etude de cavalier en tenue de fantasia (Ksar-Médénine), 389–94; Un cadre contenant 6 études: KsarMédénine, Tunis, Oasis à Gabès. The Nationale works were entitled Chemin creux dans l’oasis de Gabès and L’Oued Gabès à Menzel. 46. Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1895 catalogue, 137–39; Sud Tunisien, 140; 2 Cadres avec croquis du Sud Tunisien, 141; A

Notes to Pages

136 –143

301

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

302

la fontaine de Menzel: Lithographie pour L’Album spécial. The Committee for Old Algiers is discussed further in Chapter 8. From the early 1900s this committee organized regular walking tours of historic sites and visits to buildings of interest in Algiers and its environs. Sabine Fazekas, “La Villa Abd-el-Tif et ses peintres, 1907–1962,” master’s thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), 1987, 58. This thesis was kindly made available to me by Mme Malika Bouabdellah at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers. On Jonnart, see also Elizabeth Cazenave, La Villa Abd-elTif: Un demi-siècle de vie artistique in Algérie, 1907–1962 (Paris: Association Abd-el-Tif, 1998), 25–27, a richly researched book (half of which is a dictionary of Abd-el-Tifians) that is nevertheless flawed by errors in documentation. And see Chapter 8 of this book. Arsène Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts et les industries d’art en Algérie (1905; Algiers: L’Akhbar, 1907). See Victor Barrucand, M. Drumont et l’Algérie (Mustapha: Imprimerie algérienne, 1902), which consists of articles first published in Les Nouvelles. Christine Drouot and Olivier Vergniot, “Victor Barrucand, un undésirable à Alger,” in Le Maghreb dans l’imaginaire français: La colonie, le désert, l’exil, ed. Jean-Robert Henry (SaintEtienne: Edisud, 1985), 32. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 30–32. Ibid., 39–40. Barrucand claimed that he himself and the prominent local landscapist Maxime Noiré suggested the location of the artists’ residence; see Barrucand, “Les Abdel-Tif,” 3. See Henri Klein, “Abd-el-Tif, Villa des peintres orientalistes” (1910), in Klein, Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr (Algiers: L. Chaix, 1937), 242– 43; Edmond Gojon, “La Villa Abd-el-Tif,” in Gojon, En Algérie avec la France (Paris: Charpentier, 1927), 168–84; and Louis-

Notes to Pages

144–149

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

Eugène Angeli, “Une maison algérienne des artistes, La Villa Abd-el-Tif,” Algéria, special issue Christmas 1957, 18. Jean Alazard, “La Villa Médicis algérienne: ‘Abd el Tif,’” with watercolors by Jean Bouchaud, L’Illustration, no. 4490 (25 March 1929): 297. Barrucand, in Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 31n.1. “L’Echo des arts: Une Villa Médicis à Alger,” L’Art et les Artistes 3, no. 26 (May 1907): 110. Alazard, “La Villa Médicis algérienne,” 298. See Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif, 309–10. The initial jury’s four members were Bénédite, the director of the Office of Algeria (in Paris), and two appointees of the governorgeneral, being “amateurs . . . particularly interested in the arts inspired by countries of oriental civilization” (ibid.). See Fazekas, “La Villa Abd-el-Tif,” 84–85, and Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif, 31–33. Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif, 37–55. See Société des peintres orientalistes français, 1909 catalogue, nos. 46–96, which includes several studies of the Abd-el-Tif building itself. See Fazekas, “La Villa Abd-el-Tif,” 82. The Villa Abd-el-Tif collection is still held, in lamentable conditions indicative of a low esteem for colonial art, at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. Jean-Marie Carré, “L.-G. Carré,” L’Art et les artistes, no. 110 (May 1914): 263–64. Le thé dans le jardin, inscribed “Algiers 1910,” was exhibited at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1911 and purchased by the state in 1915. See Isabelle Compin, Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du musée d’Orsay, vol. 1, Ecole française; see also Visions de l’Algérie heureuse, 41. Carré, “L.-G. Carré,” 264. On this realist phase of his work, see also “Léon Carré et l’Algérie populaire,” L’Akhbar, 13 February 1910.

68. See Carré, “L.-G. Carré,” 267; this work is illustrated in Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif, 116, but misdated to 1919. 69. Carré, “L.-G. Carré,” 268. Several of Barrucand’s literary works of the 1890s had Buddhist and Indian themes. 70. See Thornton, L’Orientalisme (8 December 1997), nos. 76, 77. Camille Mauclair compared the best Carré miniatures to Edmond Dulac’s for the Thousand and One Nights in his “Peintres de l’Afrique du Nord à l’exposition des orientalistes,” L’Action africaine 2, no. 16 (April 1913): 78. 71. Victor Barrucand, “Abd-el-Tif et ses amis,” La Dépêche algérienne, 9 January 1920. 72. Jean Alazard, “Le Palais d’Eté du Gouverneur Général de l’Algérie,” Art et décoration 44, no. 261 (September 1923): 87–96; text amplified in Alazard, Le Palais d’Eté: Résidence du Gouverneur-Général d’Algérie (Algiers: Direction de l’Intérieur et des BeauxArts, 1951). On painting at the Palais d’Eté, see François Pouillon, “La peinture monumentale en Algérie,” 190–92. 73. The Palais d’Eté has been in continuous use since the 1962 revolution, initially as the president’s palace; when a new presidential residence was built, the old one was o¤ered to the people in 1987, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the revolution. It has been used for exhibitions and for public gatherings like weddings. 74. Alazard, Le Palais d’Eté, 41. See also Elizabeth Cazenave, Marius de Buzon (Paris: Editions Les Abd-el-Tif, 1996). 75. Pouillon, “La peinture monumentale en Algérie,” 192. 76. See Louis Vauxcelles, “Notes d’Art: Certains,” Gil Blas, 10 March 1905; see also Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif, 212. 77. See Bernard Dorival, “La donation Lung au Musée national d’art moderne,” La Revue du Louvre et des Musées dé France 11, no. 3 (1961): 148–58, esp. 156. 78. For color reproductions and discussion, see

79.

80.

81.

82.

Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, cat. nos. 114–16. J. D’Aoust, “L’Afrique du Nord aux Salons de 1913,” L’Action africaine, no. 19 (July 1913): 126. René Jean, “Petites expositions: Les peintres orientalistes français,” La Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, no. 7 (15 February 1913): 50. For Mauclair’s critique (“panels of a rude primitivity” inspired by Cézanne and Gauguin), see his “Peintres de l’Afrique du Nord” (1913), 77. See Waldemar George, “Les grandes invasions. Charles Dufresne,” La Renaissance de l’art français et les industries de luxe 10 (October 1931): 292–96. Jacques Busse, 1966, quoted in Philippe Chabert et al., Charles Dufresne, 1876–1938. Rétrospective (Troyes: Musée d’Art moderne, 1987), n.p. [5].

Chapter Seven 1. The phrase is from Marius-Ary Leblond’s diatribe against young boursiers of the Société Coloniale, whom he calls “stupid daubers sent o¤ to sow the wild oats of their mediocrity” (Leblond, “Les expositions. L’exposition des orientalistes,” 382). 2. Exposition Albert Besnard (Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 20 April–20 May 1912); see also Roger Benjamin, “The Colonial Mirage: Besnard in India, Matisse in Morocco,” University of Melbourne Fine Arts Society Bulletin 6, no. 3 (December 1994): 3–5. 3. Claude Duthuit, Rémi Labrusse, et al. Matisse: “La révélation m’est venue de l’Orient,” (Rome: Musei Capitolini; and Florence: Artificio, 1997). See also Isabelle MonodFontaine et al., Le Maroc de Matisse, exh. cat. (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe and Gallimard, 1999). 4. This chapter expands on my “Matisse in Morocco: A Colonizing Esthetic?” Art in Amer-

Notes to Pages

150 –160

303

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

304

ica 78, no. 11 (November 1990): 156–65, 211– 13, and “Orientalist Excursions: Matisse in North Africa,” in Matisse, ed. Caroline Turner and Roger Benjamin (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery; and Sydney: Art Exhibitions Australia, 1995), 70–83. In a revisionist spirit, see also Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “Matisse à Tanger,” in Tanger: Espace imaginaire (Rabat: Université de Mohammed V; and Tangier: Université Abdelmalek EsSaâdi, 1992), 113–19; Abelali Dahrouch, “The Neglected Side: Matisse and Eurocentrism,” Third Text, no. 24 (autumn 1993): 13–24; and Deepak Ananth, “Frames within Frames: On Matisse and The Orient,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153– 77. See Hubert Coenen, “Evenepoel et la peinture orientaliste belge du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle,” in Elaine de Wilde et al., Henri Evenepoel, 1872–1899 (Brussels: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1994), 125–52. For the visit to Marseille, see Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, vol. 1, The Early Years, 1869–1908 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998), 355; on Camoin, see Judi Freeman, “Chronology,” in The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 91–92. See Freeman, ibid., 90; and Spurling, ibid. Details of travel routes are confirmed by Grand tourisme en Algérie et en Tunisie (Paris: Touring-Club de France [ca. 1908]), 37. Matisse, postcard to Derain, quoted in Dominique Fourcade and Isabelle MonodFontaine, Henri Matisse, 1904–1917 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), 76; the text of the postcard is translated in Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, 358. Matisse to Pierre Courthion, in “Conversations avec Henri Matisse,” typescript, Getty

Notes to Pages

161–164

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Center for the History of Art, Los Angeles, Calif., 100; trans. in Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, ibid. Prosper Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France,123. Ibid., 127. Ricard and Dalbanne, Guides bleus, 286–89. For a wonderful analysis of Biskra as described in nineteenth-century guidebooks and literature, see Gareth Stanton, “The Oriental City: A North African Itinerary,” Third Text 3–4 (spring–summer 1988): 3–38. In Robert Hichens’s Garden of Allah (London: Methuen, 1904) an adventurous young English aristocrat visits Biskra with her maidservant, takes a young Arab poet as her guide, encounters an Italian count who keeps a magnificent garden, and flees into the desert with a mysterious Russian. While hardly high literature, The Garden of Allah presages, in the mystery it ascribes to the desert, Paul Bowles’s Sheltering Sky (New York: New Directions, 1949). Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France, 122–25. Matisse, quoted in Kasper Monrad, ed., Henri Matisse: Four Great Collectors, exh. cat. (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 1999), 284. My thanks to John Klein for this reference. Maurice Denis, “Le soleil,” L’Ermitage, 15 December 1906, reprinted in Denis, Théories, 1890–1910, 218–24. Matisse, letter to Henri Manguin, undated, quoted in Freeman, “Chronology,” 213n.37. See Franck Baudoin, letter of 18 August 1891 to Director of Fine Arts, Arch. Nat. F 21 4116. Matisse, quoted in Freeman, “Far from the Land of France: Fauves Abroad,” in The Fauve Landscape, 213n.38. “As for Fromentin’s book, it is certain that he put into it what he was unable to put into his painting” (Henri Matisse, “Lettre à Tériade”

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

[1947], in Matisse, Ecrits et propos sur l’art, ed. Dominique Fourcade [Paris: Hermann, 1973], 311). Letter from Le Glay to Matisse, Algiers, 12 June 1906, quoted in Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, 360. Henri Evenepoel, letter to his father, Algiers, 17 November 1897, in Henri Evenepoel à Paris: Lettres choisies, 1892–1899, ed. Francis E. Hyslop (Brussels: La Renaissance du livre, 1971), 162. Matisse, letter to Henri Manguin, undated, quoted in Freeman, “Fauves Abroad,” 208 and 213n.39. Matisse, letter to Henri Manguin, undated, quoted in Pierre Schneider, Matisse, trans. Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens Romer (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 158. On the literary precedent of Gustave Flaubert, see Richard Terdiman, “Ideological Voyages: Concerning a Flaubertian DisOrient-Ation,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker et al., 2 vols. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 1:28–40; and Said, Orientalism, 186–87. See The Journals of André Gide, vol. 1, 1889– 1913; although there are no entries for the 1893 venture, Gide does describe his 1896 trip to Biskra and Touggourt; of particular interest are his notes on Ouled-Naïl dance (64), on the value of “Negro” music as opposed to the vulgar ceremonies performed for tourists (67), and the beauty of Arab love songs (69– 70). Jack D. Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 167. Joseph Boone, “Vacation Cruises, or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA, no. 110 (January 1995): 101–2. Etienne Dinet and Sliman ben Ibrahim, Khadra, danseuse Ouled-Naïl (1906), illustrated by E. Dinet, ornamental pages by Mohammed Racim (Paris: Henri Piazza, 1926); further contemporary views may be found in

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

J. Huguet, “Les Ouled-Naïl,” Revue encyclopédique 10 (1900): 621–29; and Guy de Maupassant, Au soleil (1884), with illustrations by André Suréda (Paris: Albin Michel, 1945), 95–103. Dinet and Ibrahim, ibid., 128–29. See further Roger Benjamin, “Expression, Disfiguration; Matisse, the Female Nude, and the Academic Eye,” in InVisible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications; and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 75–106. See Marcel Sembat, Henri Matisse, Les peintres français nouveaux, 1 (Paris: Nouvelle revue française, 1920), 350; and Brenda Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta: The Cone Collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985), 159n.45. James D. Herbert, Fauve Painting: The Making of Cultural Politics (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 158. For the sale of works, with color illustrations, see Jack Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco: Paintings and Drawings, 1912–1913 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990). See Guillaume Apollinaire, L’Intransigeant, 17 April 1913, reprinted in Apollinaire, Chroniques d’Art, 1902–1918, ed. L.-C. Breunig (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 394. Two other reviews of this short-lived exhibition not previously noticed are worth quoting in full here. René Jean, in “Petites expositions,” Chronique des beaux-arts et de la curiosité, no. 16 (19 April 1913): 125, wrote: M. Henri Matisse is a colorist of remarkable subtlety and refinement, sensitive to the least nuances, who boldly juxtaposes the most violent and the sweetest of tones, to the point where he attains a sort of colored music that goes to the extreme limits of the pictorial domain. The canvases he has brought back from Morocco are expressive

Notes to Pages

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305

and evocative. They accompany pen sketches in a sure and synthetic line and some sculptures whose systematic and willful distortion aims to emphasize the expression of the face or the body.

Louis Vauxcelles, in “Exposition Matisse,” Gil Blas, 20 April 1913, wrote: Matisse is a difficult artist. He is execrable and delightful from one canvas to the next. . . . All this vagabond art, this chaos, is conscious, premeditated. Thus Matisse went o¤ to Morocco in 1912 like Eugène Delacroix, embarking in 1832 on the sloop of war La Perle, in Count de Mornay’s entourage. He—not Delacroix! Matisse—brings us back a dozen paintings, a job lot of drawings, and various pieces of sculpture. . . . The croquis have an amusing freedom, they are intelligent résumés. Among the paintings there are several, in particular the Café marocain, that teach us nothing new about our hero: color patches and flat areas in the manner of the Capucines of the 1912 Salon d’Automne. Others, the finest of which is the Porte de la Casbah, take e¤ect through ravishing harmonies of blues, pinks, and greens. My gravest objection to all this is that the essential theme of a picture is light, while threequarters of Matisse ’s pictures are nothing but exercises in color. Matisse is an eye.

36. Pierre Schneider, “The Moroccan Hinge,” in Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco, 201–39. 37. Pierre Loti, Au Maroc (1890), ed. Denise Brahimi (Paris: La Boîte à documents, 1988), 268. 38. Ibid., 26 (entry dated 26 March 1889). 39. See William A. Hoisington, Jr., Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and C. R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830 (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

306

Notes to Pages

168–172

40. Literary set pieces like Loti’s account of the sultan’s emergence from his palace in Fez deliberately rivaled Delacroix’s famous canvas in Toulouse; see Brahimi, introduction to Loti, Au Maroc, 10–11. 41. E. Tériade, “Matisse Speaks” (1951), in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art, 2d ed. (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), 133. 42. Loti, Au Maroc, 23. 43. See John Elderfield, “Matisse in Morocco: An Interpretive Guide,” in Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco, 226–28. 44. See James Cli¤ord, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21–54, for a discussion of self-consciousness in the discourse of ethnography. 45. Three young, apparently observant, Islamic women provided material for Loti’s novel, inviting the aging novelist to meet with them in Istanbul. They were in fact two protofeminists and the French feminist journalist Marc Hélys, who used the veil to dupe the writer and publicize their cause. The case calls for a modification of Said’s thesis, in that the conditions of Orientalism also contain the possibility of a reversal of power. On Les Désenchantées, see Lesley Blanch, Pierre Loti, the Legendary Romantic: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 271– 79; Quella-Villéger, Pierre Loti, l’incompris, 243–55; see also Marc Hélys, Le Secret des “Désenchantées” (Paris: Perrin & Cie, 1924). 46. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem: Images of a Sub-Eroticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); see Barbara Harlow’s introduction for a discussion of the veil. 47. For example, in a letter dated Tangier, 31 March 1914, the Australian artist Hilda Rix wrote to her mother of painting “an Arab girl—of about 18 yrs—a ‘naughty one ’ I

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

guess—for no self-respecting Arab woman would pose—Today she brought a friend & Oh they were queer & eastern & ‘let-go’— One was playing my Arab lute & both singing the weirdest things in harsh sad voices—She didn’t pose very well but you’ll like the thing I got. . . . If I hadn’t kept back her pay till today I’m sure she wouldn’t have appeared again. Their eyes are so weird & long & thick black lashes & brows” (see John Pigot, Capturing the Orient: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick in the East (Waverley, Victoria: Waverley City Gallery, 1992), 18. See Elderfield, “Matisse in Morocco,” in Cowart et al., 216 and 236 nn.66–67. “The hotel with its terraces standing on top of the hill in its big lovely garden is a joy— & from the window of my room I look down on a courtyard which is an unending source of interest to me—Silent footed be-turbanned servants move about their duties— Just now this morning early they were loading many mules with interesting huge packages in preparation for the departing caravan of three stout Germans[,] a celebrated financier, a diplomat and their doctor” (Hilda Rix, Hôtel Villa de France, Tangier, 5 February 1912, reprinted in Pigot, Capturing the Orient, 14). Further on Rix, see John Pigot, “Les Femmes orientalistes: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick in the East,” in Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender, ed. Jeanette Hoorn (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 155–68. Matisse also mentioned Amido of the Hotel Valentina as a potential model in a letter of April 1912; see Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco, 74. Hilda Rix, letter to Elizabeth Rix, Tangier, 25 March 1914, in Pigot, Capturing the Orient, 18. See the entries in Matisse in Morocco, 74, 88, and 90; Amido and Zorah Debout were sold to Shchukin.

53. “Entretien avec Tériade” (1929), in Matisse, Ecrits et propos sur l’art, 99. 54. Ary Renan, “Une nouvelle illustration des Evangiles par M. James Tissot,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3d ser., 17 (1 May 1897): 421–28, and 18 (1 July 1897): 61–68. Renan welcomed this correction of the “phantasmagoria” of two millennia of religious painting that had precious little to do with what was known of Palestine, ancient or contemporary. 55. See Duthuit, Labrusse, et al., Matisse, 148. 56. After many of the small number of Europeans living in the royal city of Fez were massacred in 1912, the French moved in forces sufficient to suppress opposition there and in the lowlands and establish the protectorate under General Lyautey. 57. Matisse, in a letter of early 1912, expressed a desire to see Fez but noted that it was unsafe to do so; see Schneider, “The Moroccan Hinge,” in Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco, 19. 58. Howard Ince, “A Reference to the Coast Towns of Morocco,” Art Journal (1903): 239. My thanks to John Pigot for this reference. 59. Matisse, postcard to his son Jean from Tangier with printed inscription “Tipo de la Kabila de Raisuli,” 10 January 1913, quoted in Monrad, ed., Matisse: Four Great Collectors, 238, illustrated Duthuit, Labrusse, et al., Matisse, 148. 60. Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France, 268. 61. Matisse, letter to Marguerite Matisse, 21 November 1912 (Archives Matisse), quoted in Schneider, “The Moroccan Hinge,” in Cowart et al., 56n.147. 62. Marcel Sembat, “Henri Matisse,” Cahiers d’Aujourd’hui, no. 4 (April 1913): 194. 63. For the political biography of Marcel Sembat (1862–1922), see Dictionnaire des parlementaires français (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977), 2990–92. 64. Sembat’s parliamentary speeches are recorded in the Journal officiel de la République française . . . Chambre des députés; on the Beni-

Notes to Pages

172–179

307

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

308

Snassen, see (1907): 2572– 73; on the Indochinese question, see (1910): 1014; on the Moroccan crisis (1911): 4042–46 (the quotation is from 4042). With the unification of the French socialists in 1905 under Jean Jaurès, the line on French colonial adventures moderated: while colonialism might be deplored on humanitarian grounds, it was above all feared as the most likely flash point for a war between the European powers. See Sembat’s book against bellicose Republicans, Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix (Paris: Figuière, 1913); and R. Thomas, “La politique socialiste et le problème colonial de 1905 à 1920,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 47 (1960): 238. “Discours de Sembat,” in Parti socialiste (section française de l’Internationale ouvrière), 9e Congrès national (Paris, 1912), 124. In the Chamber of Deputies, however, Sembat forcefully promoted public cultural initiatives and defended the controversial Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. I borrow the term “aestheticist” from Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). For such an approach to nineteenth-century Orientalism, see Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient.” Matisse to Camoin, Tangier, ca. October 1912, first published in Danièle Giraudy, “Correspondance Henri Matisse–Charles Camoin,” Revue de l’art 12 (1971): 13. Clara T. MacChesney, “A Talk with Matisse” (1912), in Flam, Matisse on Art, 52. The best source is Die Tunisreise: Klee, Macke, Moilliet, ed. Ernst-Gerhardt Güse, exh. cat. (Münster: Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte; and Stuttgart: Hatje, 1982). See Robert E. Groves, “Morocco as a Winter Sketching Ground,” Studio 45 (1908–9): 25. Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France, 351. Matisse, postcard to Gertrude Stein, 16 March 1912, illustrated in Benjamin, “Matisse in Morocco: A Colonizing Esthetic?” 158.

Notes to Pages

179 –186

75. Thus Groves wrote: “In Tangier my wife and I felt the irritation of too much that was European; but this is one of the instances . . . where the artist with his brush and pencil scores over the photographer. Discordant and disturbing European notes are eliminated from the otherwise harmonious Eastern picture” (“Morocco as a Winter Sketching Ground,” 25). 76. See André Suréda, “Soirées dans la Casbah”; and Jean Vignaud, “Souvenirs de la Kasbah,” L’Action africaine 3, no. 26 (February 1914): 21–28. Vignaud describes the Casbah of Algiers as a “court of every miracle, a cloaca where every vice hides, at once a coup-gorge and a prison for the roumis [Europeans] who dare to go there unarmed. . . . Friends who have lived in Algiers for thirtyfive years . . . have never visited the Arab quarter.” 77. It is unclear how much Matisse actually painted in the Casbah. In 1890 Loti had reported Tangier was secure, “no more need for guards to move about the streets, no more need to look out for oneself ” (Au Maroc, 267–68). Although small canvases like The Marabout and View of Tangier were probably begun in the open, Casbah Gate and the Moroccan Café, in view of their size and their frequent reworking, probably were not. 78. Théophile Gautier in La Presse (1839), quoted in Philippe Jullian, The Orientalists: European Painters of Eastern Scenes (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 58. 79. Sembat, in “Henri Matisse” (1913), gave evidence that originally the men’s faces had “lines, eyes, and a mouth,” that the figures were painted di¤erent colors (red, blue, yellow), and that one even smoked a pipe; the passage is translated in Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco, 104–6. 80. See Roger Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (June 1993): 307–16.

81. See Schneider, “The Moroccan Hinge,” in Cowart et al., 36–38, for Matisse ’s response to the gardens of the Villa Brooks. 82. Pierre Courthion, interview with Matisse, 1941, trans. in Cowart et al., 68. 83. See Laura Coyle ’s entry in Cowart et al., 70, and the infrared photo on 276. 84. Schneider, “The Moroccan Hinge,” 27.

Chapter Eight 1. The story is told in detail in Savarini, “L’Exposition d’art musulman,” 606–12. 2. See Dalila Orfali, “Un musée en péril,” Revue du Musée National des Beaux-Arts (Algiers) 2 (December 1988): 14; see also “Le Musée national d’Alger,” Chronique des beauxarts et de la curiosité, no. 17 (24 April 1897): 155. 3. See Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 4. Whether one model was preferable in an ethical sense is debatable: Lorcin argues that “assimilation” was based on the idea of the potential perfectability of the indigenous, whereas “association” tacitly suggested their inferiority (Imperial Identities). Practically, however, the French transformations in Morocco must be preferred to those in Algeria. 5. See Georges Marçais, L’art en Algérie, Exposition Coloniale de Marseille (Algiers: Imprimerie Algérienne, 1906), 148. On the military reuse of Roman forts and roads, see Michael Greenhalgh, “The New Centurions: French Reliance on the Roman Past during the Conquest of Algeria,” War and Society 16, no. 1 (May 1998): 1–28. 6. M. Elisabeth Crouse, Algiers (London: Gay and Bird, 1907), 184–85; on French urbanism in Algiers, see Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations.

7. Ali Merad, Le réformisme musulman en Algérie de 1925 à 1940: Essai d’histoire religieuse et sociale (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 43n.1; on Jonnart’s cultural policies, see Cazenave, La Villa Abd-el-Tif, 26–27. 8. Charles Jonnart, unidentified 1900 text, Archives départmentales du Pas-de-Calais, quoted in Cazenave, F. Marius de Buzon, 12. 9. Merad, Le réformisme musulman, 43n.1. 10. See Marçais, L’art en Algérie, 152, describing the “recent circular” as “the personal e¤ort of M. Jonnart.” 11. François Béguin, Arabisances: Décor architectural et tracé urbain en Afrique du Nord, 1830–1950 (Paris: Dunod, 1983), 1. (This book is richly illustrated.) See also Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, 214n.2. 12. Béguin, Arabisances, 20–21. 13. For detailed discussions of three of these Jonnart style buildings, see Henri Klein, Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr 7 (1914): 36, 60–68, 92–96; for illustrations, see Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations, 70; and Béguin, Arabisances, 6, 85. 14. Marçais, L’art en Algérie, 151. With some show of cultural sensitivity, the medersa was dedicated to the memory of Sidi AbdEr-Rahman’s Tsalibi clan, which had dominated the Mitidja region before the arrival of the Turks; see Ricard and Dalbanne, Guide bleu: Algérie, Tunisie, 16. 15. Lyautey is quoted to this e¤ect in Béguin, Arabisances, 61. 16. Marius Vachon, “Les industries d’art indigènes de l’Algérie,” Revue des arts décoratifs 21 (1901): 387–94, and 22 (1902): 21–27; the quotation is from 21 (1901): 394. 17. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 10. 18. Ibid. 19. On Ben-Aben, see Henri Klein, “Evocation d’art arabe: L’Ecole de broderie Ben Aben” (1909), in Klein, Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr (1937),

Notes to Pages

187–197

309

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

310

305– 7; see also C. Bayet, “L’art arabe à Alger,” Revue de l’art ancien et moderne 18 (July–December 1905): 22–23; Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 14–15; Crouse, Algiers, 154–55; and Marçais, L’art en Algérie, 158–59. Marçais, L’art en Algérie, 158. On the school of Mme Luce as described by the British feminist Barbara Bodichon, see Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain, 1850–1900 (London: Routledge, 2000), 71– 72. Bayet, “L’art arabe à Alger,” 22. See John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), chap. 5, “Orientalism in Design.” In 1905 a number of Luce ’s pieces had been given to the Mustapha Museum and others placed in a large exhibit of Muslim art at the new medersa that was scheduled to coincide with the Congrès international des orientalistes at Algiers (Bayet, “L’art arabe à Alger,” 18). Vachon, “Les industries d’art indigènes,” part 2, 27. A description of the office is given in Mustapha Orif, “Mohammed Racim, inventeur de la miniature algérienne,” in Mohammed Racim, miniaturiste algérien (Paris: Musée de l’Institut du Monde Arabe, 3–29 March 1992), 24. This essential essay is reprinted from Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales 75 (November 1988). Bayet, “L’art arabe à Alger,” 24: “Let us defend [young Arab artisans] against the zeal . . . of our drawing masters. Certain ‘artists’ have already been found who are ready to undertake the salvaging of Arab art and to provoke a renaissance by improving it as they see fit.” This account draws on Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 113¤. On Gallieni, see Betts, Assimilation and As-

Notes to Pages

197–203

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

sociation, 113–20; on Chailly-Bert, 47–51 and 147–52. For detailed descriptions of these campaigns, see Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco; and Pennell, Morocco since 1830. Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism; and Janet Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). See Wright, Politics of Design, 141–43; for a record of Moroccan sites listed for preservation, see Historique de la direction générale de l’Instruction publique, des Beaux-arts, et des Antiquités (1912–1930) (Rabat: Protectorat de la République française au Maroc, 1931), 272–82. See Henri Klein, “L’Orientalisme au Maroc,” Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr 7 (1914): 24. Rabinow, French Modern, 300, as quoted by Emily Apter, Continental Drift, 210. Wright, Politics of Design, finds for the preservationist intent and disputes the charge of apartheid by Abu-Lughod (147–49). The phrases are quoted from Raymond Koechlin, “Les tapis marocains au Pavillon de Marsan,” France-Maroc, no. 8 (15 August 1919): 208. Henri Prost, “L’Urbanisme au Maroc,” La Renaissance du Maroc (Poitiers, 1923), 391, as quoted by Wright, Politics of Design, 112. Jean Gallotti’s report was reprinted as “Les industries d’art indigène en 1913” in four issues of France-Maroc beginning with no. 82 (September 1923) and ending with no. 87 (February 1924). “Le Service des arts indigènes,” in Historique . . . des Beaux-arts, 146. France-Maroc was published under the imprimatur of Lyautey in Paris and Casablanca from 1917 to 1925 (when the War of the Rif forced Lyautey’s resignation). On Alfred de Tarde, see Wright, Politics of Design, 72, 87, 301. Alfred de Tarde, “Un renouveau des arts

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

marocains,” France-Maroc, no. 1 (15 January 1917): 33. Ibid., 35, 36. “Le Service des arts indigènes,” Historique . . . des Beaux-arts, 147. The early inspectors were Tranchant de Lunel, de la Nézière, Loth, Prosper Ricard, and Jean Gallotti and Mmes Bel, Réveillaud, and Pierrefitte; see Raymond Koechlin, “Une exposition d’art marocain,” Gazette des BeauxArts, 4th ser., 13, no. 692 (July–September 1917): 311. “Le Service des arts indigènes,” Historique . . . des Beaux-arts, 148–49; on Safi ceramics and French intervention in the arts industries, see James Housefield, “Moroccan Ceramics and the Geography of Invented Traditions,” Geographical Review 87, no. 3 (July 1997): 401– 7. R. S., “Arts indigènes: Une exposition de tapis marocains à Paris,” France-Maroc, no. 7 (15 July 1919): 201. For the modernist view, see A. T. [Alfred de Tarde], “Les influences possibles du Maroc sur l’art français,” France-Maroc, no. 5 (15 May 1917): 39. For the view of an elderly Cherifian, see Prosper Ricard, “Les tapis de Rabat,” France-Maroc, no. 80 (July 1923): 125–26. See the eyewitness account of the household industry: Marie-Louise Gallotti, “Les Tapis de Rabat,” France-Maroc, no. 10 (15 October 1917): 29–31. Gallotti, ibid. (30), mentions that the Office of Education, since the founding of the protectorate, had funded in Rabat “a Frenchwoman converted to Islam, who had gathered young indigenous girls around her and was teaching them to make carpets.” “Le Service des arts indigènes,” Historique . . . des Beaux-arts (149), notes that in the late 1920s one-third of the inspectors employed by the office (four out of twelve) were “lady technical agents especially charged with overseeing feminine industries.”

49. Raymond Koechlin wrote that by the turn of the twentieth century rug making in Morocco was becoming debased, the style was losing its firmness, the art of the workers was no longer sustained by the taste of amateurs eager for pleasure. One could foresee the moment when (as had happened in Constantinople), Europe would be insidiously introduced by favorites and businessmen in the entourage of the sultans and would little by little penetrate the art forms of the past and complete their ruin—unless, that is, the conquest, like that of Algeria, did not itself destroy the lived environment of the indigenous people. This evil has been avoided in Morocco. [Koechlin, “Les tapis marocains au Pavillon de Marsan,” 208.]

50. Ibid., 209. 51. Gallotti, “Les tapis de Rabat,” 29. 52. R. S., “Art indigène: Une exposition de tapis marocains à Paris,” 202. 53. Prosper Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains (Paris: Gouvernement chérifien, Protectorat de la République Française au Maroc, and Librairie orientaliste Paul Geunther), vols. 1, Tapis de Rabat (1923); 2, Tapis du moyen Atlas (1926); 3, Tapis du haut Atlas et du Haouz de Marrakech (1927); and 4, Tapis divers (1934). 54. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (64, 69), discusses the role of French army ethnographers and linguists in assessing the strength and political complexion of the Berber clans during the French pacification of the Middle Atlas. 55. Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, 1:ix–x. 56. Koechlin, “Les tapis marocains au Pavillon de Marsan,” 211. 57. Ricard, Corpus de tapis marocains, 4:v. 58. For a trenchant survey of painting and decorative arts at colonial exhibitions in the 1920s, see Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the

Notes to Pages

204–210

311

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

65.

66.

312

Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), chap. 5. Exposition des arts marocains, organisé au bénéfice des blessés marocains par l’Union des arts décoratifs et la Société des peintres orientalistes (Paris: Protectorate de la République Française au Maroc; and France-Maroc, Pavillon de Marsan, May–September 1917), 1–17. Raymond Koechlin’s article, “Une exposition d’art marocain,” on traditional Moroccan architecture and art, compensates for this slim war-budget catalogue. It was published in the better-funded Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Among the thirty painters were Tranchant de Lunel and de la Nézière themselves; Albert Marquet (with four Tangier drawings from 1913); the elderly Georges Clairin; and the “schoolteacher at Fez,” Azouaou Mammeri, making his continental debut. For a selection of views, see “La presse et le Maroc. I—L’Exposition d’art marocain,” France-Maroc, no. 7 (15 July 1917): 34–35. Koechlin, “Les tapis marocains au Pavillon de Marsan,” 210. On this great exposition, which cannot be detailed here, see Ludovic Nadeau, “L’Exposition coloniale de Marseille,” L’Illustration, no. 4155 (21 October 1922): 371–98; and Arsène Alexandre et al., Les richesses artistiques de la France coloniale, special issue of La renaissance de l’art et les industries de luxe 5, no. 4 (April 1922), esp. René Séguy, “L’Art marocain,” 193–207. The quoted passages are from Nadeau, “L’Afrique du Nord,” in “L’Exposition coloniale de Marseille,” 393, 395. See Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991). See Peter Wollen, “Fashion/Orientalism/the Body,” New Formations, no. 1 (spring 1987): 1–12, reprinted in Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 1–34.

Notes to Pages

210 –216

67. See Marcelle de Joannis, “La page de Madame,” France-Maroc, no. 12 (15 December 1919): 356. 68. See André Joubin, “Le Studio de Jacques Doucet,” L’Illustration, no. 4531 (4 January 1930): 17–20; and Lydia Puccinelli, African Forms in the Furniture of Pierre Legrain, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art, 1998); my thanks to Natalie Adamson for this citation. 69. “Art colonial,” in Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes: Rapport générale, vol. 4, Mobilier (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1925; reprinted New York: Garland, 1977), 52–53. 70. “Section des colonies françaises,” Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs: Catalogue officiel (Paris, 1925), 512. 71. Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs, 4:54. 72. [Victor Barrucand], “Aux arts décoratifs,” L’Akhbar, 21 August 1925. 73. Henri Gourdon, “Les colonies et les protectorats à l’Exposition des arts décoratifs,” Le monde colonial illustré 3, no. 24 (September 1925): 194; Gourdon was directorgeneral of public instruction in Indochina. 74. For arguments calling in question the modern as a “Euroamerican monopoly,” see John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998). 75. Gourdon, “Les colonies,” 196. 76. See Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs: Rapport générale, 4: pl. 75; Exposition internationale . . . : Catalogue officiel, 501–2; see also 508–9 on Moroccan and 510–11 on Algerian displays, discussed below. 77. Gourdon, “Les colonies,” 196; [Barrucand], “Aux arts décoratifs.” 78. R. S., “Le Maroc à l’Exposition des arts décoratifs,” Le monde colonial illustré 3, no. 24 (September 1925): 213. 79. See Nikos Papastergiadis, “Tracing Hybridity in Theory,” in Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterri-

80. 81.

82.

83. 84.

torialization, and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), esp. 170– 79. Exposition internationale . . . des arts décoratifs, vol. 2, Architecture, 48. Edmond Gojon, “L’Algérie à l’Exposition des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes,” Le monde colonial illustré 3, no. 24 (September 1925): 198. See Exposition internationale . . . : Catalogue officiel, 506–7; Herzig was awarded a diploma of honor by the jury at the exposition. Gojon, “L’Algérie à l’Exposition des arts décoratifs,” 199. [Barrucand], “Aux arts décoratifs.”

7.

8. Chapter Nine 1. On indigenous involvement in photography, see Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East (London: Quartet, 1988); and Mounira Khemir, “The Orient in the Photographer’s Mirror: From Constantinople to Mecca,” in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 189–95. 2. See Lumières tunisiennes, exh. cat. (Paris: Paris-Musées and Association française d’action artistique, 1995). 3. I wish to thank Lynne Thornton, Brahim Alaoui, and James Housefield for kindly providing me with copies of rare texts on Mammeri; and Maître Si Ali Tiar and, through him, Professor Driss Mammeri for letting me examine part of the family’s photo documentation of the artist’s work. 4. François Pouillon, “Tableaux d’Occident et d’Orient: La synthèse Racim,” in Mohammed Racim, miniaturiste algérien (Paris: Musée de l’Institut du Monde Arabe, 1992), 14–20. Most of the works by Racim that I discuss are illustrated in this catalogue. 5. See the essays in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 6. Prosper Ricard, “Aperçu religieux, artistique

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

et littéraire,” in Ricard and Dalbanne, Les Guides bleus: Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Malte, lviii. This biographical sketch draws upon the following: Jérôme Tharaud and Jean Tharaud, “Si Azouaou Mammeri, peintre de Rabat,” Art et décoration 39, no. 235 (July 1921): 21–24; Léonce Bénédite, Avant-propos to Exposition sous le haut patronage de M. le Maréchal Lyautey des dessins et peintures de Si Azouaou Mammeri (Paris: Galerie Feuillets d’art, 2–21 May 1921), n.p. [1–8]; and LouisEugène Angéli, “Les maîtres de la peinture algérienne: Azouaou Mammeri,” Algéria 42 (May–June 1955): 40–44. Tharaud and Tharaud, “Si Azouaou,” 21. On the Tharaud brothers, see Apter, Continental Drift, 197–202. Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), 166, notes that many Europeans feared that formal education for the Arabs would radically change the power structure. On Algerian educational policy, see Ageron, 152–68. A good sense of the term évolvé is provided in David Prochaska, “Tales of the City: Between Algérie française and Algérie algérienne,” in Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization, ed. Daniel Segal (Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 182–225. Angéli, “Les maîtres . . . : Azouaou Mammeri,” 41–43. Tharaud and Tharaud, “Si Azouaou,” 21–24. See Charles-André Julien, Le Maroc face aux impérialismes, 1415–1956 (Paris: Editions J. A., 1978), 141. Tharaud and Tharaud, “Si Azouaou,” 22. Jérôme Tharaud and Jean Tharaud, Fès, ou, Les bourgeois de l’Islam (Paris: Plon, 1930), 236–37; the chapter entitled “Histoire d’Azouaou” (234–92) draws on the biography of Mammeri as corroborated by other

Notes to Pages

217–224

313

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

314

sources (including the Tharauds’ own 1921 article). At times the Tharauds seem to conflate the careers of the two Mammeri cousins, Azouaou and Mohammed. Signed simply “Mammeri, instituteur à FezDjédid,” those articles may have been written by Mohammed Mammeri but illustrated by Azouaou (whose style and signature in the drawings correspond to those in his later paintings). See Lyautey’s preface to Exposition du peintre musulman Azouaou Mammeri, sous le patronage de M. le Maréchal Lyautey (Paris: Galerie Jean Charpentier, 4–19 May 1931): “I think it was in France-Maroc that I saw your first drawings, sketches of children and views of terraces. The line was already firm, exact, expressive.” Azouaou Mammeri, “L’Enseignement: Une classe marocaine,” France-Maroc, no. 3 (15 March 1917): 34–35. Azouaou Mammeri, “Une classe coranique,” France-Maroc, no. 12 (December 1918): 351–54. Exposition sous le haut patronage de M. le Maréchal Lyautey des dessins et peintures de Si Azouaou Mammeri, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Feuillets d’arts, 1921), cat. nos. 2 (Classe en Algérie), 41 (Ecole coranique), and 42 (Appel à la prière). The work was donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1923 by a Jacques Cartier; it is reproduced in Angéli, “Les maîtres . . . : Azaouaou Mammeri,” 41. Exposition des arts marocains, 5; Mammeri showed Campagne de Fès and Coin de Fès. See Bénédite, Avant-propos, 5–6. I am supposing that the work entitled Campagne de Fès, which is illustrated in Tharaud and Tharaud, “Si Azouaou,” 23, is the picture in question. I have been unable to trace it at the Musée d’Orsay. Tharaud and Tharaud, “Si Azouaou,” 24. See Benjamin Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954) (Paris: La découverte, 1991), 41–42, 70– 73.

Notes to Pages

225 –231

26. Pierre Angel, L’école nord-africaine dans l’art français contemporain (Paris: Les oeuvres représentatives, 1931), 139. 27. See the illustrated entry in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, cat. no. 108. 28. All three quotations are from Bénédite, Avant-propos to Exposition . . . de Si Azouaou Mammeri (1921), 1, 2–3, 6. 29. Ibid., 4, 8. 30. According to Bénédite, ibid., 4, Mammeri at Rabat refrained from teaching the figure, “to avoid any contestation,” focusing on traditional vegetative motifs and nature study, a point repeated in the anonymous article “Le premier peintre musulman” in L’Illustration, no. 4094 (20 August 1921): 162–64. From the later 1920s, however, Mammeri painted the figure (especially his family and French and Moroccan notables) with increasing frequency. 31. Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France, 292; see 288 for Joseph Victor Communal’s oil painting of the same site. 32. Conversations with Dja¤ar Boulharouf, Algiers, 1992, and Brahim Alaoui, Paris, 1996. 33. See Gustave Rouger, “Nos artistes au Maroc,” L’Art et les artistes, n.s. 6, no. 30 (October 1922): 3–41. The exhibition was at the semiofficial Galerie Georges Petit, which showed a variety of Orientalists throughout the 1920s. 34. Gustave Kahn, “Art,” Mercure de France 160 (December 1922): 762–63. Kahn refers to the exhibition Printemps dans l’oasis de Gafsa (Paris: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, 18 February–2 March 1918), in the catalogue to which Félix Fénéon writes (in the preface) that these two almost untutored Tunisians had “realized little masterpieces, of an incomparable expressive power” and had thus come “from the depths of their Africa, from the depths of their inviolate souls, to prove Matisse and Picasso right.” A copy of this rare illustrated catalogue is in the Frick Art Reference Library, New York. 35. See the Homi Bhabha–inspired reading of

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

the Australian Aboriginal landscapist Albert Namatjira: Ian Burn and Anne Stephen, “Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Reinterpretation,” in The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia, ed. Jane Hardy et al. (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1992), 264–82. See Benjamin, “Post-Colonial Taste? NonWestern Markets for Orientalist Painting,” in Benjamin, ed., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, 32–40. [Victor Barrucand], “Salon des Orientalistes,” L’Akhbar, 5 March 1921. Bénédite, Avant-propos to Exposition . . . de Si Azouaou Mammeri. P. P., “Une exposition à Rabat,” FranceMaroc, no. 12 (December 1918): 354–57. The works Boutet de Monvel purchased are illustrated in Rouger, “Nos artistes au Maroc,” 5; see also Exposition Si Azouaou Mammeri—tableaux et dessins: Afrique du Nord et Andalousie (Paris: Galeries Georges Petit, 16–31 March 1925), cat. nos. 67–69, where his ownership is noted. Victor Barrucand, “Peinture au Salon des orientalistes,” La Dépêche algérienne, 16 February 1923. Very likely this is the work described as a “stylized landscape” of the “Zaouia de Moulay-Idriss,” giving a date of about 1929 for this important picture; see de Chabot, “Les exposants du pavillon officiel à Rabat: Mammeri, Pontoy, Mme Moraël,” La Terre marocaine illustré, no. 48 (February 1930): 1059; my thanks to James Housefield for this citation. Ricard, Les merveilles de l’autre France, 322; the site is illustrated in fig. 326. Notes provided by Professor Driss Mammeri to Lynne Thornton. Bénédite, Avant-propos to Exposition Si Azouaou Mammeri—tableaux et dessins: Afrique du Nord et Andalousie, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1925), 4. “Le premier peintre musulman,” 162. François Pouillon, personal communication, 1998; for Mammeri’s later career, see Lynne

48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

Thornton, La femme dans la peinture orientaliste, Les orientalistes, 3 (Paris: ACR Edition, 1985), 246. Chabot, “Les exposants du pavillon officiel à Rabat,” 1058. Ibid., 1059. For biographical information and broader thematic issues, this section is heavily indebted to Mustapha Orif, “Mohammed Racim.” Robert Randau, “Un maître algérien de la miniature: Mohammed Racim,” L’Afrique du Nord illustrée 817 (10 January 1937), reprinted in Mohammed Racim: Miniaturiste algérien, 38. This quotation and those that follow are translated from Randau, “Un maître algérien,” 38–40. Orif, “Racim,” 24–25; there is an example of Omar Racim’s work in the collection of the Musée de l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 241, notes that in 1913 Omar Racim, “in a little journal lithographed in Arabic, Dhoul-Fiquar, . . . worked to spread the reformist [Islamic] doctrine of the Salfiyya.” François Pouillon, personal communication, 1998. See listings in Mohammed Racim: Miniaturiste algérien, 44. Georges Marçais, La vie musulmane d’hier vue par Mohammed Racim (Paris: Arts et Métiers graphiques, 1960), has color plates in five styles: “Oriental,” “Algerian,” “Persian,” “Turco-Persian,” and “Maghrebian.” All quotations are from Orif, “Racim,” 26 (sources not given). This history is drawn from Henri Klein, “Le Comité du Vieil Alger,” Feuillets d’El-Djezaïr 1 (1910): 5–12. Unlike later measures taken by Lyautey in Morocco, those of the Comité du Vieil Alger were limited by its unofficial status. See Zeynep Çelik, “Colonialism, Orientalism, and the Canon,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 2 (June 1996): 202–5.

Notes to Pages

231–241

315

60. For details, see Fereshteh Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky (New York: Garland, 1991). 61. Esquer, Iconographie historique de l’Algérie. Racim’s use of Esquer was suggested by Pouillon, personal communication, 1998. 62. Marçais, La vie musulmane d’hier, 10; cf. Georges Marçais, “Mohammed Racim, miniaturiste algérien,” Gazette des BeauxArts 141 (1939): 52–53. 63. Marçais, La vie musulmane d’hier, 9. 64. Adrien Berbrugger, Algérie historique, pittoresque, et monumentale: Recueil de vues, monuments, cérémonies, costumes, armes, et portraits, dessinés d’après nature (Paris: J. Delahaye, 1843). Berbrugger was the founding director of the National Library, and his volume helped furnish Esquer’s 1929 portfolio of prints. 65. See J[ean] B[évia], “Les Récompenses: Au Salon des Orientalistes,” La Dépêche algérienne, 17 February 1923. Bévia congratulates Racim, “whose fine talent as an illuminator and miniaturist has earned everyone ’s admiration.” 66. Victor Barrucand, “Peinture au Salon des orientalistes,” La Dépêche algérienne, 17 February 1923. 67. Orif, “Racim,” 27. In the Algiers municipal elections, Barrucand ran for office among primarily indigenous Muslim candidates. 68. Victor Barrucand, “Salon d’Hiver,” La Dépêche algérienne, 21 February 1924. 69. Exposition internationale . . . : Catalogue officiel, “Section d’Algérie,” 507: “Racim, Omar, miniaturiste, Alger (miniatures)”; Mohammed Racim is not listed but clearly did exhibit. 70. [Victor Barrucand], “Aux arts décoratifs,” L’Akhbar, 21 August 1925. Edmond Gojon, “L’Algérie,” in Album de l’Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs de 1925 (Paris: L’Art Vivant, 1925), 132. 71. Pouillon, “Tableaux d’Occident et d’Orient: La synthèse Racim,” 18.

316

Notes to Pages

241–250

72. My principal sources here are Ricard and Dalbanne, Guides bleus, 6–7; Charles Delvert, Le Port d’Alger (Paris: Dunod, 1923), 8–16; and Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 151–68. 73. See Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Captive’s Tale, trans. and ed. Donald P. McRory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 74. Richard Pennell has kindly translated Racim’s Arabic inscription—“A sea battle between the Muslim fleet and the fleet of the Christians”—which emphasizes the element of religious struggle. 75. See, for example, Andries van Eertvelt, A Spanish Engagement with the Barbary Corsairs, illustrated in David Cordingly, Pirates: Terror of the High Seas (Atlanta: Turner Publications, 1996), 76. 76. For Racim’s list of this and other projects for book illustration, see Randau, “Un maître algérien,” 40. 77. Marçais, La vie musulmane d’hier, 29. The term “folkloric” is Pouillon’s. 78. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and expanded ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 79. See Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale, 74. 80. The journal was Ech Chibab, quoted in Orif, “Racim,” 29–30. 81. Bachir Hadj Ali, “Culture nationale et révolution algérienne,” La Nouvelle Critique 147 (1963): 35, as quoted by Pouillon, “Tableaux d’Occident et d’Orient: La synthèse Racim,” 18.

Chapter Ten 1. Marshal Lyautey, quoted in Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, 1931, la mémoire du siècle: L’Exposition coloniale (Paris: Editions du complexe, 1991), 25. 2. In addition to Hodeir and Pierre, see Leprun,

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Le théâtre des colonies; Jean-Claude Vigato, “The Architecture of the Colonial Exhibitions in France,” Daidalus, no. 19 (1986): 24– 37; Philippe Rivoirard, “L’Exposition coloniale, ou l’incitation au voyage,” in Emmanuel Bréon, Michelle Lefrançois, et al., Coloniales, 1920–1940 (Boulogne-Billancourt: Musée municipal de Boulogne-Billancourt, 1989), 67–82; Herman Lebovics, “Donner à voir l’Empire coloniale. L’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris en 1931,” Gradhiva, revue d’histoire et d’archives de l’anthropologie 7 (winter 1989–90): 18–28; Romy Golan, “At the Fairs,” in Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 105–36; Jody Blake, “The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art indigène in Service of the Revolution,” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1 (March 2002): 35–58; and Morton, Hybrid Modernities. See Sylvie Cornilliet-Watelet, “Le Musée des colonies et le Musée de la France d’Outremer (1931–1960),” in Bréon, Lefrançois, et al., Coloniales, 83–93; and Morton, Hybrid Modernities, 271–312. See Dalila Mahammed-Orfali, Chefs-d’oeuvre du MuséeNational des Beaux-Arts d’Alger (Algiers: Regie du Sud-Méditerranée, 1999), with eighty color plates of paintings in the collection and a useful historical overview that, perhaps for understandable reasons, says little about the context of the centenary that I emphasize here. The discussion that follows draws on the detailed account of the political environment leading up to the centenary in Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:389–411. See Lorcin, Imperial Identities, esp. 172. Maurice Violette, letter of 20 February 1926 to Camille Chautemps, minister of the interior, quoted in Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:392. Dinet wrote to his sister on 12 August 1928: “Our Muslim policy has arrived at a degree of imbecility never previously attained. . . . Violette is the only one with whom I’ve been able

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

to speak frankly. Like me, he thinks we must above all intensify French culture, for only that way can France avoid disappearing completely in North Africa, like the Romans” (quoted in Dinet Rollince, La vie de E. Dinet, 195). Dinet, letter to his sister, 30 June 1928, quoted in ibid. Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:396. Bertrand, quoted in A. Augustin-Thierry, “Ce qui se prépare en Alger,” Revue des deux mondes, 7th ser., 55 (1 January 1930): 194. See the excellent discussion of Bertrand and his theories of the néo-Français in Lorcin, Imperial Identities, 196–213. Augustin-Thierry, “Ce qui se prépare en Alger,” 194. Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:403–4. Metropolitan and foreign journalists were funded to cover the festivities in Algeria, and the colonial authorities distributed hundreds of articles ready-made. Gustave Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie: Exposé de l’ensemble (Algiers: Gouvernement générale de l’Algérie and P. & G. Soubiron, 1931), 1:148. Poisson was an Abdel-Tifian of 1908 who had also exhibited with the Orientalist Painters in 1912 and 1914. See Mercier, 1:171– 79. Augustin-Thierry, “Ce qui se prépare en Alger,” 198. The complicity of indigenous leaders with the centenary admits of various interpretations. While clearly some indigenous benefited from working alongside the French (Dinet and others derisively called them “Beni OuiOui,” or tribe of yes-men), the participation of others was token or submissive or resigned. A cover of L’Illustration showing an indigenous leader’s son swearing fealty to France at a banquet exemplifies both the French e¤ort to claim indigenous participation in the centenary and the absence of any protest (see L’Illustration, no. 4548 [3 May 1930]).

Notes to Pages

250 –255

317

18. Dinet, letter to his sister, 12 August 1928, in Dinet Rollince, La vie de E. Dinet, 195 (also quoted in Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 180). 19. Ben Badis, quoted in Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:409 (also quoted in Hodeir and Pierre, 1931, la memoire du siècle, 32). 20. On the Oran and Constantine museums, see Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie, 1:245–55. 21. Camille Gronkowski, “Le centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie au Petit Palais”; and Raymond Escholier, “L’Exposition Eugène Delacroix au Louvre,” both in L’Illustration, no. 4551 (24 May 1930), n.p. 22. See Edouard Pommier, “Naissance des musées de province,” in Les lieux de la mémoire, vol. 2, La nation: Le patrimoine, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 451–52. 23. C. de Galland, Preface to Muller, Ville d’Alger: Catalogue du musée municipal (Algiers: A. Jourdan, 1911), xiv. 24. Fritz Muller, Avant-propos to ibid., v–x. 25. See Sherman, Worthy Monuments, chap. 1. 26. Alexandre, Réflexions sur les arts . . . en Algérie, 38: “These works age quickly, [and] are a bad example. . . . Thus certain provincial museums . . . are nothing but a shambles that young people should avoid, for they can irreparably pervert an artistic vocation.” 27. Galland, Preface to Muller, Ville d’Alger, xv, citing petitions of July 1905 and February 1908. 28. The conditions of display were nevertheless lamented in “Le Musée d’Alger et la Commission des Beaux-Arts,” L’Akhbar, 26 April 1908. 29. Galland, Preface to Muller, Ville d’Alger, xviii. 30. See Muller, Ville d’Alger. The Algiers Municipal Museum’s administrative committee included Cauvy, Dinet, Bénédite, and the patron Frédéric Lung. 31. Galland, Preface to Muller, Ville d’Alger, xx.

318

Notes to Pages

255 –261

32. Ibid., xxi. 33. See Jean Alazard, Essai sur l’évolution du portrait peint à Florence de Botticelli à Bronzino (Paris: H. Laurens, 1924), and his Florentine Portrait (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 34. Alazard, based during World War I at the Institut Français in Florence, wrote on Italian policy in that conflict (L’Italie et le conflit européen, 1914–16 [Paris: Alcan, 1916]), and during World War II, on the involvement of the United States in the European war (Remarques sur la politique étrangère des EtatsUnis [Algiers: Guiauchain, 1944]). 35. Alazard’s “Palais d’Eté du Gouverneur Général de l’Algérie,” Art et décoration 44, no. 261 (September 1923): 87–93, displays a good knowledge of the Abd-el-Tif painters. 36. Jean Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” Bulletin des Musées de France 2, no. 9 (September 1930): 184–86. 37. Both passages are from Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie, 1:230–31. Edmond Gojon questions the ethics of imposing this “rationalistic” order on the profusion of exotic vegetation of the Jardin d’Essai in his “Jardin d’Essai du Hamma,” in Gojon, En Algérie avec la France, 158–67. 38. I am grateful to Professor Philip Goad of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Melbourne for help in reading this building. Initial drawings showed arched windows on the first and second floors, producing a Renaissance look; these were eliminated in the built version in all but the courtyard windows on the top floor. See “Une grande création du Centenaire: Le nouveau Musée national des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne, no. 767 (April 1930): 155–58. 39. Quoted in Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:409. 40. Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 186. 41. The building, begun in September 1927, was completed in time for the museum to be opened by President Gaston Doumergue on

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

4 May 1930; for details see Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie, 1:231–33. Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 186. Pierre Berthelot, “Le Musée National d’Alger,” Beaux-Arts: Chronique des arts et de la curiosité 8, no. 5 (20 May 1930): 7. Thus he wrote: “One hopes this new center of culture will . . . give the young French people of Africa the wherewithal to educate their taste. Many of them know our artistic traditions only through books; henceforth they will have living examples before their eyes, and so will remain permanently in contact with what has made the grandeur and beauty of our civilization” (Alazard, quoted in Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie, 1:244; repeated in Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 210). Mercier, quoted in Augustin-Thierry, “Ce qui se prépare en Alger,” 198. Victor Barrucand, “Pour le Musée d’Alger,” L’Akhbar, 30 June 1928. Alazard, cited in Paul-Fierens, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” Mouseion 21–22 (1933): 212. Alazard nevertheless did purchase a School of Fontainebleau Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis (Vénus pleurant la mort d’Adonis) to establish the starting point common to histories of French painting. Giovanni Pannini’s View of the Colosseum (Vue du Colisée) appears as a rare gesture to non-French precedents, while a fine drawing of a nude by Carle Van Loo stood out against new transfers from the Louvre: a copy of Poussin’s Institution of the Eucharist (L’Institution de la Eucharistie), a Vow of Love (Voeu d’amour) from the school of Fragonard, and a “rather somber” seascape by Joseph Vernet. See Alazard, “Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger.” Berthelot, “Le Musée National d’Alger,” 7. Alazard’s 1930 book L’Orient et la peinture française au XIXe siècle reinforces the genealogy Bénédite had established in his own

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

curating and in his scholarly books on Orientalists like Lebourg and Chassériau. The heroes of the movement, for Alazard, were Delacroix and Fromentin but also Chassériau, Dehodencq, and Regnault. Alazard wrote a chapter on the impressionist Orientalists Lebourg and Renoir (not explored in Bénédite ’s retrospectives at the Orientalist Painters). Alazard’s major point of di¤erence with Bénédite was Dinet, whom Bénédite championed and Alazard virtually ignored. See Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 2, 1882– 1886: Peintures (Lausanne and Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1979), cat. no. 1118, Mer démontée. Barrucand, “Pour le Musée d’Alger.” Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 208. Ibid., 202. Fierens, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 214. Berthelot, “Le Musée National d’Alger,” 7. As for the work of Charles Despiau, who, like Aristide Maillol, excelled at the modernized neoclassical female nude, Algiers possessed the best collection held by any museum of the day. Alazard attempted to import the whole history of French sculpture to Algiers by the expedient of the plaster cast. He expanded the Municipal Museum’s old study collection by spending thirty-seven thousand francs on “fifty-seven casts of French art (tenth– nineteenth century),” and devoted another ten thousand to “albums of reproductions of master drawings,” mostly from the Albertina in Vienna (minutes of the 27 November 1929 meeting of the Conseil Supérieur du Centenaire, AOM 64.S.30). Alazard wrote of seeking to create, “not far from the museums of Mustapha, of Cherchell and Djemila, in a country that contains so many vestiges of antique statu-

Notes to Pages

261–266

319

58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64.

65.

320

ary, a sort of modern Glyptotheque” (“Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 202). See Mercier, Le centenaire de l’Algérie, 1:278– 311, for details of the military monuments. “Contrôle des engagements de dépenses,” Commissariat générale du centenaire de l’Algérie, 26 October 1928, AOM 64.S.30. The evidence for such allocations lies in further official documents (in ibid.) and in the list of new works in Jean Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger: Exposition des dons et acquisitions,” Bulletin des musées de France 5 (May 1935): 73–80. Alazard continued: “Purchases made for the museum of Algiers will benefit from the great authority of such persons as MM. Koechlin, Pacquement, David-Weill (a benefactor of our museum), Jamot, Gui¤rey, Dezarrois, Rey, and so forth, . . . who are the men the director of fine arts in Paris has proposed to you” (Jean Alazard, letter to Gustave Mercier, dated Marrakech, 28 April 1929, AOM 64.S.30; the same source lists all sixteen members of the commission for purchases in a document dated 11 May 1929). Alazard, ibid. For comprehensive lists of works acquired, see the documents of the Commission d’achats for the Centenaire de l’Algérie dated from 1929 to 1930, in AOM 64.S.30. Polignac gave a drawing by Derain and a nude by André Favory (with drawings by Nicolas de Largillière and Louis-Léopold Boilly); David-Weill donated an Italian landscape by Pierre Laprade, and the small Matisse—a view of Renoir’s garden (see Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 191–92). On Lung’s Besnard, see Barrucand, “Pour le Musée d’Alger.” Lung reserved his major munificence for the metropole, most works from his estate passing on his death during the Algerian war to the Bordeaux Museum and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris (see Dorival, “La donation Lung”).

Notes to Pages

266 –269

66. Barrucand, “Pour le Musée d’Alger.” 67. Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 201. 68. The minister of public instruction and fine arts in Paris wrote to the governor-general of Algeria on 17 May 1929, agreeing to change the name of the proposed museum from “Musée Colonial” (which must have been its interim designation) to “Musée National” (AOM 64.S.30). 69. On the role of Jean de Maisonseul, see François Pouillon, “Exotisme, modernisme, identité: La société algérienne en peinture,” in Le Maghreb, l’Europe, et la France, ed. Kacem Basfao and Jean-Robert Henry, Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 29 (1990): 219. 70. See Les peintres de l’Orient au XIXe siècle, Exposition artistique du Centenaire de l’Algérie (Algiers: Musée National des BeauxArts d’Alger, 5 May–5 June 1930); the scholarly counterpart of Esquer’s exhibition was his three-volume Iconographie historique de l’Algérie; more accessible is his splendidly illustrated “Oeuvre de la France en Algérie,” L’Illustration 8, no. 4551 (24 May 1930): n.p. 71. Jean Alazard, letter to Gustave Mercier, 28 April 1929. 72. It is likely Séailles donated the works, for they do not appear on Alazard’s lists for the centenary budget; the Louvre donation is noted in Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 195. 73. See Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 198; the acquisition of Renoir’s Algerian figure studies by the museum is proved by the entry in L’Algérie vue par les artistes français (XIX et XXe siècles), exposition organisé sous les auspices du Gouvernement Général de l’Algérie et de l’Association Française d’Expansion et d’Echanges Artistiques (Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, October–November 1931), cat. no. 25, “Types arabes (Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger).” 74. Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 199.

75. At the time of my visit in 1992 the Abd-elTif collection was relegated to storage in lamentable conditions. 76. Jean Alazard, “Les Beaux-Arts,” in Les Arts et la technique moderne: Algérie, 1937 (Algiers: Imprimerie Fontana, 1937), 163; see also Alazard, Exposition d’oeuvres d’Albert Marquet (1875–1947), exh. cat. (Algiers: Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, 1949), 14–17. 77. Ketty Carré purchased three Sudanese dyed cloths and one “Dokali Gourara” (her husband purchased two more) from a special display organized by the Direction des Territoires du Sud; see “Etat des ventes au salon de 1912,” in Société des artistes algériens et orientalistes, catalogue of the fifteenth annual Salon (Algiers, 1913), 30. 78. Victor Barrucand, L’Algérie et les peintres orientalistes (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1930), 1:19. 79. Minutes of the Conseil Supérieur du Centenaire, 19 February 1930, AOM 64.S.30; and L’Algérie vue par les peintres français, cat. nos. 45, 46. 80. Barrucand, L’Algérie et les peintres orientalistes, 1:18–19; see also 1:35, 43–44. (Barrucand commissioned Ketty Carré and Racim to do the covers for his two-volume book.) Yet Pierre Angel could compare her work unfavorably with that of her husband and other male members of the school, writing of her “savorous, ever so delicate, perhaps over-pretty work” (Angel, L’école nordafricaine, 177). 81. In Paris she studied under the figure painter Paul-Albert Laurens and the poster artist Eugène Grasset. See Lynne Thornton, La Femme dans la peinture orientaliste, 241. 82. See the comb, hairpin, and pendant sold by “Mlle Herzig” in “Etat des ventes au Salon de 1912,” 29. 83. Kleiss-Herzig won scholarships from the office of the governor-general, the Algerian railways, and so forth, in 1920, 1924, and 1926; see “Recompenses officielles attribuées

84.

85.

86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

depuis la fondation de la Société des artistes algériens et orientalistes,” Société des artistes algériens et orientalistes, catalogue of the forty-second annual Salon (Algiers, 1942), 17–19. Her work was in the Museum of Algiers by 1935 (if not well before); see Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger: . . . dons et acquisitions,” 79. The Conseil Supérieur du Centenaire, 19 February 1930, approved the following purchases: “Mammeri—Maison arabe . . . 1,500 frs” and “Racim—Miniatures . . . 10,000 frs”; the number of miniatures is not specified (AOM 64.S.30). Shown as the property of the Algiers Museum when displayed at the Palais des Beaux-Arts at the 1931 Exposition coloniale; see Beaux-Arts: Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris (Paris, May–November 1931), 68 (cat. nos. 295, 296). The commission allocating works to the museums of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran transferred to Oran (as part of a lot of 56 paintings and 12 sculptures by primarily twentieth-century Orientalists) Racim’s Miniature orientale, Dinet’s Vieilles femmes arabes, and Mammeri’s Vue de Tolède (minutes of 28 February 1930, AOM 64.S.30). See Orif, “Racim,” 28; and Alazard, “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger,” 200, and “Les Beaux-Arts,” 163. In the first of his two essays Alazard wrote of the “original note” that indigenous artists brought to the new Algerian school, in “Racim who rejuvenates the technique of the miniature, and Mammeri, the Kabyle painter who brings to the analysis of things in his home country a probity, a primitive ’s vigor that has an austere charm.” Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 182. Ibid., chaps. 9, 10. See Muller, Ville d’Alger, cat. no. 38; and the minutes of 28 February 1930, AOM 64.S.30. Only one Dinet belonging to the Algiers museum was exhibited in the full-scale retrospective devoted to the artist at the end of

Notes to Pages

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321

91.

92.

93.

94.

the colonial exposition in Paris. See Retrospective E. Dinet, Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931 (Paris: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 16 October–11 November 1931), cat. no. 8: “L’Abandonnée, peinture, Musée d’Alger.” A number of Islamic reformist politicians were present at the funeral and made speeches about their devotion to this Muslim, for whom religion, having arisen from study, meditation, and free choice, was all the richer. See Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, 207–11. Pierre Bordes, “La mort du peintre Dinet,” L’Akhbar, 15 January 1930, reprinted in Pouillon, ibid., 212, 216. Given the liberal and conciliatory tenor of Bordes’s eulogy and the level of understanding of Dinet’s art it exhibits, it seems unlikely that Bordes wrote it himself (Pouillon, 205). Regarding his appointment to the Commission on Muslim Arts Dinet wrote his sister: “I should decide whether to participate in the centenary. Personally I would like to see it go to the devil! Even if it succeeded overall, it would bring with it so much ugliness (not to say ignominy) that I would like to be far away and see nothing of it.” In the event Dinet died first, but in 1929 there was a plan for the French president’s ceremonial tour of Algeria to include Bou-Saâda, where he was to make Dinet Commander of the Légion d’honneur (Dinet Rollince, La vie de E. Dinet, 206– 7). See the catalogues of the following exhibitions at the library of the Algiers museum: Léon Cauvy (1933), Henri Clamens (1939), Charles Dufresne and Jean Launois (1942), Albert Marquet (1949), Othon Friesz (1951).

Conclusion 1. This summary draws from materials in Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities, the chap-

322

Notes to Pages

272–280

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

ter entitled “Challenging the Exposition,” 96–129; and from Jody Blake, “The Truth about the Colonies, 1931,” 35–58. For details of both the retrospective and the contemporary sections, see Beaux-Arts: Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris (Paris, May–November 1931), listing nearly eight hundred items. See Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 168 n.52. For Mammeri and Racim, see Beaux-Arts, 65, 68, 86, 90; on the Indochinese artists, see the thoroughly researched book by Nadine André-Pallois, L’Indochine: Un lieu d’échange culturel? Les peintres français et indochinois ( fin XIXe–XXe siècle) (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole d’Extrême-Orient, 1997), as well as her Paris–Hanoï–Saigon: L’Aventure de l’art moderne au Viêt-Nam, exh. cat. (Paris: Pavillon des Arts/Paris Musées, 1998). These points were first made by Kenneth Silver, in his “Matisse ’s ‘Retour à l’Ordre,’” Art in America 76, no. 6 (June 1987): 111–23, and in his Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 258–64. “Exposition Rétrospective,” in Beaux-Arts, 33, 42. Camille Mauclair, letter to Marshal Lyautey, 22 May 1931 (on letterhead of Le Figaro), Arch: Nat. F 21 4076. Gaston Bernheim, letter to Senator Henri Bérenger (commissaire des Beaux-Arts), 1 June 1931, Arch. Nat. F 21 4076. Jeanne Dinet Rollince, letter to Paul Léon, director of fine arts, 7 June 1931, Arch. Nat. F 21 4076: “The organizers of the exhibition, no doubt finding more interesting works of a certain modernism that I will not judge here, welcomed them in such a great number and placed them so advantageously that Dinet, Suréda, and others had to be relegated . . . to the entrance of a staircase. Against this I protest vehemently, M. le Directeur, and beg you to raise your authoritative voice to reverse

this scandalous state of a¤airs. If Dinet had been alive they would never have dared to act thus.” 10. Retrospective E. Dinet. Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris 1931 (Paris: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 16 October–11 November 1931); a letter from the administrator Albert Keim to the curator of the Luxembourg (Louis Hautecoeur) indicates the exhibition was already being organized in early July, just weeks after Dinet Rollince ’s intervention; see Arch. Nat. F 21 4076.

11. Arsène Alexandre, “La vie artistique: L’oeuvre d’Etienne Dinet,” Figaro, 20 October 1931. See also “Les Expositions: Une retrospective Dinet à l’Exposition coloniale,” L’Art et les artistes 26, no. 120 (October 1931): 67. Canvases were drawn from the Luxembourg, the Petit Palais, the Musée de Reims, and the Algiers Museum, but most were from private collections like those of Frédéric Lung, Miss Cushing, Mme Louis Meley, Bénédite ’s family, and Mme Georges Devêche.

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Selected Bibliography

All catalogues of temporary exhibitions are identified as “Exh. cat.” Exhibition dates, however, are provided only for catalogues published prior to 1960. 1830—L’Algérie française—1930. Special issue of L’Illustration, no. 4551 (24 May 1930). Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Ageron, Charles-Robert. L’anticolonialisme en France de 1871 à 1914. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973. ———. Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979. Alazard, Jean. “La Villa Médicis algérienne: ‘Abd el Tif,’” with watercolors by Jean Bouchaud. L’Illustration, no. 4490 (25 March 1929): 297–300. ———. “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger.” Bulletin des musées de France 2, no. 9 (September 1930): 183–210. ———. L’Orient et la peinture française au XIXe siècle, d’Eugène Delacroix à Auguste Renoir. Paris: Plon, Collection du centenaire de l’Algérie, 1930.

———. “Le Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Alger: Exposition des dons et acquisitions.” Bulletin des musées de France 5 (May 1935): 73–80. ———. “Les Beaux-Arts.” In Les arts et la technique moderne: Algérie 1937, 161–66. Algiers: Imprimerie Fontana, 1937. ———. Le Palais d’Eté: Résidence du GouverneurGénéral d’Algérie. Algiers: Direction de l’intérieur et des Beaux-Arts, 1951. Alexandre, Arsène. Réflexions sur les arts et les industries d’art en Algérie. 1905. Algiers: L’Akhbar, 1907. ———. “La vie artistique: Les orientalistes.” Figaro, 7 February 1911. Alexandre, Arsène, et al. Les richesses artistiques de la France coloniale. Special issue of La renaissance de l’art et les industries de luxe 5, no. 4 (April 1922). Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem: Images of a Sub-Eroticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

325

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. and expanded ed. London: Verso, 1991. Andral, Jean-Louis, et al. Album de voyage: Des artistes en expédition au pays du Levant. Paris: Association Française de l’Action Artistique and Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993. Angel, Pierre. L’école nord-africaine dans l’art français contemporain. Paris: Les oeuvres représentatives, 1931. Angéli, Louis-Eugène. “Les maîtres de la peinture algérienne: Azouaou Mammeri.” Algéria 42 (May–June 1955): 40–44. Apter, Emily. “Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem.” Di¤erences 4, no. 1 (1992): 205–24. ———. Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Arama, Maurice. Itinéraires marocaines: Regards de peintres. Paris: Jaguar, 1991. “Art colonial.” In Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes: Rapport générale, vol. 4: Mobilier, 52–53. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1925; reprinted New York: Garland, 1977. Augustin-Thierry, A. “Ce qui se prépare en Alger.” Revue des deux mondes, 7th ser., 55 (1 January 1930): 194–203. Baghli, Sid Ahmed. Un maître de la peinture algérienne: Nasreddine Dinet. Algiers: Société nationale d’édition et de di¤usion, 1975. Bailey, Colin B., with John B. Collins. Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age. Exh. cat. New Haven and London: Yale University Press; and Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1997. Barker, Francis, et al., eds. Europe and Its Others. 2 vols. Colchester: University of Essex, 1985. Barrucand, Victor. “Au Salon.” L’Akhbar, 15 February 1914. ———. “Abd-el-Tif et ses amis,” La Dépêche algérienne, 9 January 1920. ———. “Peinture au Salon des orientalistes.” La Dépêche algérienne, 17 February 1923. [———]. “Aux arts décoratifs.” L’Akhbar, 21 August 1925.

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———. “Les peintres orientalistes français.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3d ser., 21, no. 501 (March 1899): 239–47. ———. “Une tentative de rénovation artistique: Les ‘peintres orientalistes’ et les industries coloniales.” Revue des arts décoratifs, no. 4 (April 1899): 97–105. ———. “Art et Orient: L’oeuvre d’Etienne Dinet.” Art et décoration 14 (1903): 305–15. ———. “A Etienne Dinet.” Preface to Etienne Dinet and Sliman ben Ibrahim, Tableaux de la vie arabe, n.p. Paris: Henri Piazza, 1908. ———. “Etienne Dinet.” L’Art et les artistes 10, no. 58 (January 1910): 163– 72. ———. Avant-propos to Exposition sous le haut patronage de M. le Maréchal Lyautey des dessins et peintures de Si Azouaou Mammeri, n.p. [1–8]. Exh. cat. Paris: Galerie Feuillets d’art, 2–21 May 1921. ———. Albert Lebourg. Paris: Editions Georges Petit, 1923. ———. Avant-propos to Exposition Si Azouaou Mammeri—tableaux et dessins: Afrique du Nord et Andalousie. Exh. cat. Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1925. Benjamin, Roger. “Matisse in Morocco: A Colonizing Esthetic?” Art in America 78, no. 11 (November 1990): 156–65, 211–13. ———. “The Colonial Mirage: Besnard in India, Matisse in Morocco.” University of Melbourne Fine Arts Society Bulletin 6, no. 3 (December 1994): 3–5. ———. “Orientalist Excursions: Matisse in North Africa.” In Caroline Turner and Roger Benjamin, eds., Matisse, 71–83. Exh. cat. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery; and Sydney: Art Exhibitions Australia, 1995. ———, ed. Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee. Exh. cat. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, distributed by Thames and Hudson, 1997. ———. Review of François Pouillon, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, peintre en Islam. Art History 22, no. 1 (March 1999): 151–53. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.

Berson, Ruth, ed. The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886. Documentation: vol. 1, Reviews; vol. 2, Exhibited Works. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996. Betts, Raymond F. Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. ———. The “Scramble” for Africa: Causes and Dimensions of Empire. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1966. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Blake, Jody. “The Truth about the Colonies, 1931: Art indigène in Service of the Revolution.” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1 (March 2002): 35–58. Blanch, Lesley. The Wilder Shores of Love. London: John Murray, 1951. ———. Pierre Loti, the Legendary Romantic: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Boone, Joseph. “Vacation Cruises, or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism.” PMLA, no. 110 (January 1995): 89–107. Bouillon, Jean-Paul, et al., eds. La promenade du critique influent: Anthologie de la critique d’art en France, 1850–1900. Paris: Hazan, 1990. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. Homo academicus. Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1984. Bouyer, Raymond. “Expositions diverses: Société des peintres orientalistes français.” Bulletin d’art ancien et moderne, no. 491 (11 February 1911): 46. Brahimi, Denise, and Koudir Benchikou. La vie et l’oeuvre de Etienne Dinet. Les orientalistes, 2. Paris: ACR Edition, 1984. Bréon, Emmanuel, Michelle Lefrançois, et al. Coloniales, 1920–1940. Exh. cat. BoulogneBillancourt: Musée municipal de BoulogneBillancourt, 1989.

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Burn, Ian, and Anne Stephen. “Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Reinterpretation.” In The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolourists of Central Australia, edited by Jane Hardy et al., 264–82. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1992. Carré, Jean-Marie. “L.-G. Carré.” L’Art et les artistes, no. 110 (May 1914): 261–68. Castagnary, Jules-Antoine. Salons, 2 vols.: 1 (1857– 1870) and 2 (1872–1879). Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1892. Cazenave, Elizabeth. F. Marius de Buzon, 1879– 1958. Paris: Editions les Abd-el-Tif, 1996. ———. La Villa Abd-el-Tif: Un demi-siècle de vie artistique en Algérie, 1907–1962. Paris: Association Abd-el-Tif, 1998. Çelik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. ———. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Çelik, Zeynep, and Leila Kinney. “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles.” Assemblage, no. 17 (December 1990): 35–59. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review, 1972. Chabert, Philippe, et al. Charles Dufresne, 1876– 1938: Rétrospective. Exh. cat. Troyes: Musée d’Art Moderne, 1987. Charabot, Eugène, and Georges Collot. “Organisation et description de l’Exposition coloniale nationale de 1907: Rapport générale.” Revue coloniale, n.s. 8 (1908): 705–35, and 9 (1909): 46–64. Charles-Roux, Jules, and Scellier de Gisors. Exposition universelle de 1900, section des colonies et pays de protectorat:Album commemoratif. Paris,1900. Charles-Roux, Jules, et al. Notice officielle et catalogue illustré des expositions des Beaux-Arts, Exposition coloniale nationale de Marseille. Exh. cat. Paris: Moderne imprimerie, 1906. Charpentier, Françoise-Thérèse. Orient roma-

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Index

Abbas, Ferhat, 248, 250 Abd-el-Kader, 12, 13, 15, 191, 286n57 Abd el-Krim, 177, 177, 217, 227 Abd-el-Tif. See Villa Abd-el-Tif Abstraction: in Algerian indigenous art, 1; in Matisse ’s art, 160, 170, 179–81, 185, 189–90, 279; in Rodin’s art, 204 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 201, 310n34 Abyssinia, 67, 113, 132–33 Academic tradition: and Bernard’s art, 89; and Bouguereau’s art, 84; and colonialism, 82; and Dinet’s art, 100, 103, 271, 289n40; and ethnography, 18, 34; and exoticism, 153, 159, 160; and Fromentin’s writings, 18, 28; and Gérôme ’s art, 69, 180; and Herzig’s art, 199; and impressionism, 34, 51, 279, 289n40; and Kleiss-Herzig’s art, 271; and Lazerges’s art, 259; and Matisse ’s art, 174; and Meissonnier’s art, 84; and naturalism, 55; and Oriental-

ism, 18, 21, 34, 51, 53, 55, 66, 69, 82, 84, 89, 100, 103, 160, 174, 180, 259, 278, 289n40; and pointillism, 137; and Prouvé’s art, 259; and realism, 66, 82, 84, 89; and Renoir’s art, 55; and traveling scholarships, 130, 137; waning of, 31 Académie des Beaux-Arts, 288n35 Académie Française, 28, 251 Académie Julian, 100 Aesthetics. See Art criticism; Theory of art Ageron, Charles-Robert, 23, 250, 252 Agutte, Georgette, 161, 179, 293n7 Alaoui, Brahim, 228 Alazard, Jean, 6, 7, 41, 48, 145, 147, 151, 153, 259–61, 263– 73, 275, 277, 279, 318n34, 319–20n57, 319nn44,47,48,56, 320nn60–61,72, 321n87 Album spéciale des Peintres Orientalistes, 74, 77 Alési, Hugo d’, 114

Alexandre, Arsène, 79, 86, 92, 144–45, 147, 150, 157, 174, 195– 97, 199, 202, 236, 240, 258, 259, 281, 318n26 Algeria: anticolonialism in, 8, 16, 29–30, 36, 120, 191–92, 247, 248, 268; Bénédite ’s travels in, 59, 258; Besnard’s depiction of, 53; Besnard’s travels in, 269; Carré’s depiction of, 149–50; Cauvy’s depiction of, 147; centenary of, 7–8, 249–57, 260, 261, 266, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 317n17, 322n93; Chassériau’s depiction of, 61; corsairs in, 246, 247; Cottet’s depiction of, 83; De Buzon’s depiction of, 152–53; decorative art of, 151–53, 186, 191, 195–200, 210, 217–19, 236, 269, 271, 273; destruction of indigenous culture in, 12–13, 15, 36, 201, 247; Dinet’s activity in, 59, 73, 92, 98, 102, 135–37, 161, 251, 255, 269, 281, 295n61, 317n8; Dufresne ’s depiction of, 154–

Algeria (continued) 56; Eberhardt’s activity in, 101–2, 144; Evenepoel’s travels in, 169; French colonial policies in, 29–30, 36, 191–95, 202, 223, 250–51, 309n4; French colonists in, 15, 36, 65, 102, 144, 192, 251, 263; and French exhibitions, 59–60, 64–65, 66, 106–10, 114, 125, 127, 161, 217–19, 244; French military activity in, 12, 15–16, 27, 30, 36, 114, 120, 191, 200; Fromentin’s depiction of, 12, 15–17, 29–31, 40, 135, 269; Fromentin’s description of, 16, 17–18, 19, 21–23, 163, 184; Fromentin’s travels in, 15–19; Gautier’s travels in, 12, 15; Guillaumet’s depiction of, 53, 83, 163; Guillaumet’s description of, 53; Guillaumet’s travels in, 37, 53; Herzig’s depiction of, 199; indigenous art of, 1, 74, 109–10, 144–45, 157, 191, 194, 195–200, 217–19, 221–24, 236– 48, 271, 278; Jonnart’s administration in, 144, 152, 157, 194– 95, 198, 200, 202, 219, 223, 236, 238, 255, 261; Landelle ’s depiction of, 163; Landelle ’s travels in, 37; Lebourg’s depiction of, 288n27; Lebourg’s travels in, 50; Leroy’s depiction of, 163; Lévy-Dhurmer’s travels in, 87, 161; Lunois’s depiction of, 74; Marquet’s depiction of, 269; Matisse ’s description of, 164, 165; Matisse ’s travels in, 159, 160–61, 163–67, 169; medersas (Islamic colleges) in, 194–95; and modernization, 12–13, 15, 36, 165; Monet’s description of, 36, 37; Monet’s travels in, 35–36; Napoléon III’s visit to, 29, 62; nationalism in, 222, 235, 247, 248; Potter’s travels in, 67; Renoir’s depiction of, 34, 36–43, 45–50, 55, 125; Renoir’s travels in, 36; Roman architecture in, 189, 193, 238, 269; and tourism, 15, 36, 55, 114, 163,

338

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258, 273; traveling scholarships to, 130, 132; Vernet’s depiction of, 295n44. See also names of specific cities and sites Algiers: Bardo Museum in, 256– 57, 271, 273; Bénédite ’s stays in, 6, 59, 146, 258; Ketty Carré’s residence in, 150, 269; Léon Carré’s residence in, 150, 269; Casbah in, 19, 36, 37, 38, 40, 164, 181, 192, 197, 198, 236, 271, 308n76; Cauvy’s depiction of, 147; centenary celebration in, 255–57; Chudant’s depiction of, 75; Comité du Vieil Alger in, 144, 194, 197, 201, 238, 240– 41, 259, 302n47; corsairs in, 245; Dauzats’s depiction of, 13, 14, 15; Delacroix’s depiction of, 34; Ecole des Beaux-Arts in, 143, 147, 195, 199, 223, 237, 245, 270; ethnic heterogeneity of, 45; French military activity in, 12; Fromentin’s stay in, 17– 18, 19, 41, 184; Gautier’s description of, 12–13; Gautier’s stay in, 12; indigenous architecture of, 13, 15, 36, 193–95, 202, 238, 240; Jardin d’Essai in, 42, 55, 145, 154, 165, 196, 261; Lebourg’s depiction of, 39, 40–41, 49, 50; Lebourg’s stay in, 40; Lessore ’s depiction of, 12, 14; Marquet’s depiction of, 269, 270; Matisse ’s stay in, 161; and modernization, 12–13, 15, 36; Mosquée de la Pêcherie in, 13, 195; Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman in, 37–38, 38, 55, 259; Municipal Museum of French Art in, 59, 143, 258–60, 263, 271, 272, 319n56; Museum of the Casbah in, 257, 257; Mustapha Museum in, 192, 195, 256, 257, 271, 273, 310n23; National Museum of Antiquities and Muslim Art in, 143, 192; National Museum of Fine Arts in, 1–3, 6, 7–8, 42, 145, 147, 148, 242, 249, 256, 257– 73, 260, 262, 275, 302n64; Palace

of the Deys in, 13; Palace of the People of Algiers (Palais d’Eté) in, 151–53, 219, 258, 303n73; Place du Gouvernement in, 13, 14, 266; Mohammed Racim’s depiction of, 222; Renoir’s depiction of, 37–43, 45–48, 55, 168; Renoir’s description of, 41, 48; Renoir’s stays in, 31, 36–37; Rochegrosse ’s residence in, 66; Silbert’s depiction of, 124; Villa Abd-elTif in, 7, 143, 145–49, 151–55, 157, 194, 195, 223, 260, 267, 269; Wyld’s depiction of, 12, 14 Alhambra Palace, in Granada, 26, 118, 122, 248 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 25 Andalusia, 26, 118–22, 127, 130, 150, 165, 223, 245, 247, 248, 273 Anderson, Benedict, 247 André, Albert, 45 André, Emile, 137 Angel, Pierre, 228, 320n80 Angèli, Louis-Eugène, 224 Anticolonialism, 8, 23, 24, 79, 81, 82, 92, 248, 276, 294n33; in Algeria, 8, 16, 29–30, 36, 120, 191–92, 247, 248, 268; in Morocco, 176– 79, 211, 217, 225, 227, 248 Antisemitism, 144, 252 Antoni, Fernand, 151 Antoni, J.-L., 147, 259, 269 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 168, 190 Arabesque, 186, 189, 199, 203, 219, 222 Arabic language, 73, 98, 101, 200, 223–26, 237, 248 Arabs: and French colonial policies, 29; Fromentin’s depiction of, 29–30, 286n53; Fromentin’s description of, 22–23; Matisse ’s description of, 165; Prouvé’s description of, 138–39; and racial stereotypes, 22; Renoir’s depiction of, 45–46 Arago, Etienne, 59

Architecture: Moorish, 26, 37–38, 41, 42, 60, 106, 108, 118, 151, 163, 170, 181, 182, 192, 194–95; promotion of indigenous, 193– 95, 201–2; as subject of art, 26, 37–42, 39, 41 Argand, Paul, 62, 86 Art collection, 52, 59, 125, 144, 147, 155, 167, 179, 213, 231, 286n57 Art criticism: and academic tradition, 18; by Alazard, 41; by Apollinaire, 168; by Baudelaire, 11–12, 82; by Bénédite, 51–54, 99–100, 102, 226, 228–29, 234; by Castagnary, 24, 25, 27; by Duranty, 29–31; by Fontainas, 83–84; by Fromentin, 28; by Gautier, 12, 24, 27, 184; and impressionism, 29; by René Jean, 156–57, 168, 305–6n35; by Kahn, 230; by Roger Marx, 33, 41, 50, 54, 288n27; by Mauclair, 102, 156; and naturalism, 25, 27, 286n53; and realism, 24–25, 29– 31; by Ricard, 223; and symbolism, 29, 33; by Tarade, 49; by Vauxcelles, 306n35; by Werth, 127; by Zola, 286n53. See also Reception, critical; Theory of art Art deco, 210, 215 Artenac, Raoul d’, 238 Art history, 2, 5, 6, 17, 29, 61 Art market, 3, 103, 126, 159, 168 L’art nègre, 127, 213 Art nouveau, 8, 62, 75, 137, 138 Arts Decos. See International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts Assimilation, 192, 309n4 Associationist policy, 192, 200, 215–17, 219, 223, 236, 309n4 Atatürk, Kemal, 248 Auguste, M., 268 Aumale, le duc d’, 16, 286n57 Austria, 131 Austro-Hungarian empire, 291n25 Avant-garde, 29, 33, 34, 57, 59, 86, 87, 89, 124, 126, 155, 168, 190, 231, 238, 264, 289n40

Bab-Azoun, 14, 15, 19, 284n6 Bachir Hadj Ali, 248 Ballu, Albert, 106 Bande Noire, 66, 135 Banquets, Orientalist Painters’, 72– 74, 98 Barbarossa, 245, 247 Barbizon school, 25, 259, 263 Bardo Museum, in Algiers, 256– 57, 271, 273 Barker, Robert, 110 Barrias, Louis Ernest, 110 Barrucand, Victor, 6, 84, 101, 143, 144, 149, 150, 151, 202, 215, 216, 219, 232, 233, 240, 244, 263, 264, 267, 268, 270, 279, 302n53, 303n69, 321n80 Barry, François, 267 Barye, Antoine-Louis, 265 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 98, 135, 289n40 Baudelaire, Charles, 11–12, 16, 23, 31, 82, 86, 89, 283n1, 284n9 Bayet, C., 200, 310n26 Bazaars, 86 Bedouins: Dauzats’s depiction of, 15; Dinet’s depiction of, 98; Fromentin’s depiction of, 16, 19, 23, 286n53; Renoir’s depiction of, 46 Béguin, François, 194, 202 Belgium, 29 Belly, Léon, 25, 52, 53, 54, 61, 71, 83, 125, 277; artwork of: Pilgrims Going to Mecca, 52, 71, 277 Ben Badis, Abdelhamid, 248, 255–56 Bénédite, Georges, 59, 66 Bénédite, Léonce, 6, 17, 18, 31, 34, 49–55, 51, 58–59, 84, 86, 89, 154, 258, 267, 269, 278, 288nn34–35, 302n60; on Dinet’s art, 92, 94, 95–100, 102, 136, 281, 319n49; as leader of Orientalist Painters, 6, 58, 59, 61–62, 67, 69– 71, 73, 81, 82, 95, 106, 109, 118, 125, 126, 131, 134–35, 160, 259, 263, 278, 292n38; on Mammeri’s art, 226, 228–29, 234, 314n30

Bennett, Tony, 106, 113, 116, 296n16 Berbers: arts and crafts of, 77, 196, 198, 202, 206, 210, 216, 218; Dauzats’s depiction of, 15; Dinet’s depiction of, 94, 100, 122; Dinet’s relations with, 92, 98, 280; and ethnography, 22; and French colonial policies, 29, 120, 176, 179, 311n54; Fromentin’s description of, 21; and Mammeri’s ethnic identity, 233; Renoir’s depiction of, 45, 46 Berbrugger, Adrien, 243, 316n64 Berchère, Narcisse, 25, 268 Bérenger, Henri, 279 Bernard, Emile, 59, 87, 89, 161, 290n14; artwork of: Arab Festival, 89; Cairo Merchants, 89, 90; The Hashish Smoker, 89; Women at Market, 89 Bernheim de Villiers, Gaston, 6, 124, 125, 126, 277, 278, 280, 299n69 Bertrand, Louis, 189, 251–52 Besnard, Albert, 53, 62, 66, 130, 159, 160, 267, 269 Bey, Hakky, 62, 241 Bey, Hamdy, 228 Bhabha, Homi, 2, 4, 222 Bible, 21–22, 58, 69, 87, 92, 173 Bing, Samuel, 62 Biskra, 17, 37, 100, 114, 127, 149, 160–61, 162, 163–67, 169, 181, 188, 281, 293n4, 297n36, 304n13 Blida, 17, 169 Blue Rider school, 157 Boilly, Louis-Léopold, 320n64 Bompard, Maurice, 135 Bongie, Chris, 97 Bonnard, Pierre, 125, 143, 265 Bonnat, Léon, 148 Bonvalot, Gabriel, 62, 67, 68 Book illustration, 150, 167, 237– 38, 269, 278, 294n27, 298n36, 303n70, 321n80 Boone, Joseph, 166 Bordes, Pierre, 102, 251, 272, 322n92 Bordone, Paul, 259 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 195, 291n25

Index

339

Botanical gardens. See Gardens Bouchand, Jean, 279 Boudin, Eugène-Louis, 264 Bouguereau, William, 84, 98, 138, 289n40 Bourdelle, Antoine, 265, 265 Bou-Saâda, 59, 67, 73, 92, 98, 100, 122, 135, 137, 155, 238, 269, 271, 272, 280, 322n93 Boutet de Monvel, Bernard, 233 Bowles, Paul, 304 Brangwyn, Frank, 147 Braque, Georges, 293n7 Breton, André, 276 Bretonism, 83, 89 British Museum, 259 Brooks, Jock, 187 Buffet, Paul, 61, 67, 132–35; artwork of: engraving of Lagarde ’s arrival, 133, 133; The King of Kaffa, 134, 134–35; Negus Menelik at the Battle of Adoua, 134 Bugeaud de la Piconnerie, Thomas-Robert, 16, 65 Burty, Philippe, 117 Buzon, Marius de, 147, 151– 53, 279; artwork of: Kabyle Cortege, 152; Return from the Market, 152, 154 Byron, George Gordon, 90 Byzantine art, 89, 151 Cabanel, Alexandre, 138 Cabat, Louis, 18 Caillebotte, Gustave, 52, 59, 288n35 Cairo, 59, 69, 94 Calligraphy, Arabic, 237, 273 Cambodia, 161 Cambon, Paul, 192 Camoin, Charles, 124, 161, 180 Capitalism, 23 Cardonne, Elisabeth, 17 Carpets, 86, 199, 199, 202, 205–11, 206, 208–9, 311n49 Carré, Ketty, 149, 224, 269– 71, 278, 321nn77,80; artwork of: Arab Woman in a Garden, 270; Courtesan, 270, plate 16 Carré, Léon, 148–52, 149, 224, 229, 238, 269, 278, 294n27;

340

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artwork of: Mule Driver, 149; The Muleteer, 149, 150; Muslim Life, 151–52, 152, 153; Nude Dancer, 150, plate 9; Tea in the Garden, 149 Casablanca, 201, 204, 210, 233 Casbah, in Algiers, 19, 36, 37, 38, 40, 164, 181, 192, 197, 198, 236, 271, 308n76 Casbah, in Tangier, 169, 173, 180– 84, 308n77 Castagnary, Antoine, 24–25, 27, 31, 58, 82, 117, 286n48, 287n1 Castellani, Charles, 297n26 Cauvy, Léon, 147, 151, 218, 219, 252, 270, 278 Cazenave, Elizabeth, 146, 147 Çelik, Zeynep, 109 Centenary of French Algeria, 7–8, 249–57, 260, 261, 266, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 317n17, 322n93 Central Union of Decorative Arts, 210 Cervantes, Miguel de, 245 Cézanne, Paul, 34, 50, 59, 82, 124, 278 Chabaud, Auguste, 124 Chailly-Bert, Joseph, 200 Champfleury, 24 Champollion, Jean-François, 59, 290n4 Chanson de Roland, 120, 178 Charlemagne, 120 Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 123 Charles-Roux, Jules, 122–25, 123, 127 Charpentier, Françoise-Thérèse, 138 Chassériau, Arthur de, 71, 267, 278 Chassériau, Théodore, 19, 61, 71, 96, 125, 161, 268–69, 277, 319n49; artwork of: Arab Chiefs, 19, 21; Portrait of the Caliph of Constantine, 71 Chataud, Alfred, 259 Chennevières, Philippe de, 130 Chiaroscuro, 29 Child labor, 196–98, 207 Chinoiserie, 58, 62

Christianity, 21–22, 58, 66, 69– 70, 92–94, 119–20, 171, 174, 225 Chudant, Adolphe, 74– 75, 292n50; artwork of: Algiers — Cocktail Hour, 74– 75, 76; exhibition poster, 75, 76 Cinema, 110 Cinéorama, 114, 116 Clairin, Georges, 27, 138, 312n60 Classicism, 18, 21 Clémenceau, Georges, 23, 194, 226 Colonialism: and academic tradition, 82; and aestheticization, 37, 49, 170, 179–80, 184, 190; and assimilationist policy, 192, 309n4; and associationist policy, 192, 200, 219, 223, 236, 309n4; and Bénédite ’s writings, 61–62, 67; civilizing effect of, 12, 23–24, 222, 273; and classical antiquity, 189; and destruction of indigenous cultures, 12–13, 36, 62, 65, 97–98, 102, 169, 191, 193, 201, 203, 247; and Duranty’s writings, 29–30; and economic relations, 23, 30, 36, 62, 64, 65, 109, 122–23; and expansionism, 7, 62, 65, 79, 102; and expositions, 7, 8, 59–60, 74, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112–13, 114, 122–27, 213– 15; and Fromentin’s writings, 23; and Gauguin’s writings, 294n33; and Gautier’s writings, 12; as global system, 4–5, 8, 9; and immigration, 59; legitimation of, 12, 23–24, 30, 31, 79, 81–82, 95, 217, 252; and Loti’s writings, 169; and mimetic painting by indigenous artists, 221–23, 235; and modernization, 12, 36, 102, 169, 215; and Orientalism, 3, 5, 61–62, 67, 79, 81–82, 90, 95, 106, 170, 180, 181; and political relations, 8, 23, 24, 29–30, 62, 65, 79, 168, 176; and preservation of indigenous cultures, 192–95; and Renoir’s writings, 41; resistance to, 8, 16, 23, 24, 29–30, 36, 79,

81, 82, 92, 120, 176– 79, 191– 92, 222, 225, 227, 228, 247, 248, 268, 276, 294n33; and Villa Abd-el-Tif artists, 7, 147 Colonial Society of French Artists, 6, 118, 125, 143, 176, 278, 299n69, 303n1 Color: and Belly’s art, 52; and Bénédite ’s writings, 51–53; and Léon Carré’s art, 150; and Cauvy’s art, 147; and Dinet’s art, 52, 53, 281, 289n40; and Dufresne ’s art, 156; and exoticism, 49; and fauvism, 157; and Fromentin’s art, 12; and Fromentin’s writings, 29, 48; and Guillaumet’s art, 53; and impressionism, 29, 41, 49, 52, 140, 143, 289n40; and Islamic art, 186; and Lebourg’s art, 41, 49, 51, 160; and LévyDhurmer’s art, 87; and Mammeri’s art, 223; and Roger Marx’s writings, 54; and Matisse ’s art, 160, 164, 174, 179, 184–86, 189, 279; and Monet’s art, 140, 287n5; and naturalism, 49; and Prouvé’s art, 140, 143, 160; and Prouvé’s writings, 139–40; and realism, 29, 124; and Renoir’s art, 37, 39, 49; and romanticism, 29; and Silbert’s art, 124 Comité Dupleix, 67 Comité du Vieil Alger, 144, 194, 197, 201, 238, 240–41, 259, 302n47 Commune, Paris, 27, 130 Communist party, in France, 248, 276 Constant, Benjamin, 8, 26, 27, 66, 89, 183, 232 Cordier, Charles, 72, 292n42 Cormon, Fernand, 66, 110 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 42, 52, 69, 130, 233, 263, 278 Corpus de tapis marocains, 207–9 Corsairs, 245, 247 Cottet, Charles, 59, 66, 83–84, 109, 259; artwork of: Fellah

Women, 83, 85; Low Mass in Winter, 83, 84 Courbet, Gustave, 1, 24, 52, 263, 266, 279 Cox, Samuel, 36, 42 Cross, Henri-Edmond, 264, 266 Cross-cultural relations, 4, 9, 98–99, 101–2, 222, 225, 235, 272, 281 Crouse, Elisabeth, 193 Crusades, 120 Cubism, 69, 82, 86, 154, 157, 168, 181, 204, 264, 278, 279 Culture: decline of, 97–98, 203, 238, 296n62; destruction of, 12–13, 15, 36, 62, 65, 97–98, 102, 169, 191, 193, 201, 203, 247; preservation of, 62, 64– 65, 96–98, 144, 168, 169, 181, 192–95, 238, 240. See also Cross-cultural relations Dagnan-Bouveret, Pascal, 60 Daguerre, Louis, 297n27 Dampt, Jean, 137 Dance, 116, 117, 120–21, 122, 161, 165, 167, 305n26 Daubigny, Charles-François, 52 Dauzats, Adrien, 13, 15–16, 286n57; artwork of: Place du Gouvernement at Algiers, 13, 14 David, Jacques-Louis, 61 David-Weill, M., 267, 320n61 Dayot, Armand, 6, 129, 130, 131, 135, 138, 150 Decamps, Alexandre, 178, 184, 266, 268, 286n57 Decorative art: of Algeria, 151– 53, 186, 191, 195–200, 210, 217– 19, 236, 269, 271, 273; and art deco, 210, 215; and art nouveau, 138; and associationist colonial policy, 192, 200, 215–17; and Bénédite ’s writings, 58; of Berbers, 77, 196, 198, 202, 206; and Bernard’s art, 89; in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 195, 291n25; and Ketty Carré’s art, 269– 70; and Léon Carré’s art, 150, 151–52; and Cauvy’s art, 151; and Chudant’s art, 75,

292n50; and De Buzon’s art, 151–53; and De Tarde ’s writings, 203; and economic relations, 191, 195, 202, 210; and ethnography, 273; exhibitions of, 110, 138, 151, 210–19; and Gallé’s art, 138, 142; and Herzig’s art, 199–200; Islamic, 75, 151–52, 185–86, 189, 195, 237, 269, 281, 291n25; and KleissHerzig’s art, 271; and Majorelle ’s art, 142–43; and Roger Marx’s writings, 287n1; and Matisse ’s art, 175, 180, 185, 189, 191, 279, 281; and modernism, 180, 191, 213–18; of Morocco, 8–9, 191, 202–13, 215–17; and Mohammed Racim’s art, 236; and Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 142; and Vachon’s writings, 195 Deferre, Gaston, 123 Degas, Edgar, 31, 129, 130, 264, 278, 288n35 Dehodencq, Alfred, 37, 69– 71, 96–97, 266, 268, 269, 277, 319n49; artwork of: Bastinado, 70; Execution, 70; Execution of the Jewish Woman, 69– 70, 70; Little Gypsy Girl, 71; Little Orange Seller, 71; Punishment of Thieves, 70 Delacroix, Eugène, 8, 17, 18, 19, 21, 34, 35, 37, 51, 60, 69, 71, 138, 149, 157, 161, 168, 169, 183, 241, 257, 266, 268, 277, 280, 281, 286nn53,57, 306nn35,40, 319n49; artwork of: Fanatics of Tangiers, 95; Fantasia, 277; Giaour Pursuing the Abductors of His Mistress, 266, 268; Jewish Wedding, 34, 71; Lion Devouring an Arab, 161; Lion Hunt, 277; Women of Algiers, 8, 34, 241 Dellepiane, David, 147 Demaeght Museum, in Oran, 256, 271, 272 Denis, Maurice, 130, 164, 265, 279 Department stores, 213 Derain, André, 161, 320n64

Index

341

Dervaux, Adolphe, 86, 90 Despiau, Charles, 265, 319n55 Deutsch, Ludwig, 178, 179 Devilly, Théodore, 138 Dinet, Etienne, 4, 5, 6, 48, 60, 61, 66, 74, 83, 101, 130, 132, 150, 154, 155, 163, 164, 170, 174, 240, 244, 278, 294n41; and academic tradition, 100, 103, 289n40; and activity in Algeria, 59, 73, 92, 98, 102, 135–37, 161, 251, 255, 269, 271– 72, 281, 295n61, 317n8; and Algerian museology, 259, 269, 271– 72, 321n90; artistic practice of, 92, 100–101, 102, 136–37, 271, 281, 289n40; Bénédite ’s writings on, 92, 94, 95–100, 102, 136, 319n49; on centenary in Algeria, 251, 255, 271, 272, 317nn8,17, 322n93; and conversion to Islam, 94, 98, 102, 272, 280, 322n91; critical reception of, 52, 54, 89, 92, 99– 100, 102–3; and ethnographic art, 92, 94–95, 99, 142, 281; and Orientalism, 52, 53, 54, 73, 92, 94–95, 98–103, 109, 132, 136– 37, 269, 279–81, 289n40; and relations with Berbers, 92, 94, 98, 100, 122; and relations with Mohammed Racim, 237, 238, 281; and relations with Sliman ben Ibrahim, 72– 73, 94, 95, 98, 102, 167, 237, 271, 281, 292n45; Salon exhibitions by, 92, 99, 135, 136; and traveling scholarships, 135–37; artwork of: Andalusia in the Time of the Moors, 122, plate 7; Crescent Moon, 94; Imam Leading the Prayer, 94, 96; Old Arab Women, 272; An Ouled-Naïl, 166, 167; Portrait of Sliman ben Ibrahim, 72; El Rattacine (The Well Diggers), 136; Saint John Hospitaller, 135; Sliman ben Ibrahim at the Place de la Concorde, 98, 99; Snake Charmer, 137; Son of a Holy M’rabeth, 95, 97; Spring of Hearts, 100–101; The Terraces

342

Index

of Laghouat, 136–37, 137; “The Quesba” (Long Reed Flute), 100, plate 6; View of the M’Sila after Rain, 135; writings of: Khadra, danseuse Ouled-Naïl, 167; Pélerinage à la Maison Sacrée d’Allah, 95; Tableaux de la vie arabe, 94, 102; La Vie du prophète Mohammed, 94, 237 Dioramas, 7, 105, 106, 111, 112– 13, 113, 116, 297nn26–27,36 Dollfuss, Jean, 34 Dormoy, 252, 254 Doucet, Jacques, 213, 214 Doumer, Paul, 67 Doumergue, Gaston, 254, 268, 280, 318n41 Draner (Jules Renard), 42, 49 Dreyfus affair, 144 Drumont, Edouard, 144 Dubois, Paul-Elie, 151, 278 Dufresne, Charles, 153–57, 187, 278, 279, 293n7; artwork of: Algerian Oasis, 155, 156; North African Landscape, 155, 155; Oriental Scene, 155–56, plate 10 Dufy, Raoul, 279 Dulac, Edmond, 294n27, 303n 70 Dumoulin, Louis, 7, 9, 114, 116– 18, 124, 127, 298n44 Dupleix, Joseph-François, 65 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 43, 45, 69, 71, 86, 103, 125, 268, 269 Duranty, Louis, 29–31, 82 Duret, Théodore, 52 Dutch art, 29, 40, 247 Duval, Jeanne, 12 Duvent, Charles, 124 Eberhardt, Isabelle, 6, 101–2, 123, 144, 149, 160, 163, 168, 202, 291n26, 298n36 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Algiers, 143, 147, 195, 199, 223, 237, 245, 270 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, 26, 29, 100, 130, 157, 173, 189 Economic relations, 23, 30, 36, 62, 64, 65, 86, 109, 122–23; and decorative art, 191, 195, 202, 210

Egypt: Alma-Tadema’s depiction of, 25; Belly’s depiction of, 61, 83; Cottet’s depiction of, 83; Cottet’s travels in, 66; Fromentin’s depictions of, 28; Gérôme ’s travels in, 69; Regnault’s depiction of, 26 Egyptian art, 59 Egyptology, 59, 66, 98 Eiffel Tower, 59, 106 Eisenman, Stephen, 94, 294n36 Elderfield, John, 170 Eluard, Paul, 276 Emulation, and Mammeri’s art, 222, 224, 228, 243 Enlightenment, 49 Eon, Henri, 84–86 Escapism, 25 Escholier, Raymond, 257 Esquer, Gabriel, 241, 268, 316n64 Estienne, Henry d’, 113 Ethiopia, 132–34. See also Abyssinia Ethnic identity, 45, 99, 116, 119 Ethnic types, 55, 164, 174, 181 Ethnography: and academic tradition, 18, 34; and Bénédite ’s writings, 62, 99, 109; and Cordier’s art, 72; and decorative art, 273; and Dehodencq’s art, 96; and Dinet’s art, 92, 94–95, 99, 142, 281; and expositions, 105, 109, 116–17, 127; and Fromentin’s writings, 18– 19, 92, 102; and Gauguin’s art, 93–94; and Gautier’s writings, 18–19, 24, 92, 96; and Gérôme’s art, 19; and Guillaumet’s art, 96; and Matisse ’s art, 170, 173, 180; and Prouvé’s art, 142; and Renan’s writings, 22; and Renoir’s art, 45, 55; research program of, 19 Etienne, Eugène, 62, 65, 200 Etoile Nord-africaine movement, 227, 248, 255 Eurocentrism, 170 Evenpoel, Henri, 85, 161, 165, 169, 181 Évolué, definition of, 3, 223 Exhibition of Moroccan Arts, in

Paris, 207, 208, 210–11, 226, 228 Exhibitions, of Orientalist art, 59–62, 65, 67, 69– 72, 75, 81, 103, 106, 129, 151, 160, 163, 268–69, 292nn38,42, 294n27, 299n69; and expositions, 59– 60, 61, 71, 74, 105–6, 109– 10, 118, 121–22, 124–27, 161, 210, 276–81. See also Salon exhibitions Exoticism: and academic tradition, 153, 159, 160; and Algerian museology, 268; and Baudelaire ’s writings, 89; and Bénédite ’s writings, 61–62; and Bernard’s art, 89, 290n14; and Bretonism, 83, 89; and Carré’s art, 149; and Castagnary’s writings, 24, 27; and color, 49; and Duranty’s writings, 31; and Flaubert’s writings, 89; and French bazaars, 86; and Fromentin’s writings, 18, 21, 29, 95; and Gauguin’s art, 33, 279, 281; and Guillaumet’s art, 96; and impressionism, 34–35, 55; and Lebourg’s art, 49; and Lévy-Dhurmer’s art, 290n14; and light, 49; and Loti’s writings, 117; and Manet’s art, 125; and Matisse ’s art, 3, 160; and modernization, 36; neoclassical critique of, 18, 21; and otherness, 90; and Parisian expositions, 59–60; and Point’s art, 290n14; realism combined with, 49; realist critique of, 24, 31; and Renoir’s art, 34, 55; and representation, 18, 21, 49; and tourism, 81; and traveling scholarships, 31 Exposition Franco-Marocaine, in Casablanca, 204 Expressionism, 124 Fagus, Félicien, 83 Falconry, 20, 21, 27 Fanon, Frantz, 2 Fantasias, equestrian, 21, 27, 119, 139, 140, 255

Fantin-Latour, Henri, 264, 266 Fauvism, 86, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 230, 264, 279, 293n7 Favory, André, 320n64 Fazekas, Sabine, 146 Fénéon, Félix, 52, 314n34 Ferry, Jules, 65, 131, 300 Fez, 170, 201, 203, 204, 205, 210, 211, 217, 224, 225, 229, 231, 233, 235, 306n40, 307n56; Mammeri’s depiction of, 222, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 232 Fichet, L. A., 276 Figure painting: and Belly’s art, 71; and Bernard’s art, 89; and Dehodencq’s art, 69; and Dinet’s art, 102; and Guillaumet’s art, 71; and Mammeri’s art, 222, 235, 314n30; and Matisse ’s art, 173–80; and Prouvé’s art, 140–43; and Renoir’s art, 37–38, 42–43, 45–48, 55, 87, 173; and Silbert’s art, 124 Fin-de-siècle period, 33, 57, 86, 97, 101, 105 Flaubert, Gustave, 67, 89–90, 135, 138 Fontainas, André, 82–84 Foucault, Michel, 5 Fourcaud, Louis, 43 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 124 Franco-Prussian War, 26, 27, 29, 130 French colonists: in Algeria, 15, 36, 65, 102, 144, 192, 251, 263; and anticolonialism, 79; and modernization, 15; in Morocco, 200, 211 French Revolution, 252 Frère, Théodore, 19 Friant, Emile, 135, 143 Fromentin, Eugène, 6, 7, 12, 15– 19, 21–25, 27–31, 28, 37, 48– 49, 52–53, 55, 60, 69, 84, 92, 95–96, 102, 135, 149, 157, 161, 163, 268–69, 277, 319n49; aesthetic theory of, 17–19, 84, 95, 164; artwork of: Arab

Falconer, 19, 20; Bab-el-Gharbi Street in Laghouat, 12, 15, 16– 17, 163, plate 1; Fountain at Kouba, 269; Souvenir of Algeria, 269; writings of: Une année dans le Sahel, 17–19, 22, 27, 28, 41, 48, 284n13; Dominique, 17; Un éte dans le Sahara, 16, 17, 21–22, 25, 41, 284n13; Les maîtres d’autrefois, 17, 28–29 Gabès, 139, 140, 142, 143 Galand, Charles, 297n36 Galichon, Emile, 285n24 Gallé, Emile, 138, 139 Gallieni, Joseph, 200 Gallotti, Jean, 202, 311nn43,48 Gallotti, Marie-Louise, 207, 311n47 Gambetta, Léon-Michel, 286n48 Gangnat, Maurice, 278 Gardens, 42, 59, 126, 148, 170, 186–89, 261, 318n37 Gardier, Raoul du, 161 Gasté, Constant-Georges, 72, 292n42 Gauguin, Paul, 33, 59–60, 83, 89, 92–94, 95, 97, 98, 125– 26, 154, 161, 164, 165, 168, 264, 266, 278, 279–81, 287n1, 294nn33,41; artwork of: Ia Orana Maria, 92, 93; Mana’o tupapa’u, 94, 95; Martinique, 126; Tahitian Landscape, 126; Who Are We? Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going?, 280 Gautier, Théophile, 12–13, 13, 15, 17, 18–19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 31, 36, 48, 61, 62, 92, 96, 184, 284nn2,7; writings of: Alger extra-muros, 15; Voyage en Algérie, 284n7 Geffroy, Gustave, 52 Géricault, Théodore, 277 Germany, 19, 23, 59, 64, 122, 131, 176, 179, 195, 202 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 19, 25, 62, 66, 72, 86, 159, 174, 178, 179, 180, 190, 228, 292n42; artwork of: Almeh, 25, 26

Index

343

Gervex, Henri, 117 Gide, André, 136, 163, 165–66, 293n4, 305n26 Giradet, Eugène, 292n42 Girardot, L.-A., 131, 135 Giraud, Eugène, 13 Girodet, Anne-Louis, 61 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 92 Gogh, Vincent van, 117 Gojon, Edmond, 217–18, 238, 244, 318n37 Goncourt, Edmond-LouisAntoine Huot de, 17 Goncourt, Jules-Alfred Huot de, 17 Gonse, Louis, 62, 81, 241 Gourdon, Henri, 215, 312n73 Granada, 26, 118, 121, 244, 248 Grand Palais, in Paris, 71, 103, 109, 122 Granet, François, 124 Graphic arts, 73, 73– 75, 76, 77, 271, 294n27. See also Book illustration; Lithography Grasset, Eugène, 63, 321n81 Great Britain, 19, 23, 64, 67, 122, 131, 176, 195, 202, 291n25 El Greco, 233 Greece, 27, 89 Grimm, Thomas, 291n25 Groves, Robert E., 308n75 Gsell, Stéphane, 195 Guillaume, Paul, 279 Guillaumet, Gustave, 7, 27, 31, 37, 50, 53, 58, 60, 61, 71, 83, 96, 125, 132, 136, 138, 163, 164, 268, 277; artwork of: Desert: The Sahara, 53; Seghia, Biskra, 53, 54, 83, 163; Weaving Women, 30, 31; writings of: Tableaux algériens, 53, 138, 301n31 Guillaumin, Armand, 264 Guion, Paul, 261 Gypsies, 71, 74, 96–97, 119, 121 Halley, Charles, 277 Hamidou, 248 Hamon, Philippe, 109 Hand of Fatma, 74, 75, 292n48 Hasnaoui, Terzi ben, 230

344

Index

Haussmannization, 13 Hautecoeur, Louis, 323n10 Hélys, Marc, 306n45 Hemche, Abdel-Halim, 147 Herzig, Edouard, 199–200, 217– 19, 224, 229, 236, 240, 270 Herzig, Yvonne, 270– 71, 321n83 Hestaux, Louis, 139 Hichens, Robert, 163, 188, 304n13 Historical painting, 25 Hoisington, William A., 311n54 Holland, 29, 131 Hugo, Victor, 90 Hybridity, in Mohammed Racim’s art, 222, 237, 242, 243 Illuminations, 189, 219, 237–38, 244 Immigration, 59 Impressionism: and academic tradition, 34, 51, 279, 289n40; and Algerian museology, 263– 64, 269, 271; and Bénédite ’s writings, 49–54, 58; and color, 29, 41, 49, 52, 140, 143, 164, 289n40; and Courbet’s art, 29; and Dumoulin’s art, 117; and exoticism, 34–35, 55; and Fromentin’s art, 17; and Fromentin’s writings, 29, 286n53; and Lebourg’s art, 39, 41, 49–51, 269, 319n49; and light, 17, 29, 36, 49, 52, 58, 164, 189; and Manet’s art, 29; and Roger Marx’s writings, 49–50; and Monet’s art, 29, 35–36, 69, 140, 264; as movement, 57, 130; and Orientalism, 7, 34, 35, 49– 54, 277, 279, 289n40, 319n49; and Prouvé’s writings, 140; and Renoir’s art, 7, 34, 36, 41, 49, 55, 277, 319n49 Ince, Howard, 176 Indigenous art: Algerian, 1, 74, 109–10, 144–45, 157, 191, 194, 195–200, 217–19, 221–24, 236– 48, 271, 278; Moroccan, 8–9, 191, 200, 202–13, 215–17, 224– 35; Tunisian, 74, 77, 215, 217, 230 Indochina, 7, 8, 9, 59, 65, 67, 74,

113, 116, 117, 124, 125, 161, 179, 200, 213, 215, 250, 276, 278 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 61, 71, 86, 130, 241, 279 Institut de Carthage, in Tunis, 75, 106, 143 Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris, 222, 228 International Colonial Exposition at Vincennes, 7, 249–50, 276– 81, 277 International Congress of Orientalists, 25, 66 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, in Paris, 151, 210, 212–19, 216, 218, 244, 276 Islam, 22, 48, 62, 70, 74, 90, 94– 95, 102, 118, 122, 170– 71, 182, 225–28, 233, 237, 248, 250, 272, 292n48 Islamic art, 58, 74– 75, 151–52, 183, 210, 291n25; and decorative art, 75, 151–52, 185–86, 189, 195, 237, 269, 281, 291n25; and injunction against images, 3, 5, 182, 229, 266, 314n30; and Muslim Art Exhibition, 62, 64–65, 66, 74, 291n22 Israel, ancient, 22 Italy, 21, 26, 31, 62, 89, 91, 129– 30, 131, 132, 137, 202, 215, 233, 248, 252, 273 Janniot, Alfred, 276 Japan, 9, 116 Japonisme, 62, 64, 117 Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, 148 Jardin d’Essai, in Algiers, 42, 55, 145, 154, 165, 187, 196, 261, 318n37 Jaurès, Jean, 308n64 Jazz, 127 Jean, René, 156–57, 168, 305–6n35 Jews, 22, 58, 118, 121, 127, 165, 171– 72, 250 Jongkind, Johan, 264 Jonnart, Charles-Celestin, 144, 152, 157, 194–95, 198, 200, 202, 219, 223, 236, 238, 255, 261

Jouve, Paul, 147, 151 Jullian, Philippe, 259 Kabyle, 16, 22–23, 29, 36, 96, 98, 150, 152–53, 198, 199, 217, 223, 233, 234, 235, 255 Kahn, Gustave, 84, 230, 314n34 Keim, Albert, 323n10 Klee, Paul, 8, 180–81 Klein, Henri, 238, 240 Kleiss-Herzig, Yvonne. See Herzig, Yvonne Koechlin, Raymond, 209, 211, 266, 269, 311n49, 320n61 Koran, 4, 22, 225–28, 233, 237, 238, 244, 266 Lafenestre, Georges, 59, 67 Lagarde, Léonce, 67, 132–33, 133 Laghouat, 12, 15, 16–17, 67, 122, 135, 136, 163 Lamartine, Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de, 90 Landelle, Charles, 37, 60, 163, 292n42 Landscape painting: and academic tradition, 51; and Belly’s art, 71; and Léon Carré’s art, 224; and Castagnary’s writings, 24–25, 27; and Chudant’s art, 74; and Corot’s art, 263; and Courbet’s art, 24; and Delacroix’s art, 16, 17; and Dinet’s art, 135, 136– 37; and Fromentin’s art, 16, 17, 27; and Guillaumet’s art, 71; and Lebourg’s art, 288n27; and Lepine ’s art, 263; and Mammeri’s art, 4, 229, 278; and Matisse ’s art, 186; and national identity, 24–25; and Point’s art, 60, 87; and Prouvé’s art, 142, 143; and Renan’s art, 85; and Renoir’s art, 34, 53, 264 Laprade, Albert, 202 Laprade, Pierre, 320n64 Larche, Raoul, 137 Largillière, Nicolas de, 320n64 Launois, Jean, 151 Laurens, Paul-Albert, 321n81 Lazerges, Hippolyte, 259 Leblond, Marius-Ary, 303n1

Lebon, André, 73– 74 Lebourg, Albert, 39–41, 49–51, 160, 268, 269, 277, 288nn27,34, 319n49; artwork of: Algiers Admiralty, 49; Algiers Street, 40; Port of Algiers, 41, 50 Lecomte de Nouÿ, Jean-Jules Antoine, 178 Leftist politics, 23, 30, 34, 82, 168, 250 Legrain, Paul, 213 Lemire, Charles, 74 Lenin, V. I., 276 Lepine, Stanislas, 263 Leprun, Sylviane, 116 Le Roux, Hughes, 287n5 Leroy, Paul, 48, 60, 61, 73, 74, 98, 109, 135, 163; artwork of: The Chourbah, 73; Hand of Fatma, 75 Le Sidaner, Henri, 137 Lessore, Emile, 12, 14 Lévy-Dhurmer, Lucien, 87, 161, 290n14, 293n7; artwork of: Evening Promenade, Morocco, 87, 88; Moroccan, 87; Portrait of Pierre Loti, 87, 88 Leygues, Georges, 67 Light: and Belly’s art, 52, 71; and Bénédite ’s writings, 52–53, 58, 62; and Cottet’s art, 83; and Dinet’s art, 52; and exoticism, 49; and Fromentin’s art, 12, 17; and Fromentin’s writings, 29, 48; and Guillaumet’s art, 53, 71; and impressionism, 29, 36, 49, 52, 58, 189; and Lebourg’s art, 49, 50; and Mammeri’s art, 223; and Roger Marx’s writings, 50, 54; and Matisse ’s art, 164, 184, 189; and Monet’s art, 36, 287n5; and naturalism, 49; and realism, 29; and Renoir’s art, 37, 49; and romanticism, 29 Liotard, Jean-Etienne, 43 Lithography, 73, 73– 75, 76, 77, 142, 143, 148, 181 Lorcin, Patricia, 19, 22, 250, 309n4 Lorrain, Claude, 259 Loti, Pierre, 71, 86, 87, 90, 97, 116, 117, 168– 70, 171, 181, 192,

294n33, 298n44, 306nn40,45, 308n77 Louis XIV, 65 Louvre, 59, 71, 84, 98, 210, 257, 259, 267, 269, 290n4 Luce, Maximilien, 264, 310n23 Lung, Frédéric, 144, 147, 155, 267, 320n65, 323n11 Lunois, Alexandre, 73, 74, 80, 109, 135; artwork of: exhibition poster, 80 Luxembourg Museum, 6, 27, 50–52, 59, 61, 69, 71, 98, 226, 258, 264, 266, 278, 288n35, 323nn10–11 Lyautey, Hubert, 8–9, 193, 193, 195, 200–205, 211, 217, 222, 225, 226, 229, 249, 263, 276, 278, 280 Lytton, Baron, 90 Madagascar, 7, 8, 9, 59, 65, 110, 112–13, 125, 200 Mahmoud II, 26 Maillol, Aristide, 265, 319n55 Maisonseul, Jean de, 268 Majorelle, Jacques, 233 Majorelle, Louis, 142–43 Mammeri, Azouaou, 4, 5, 6, 150, 157, 183, 222, 223–35, 234, 236, 238, 241, 243, 244, 249, 271, 278, 312n60, 314n30, 321n87; artwork of: Arab House, 271; Cheikhates, 235; The Fountain, 225, 225; Interior of a Koranic School, 226, 227, 228; Interior of the Karouiine Mosque, Fez, 228; Koranic Class, 228; “Montée des rats” in Fez, 232, 232; View of Fez, 229, 230, 231; View of Moulay-Idriss, 233, plate 13 Manet, Edouard, 29, 54, 61, 117, 125, 278, 286n53, 288n35 Manguin, Henri, 164 Marby, Marcelle, 269 Marc, Franz, 157 Marçais, Georges, 144, 192, 241– 42, 247 Marcel, Alexandre, 114, 116 Mardrus, Joseph, 89, 154, 238 Maréorama, 114, 116

Index

345

Marilhat, Prosper, 190, 268, 277, 286n57 Marquet, Albert, 85, 161, 269, 270, 293n7, 312n60 Martin, Henri, 137 Marval, Jacqueline, 265 Marx, Karl, 276 Marx, Roger, 33, 41, 48, 49–50, 53–54, 61, 67, 81, 126, 287n1, 288n27 Marye, Georges, 64, 96, 144, 192, 195 Matisse, Henri, 49, 59, 84, 124, 125, 127, 129, 155, 156, 265, 278– 79, 281, 293n7; Algerian travels of, 159, 160–61, 163– 67, 169; and Islamic art, 3, 183, 185–86, 189; Moroccan travels of, 3, 8, 159, 169–89, 191, 202, 278, 281, 308n77; and Orientalism, 6, 85, 159–60, 164, 168– 72, 173, 175, 179–81, 183–86, 189–90; artwork of: Acanthus, Moroccan Landscape, 189, plate 12; Amido, 173– 74; Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra), 127, 167; Bonheur de vivre, 189; Casbah Gate, 168, 180, 183–84, 308n77, plate 11; Dance, 184; Fatma the Mulatto Woman, 173, 174; Harmony in Red, 184; Interior with Eggplants, 186; Landscape Viewed from a Window, 182, 183–84; Marabout, Tangier, 170, 308n77; Matisse by Himself, 170, 171; Moroccan Café, 168, 184–86, 185, 308n77; Moroccan Garden, 186, 188, 189; Music, 184; On the Terrace, 168, 172, 172, 180, 184, 186; Portrait of Madame Matisse: The Green Stripe, 174; Seated Moroccan Woman, 173, 179; Seated Riffian, 175; The Standing Riffian, 175, 175; Street in Biskra, 162, 163; View of Tangier, 179, 308n77; Zorah, 168; Zorah Standing, 173, 174, 186 Mauclair, Camille, 102, 156, 280, 281, 303n70

346

Index

Mecca, 94–95, 102, 272 Médénine, 140–41 Medersas (Islamic colleges), 194–95, 207, 309n14 Medina, 94 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 89 Meissonnier, Ernest, 84 Meley, Louis, 144, 147 Melnikov, Konstantin, 213, 276 Ménélik, 132–33, 134, 297n26 Menzel, 139, 142–43 Merad, Ali, 194 Mercier, Gustave, 252, 255, 263, 266 Merson, Luc-Olivier, 148 Merwaert, Paul, 113, 124 Mesnil, Armand du, 17 Meunier, Constantin, 54 Michelangelo, 266 Middle class, 5, 87, 273 Migéon, Gaston, 135, 136, 210, 291n22 Migonney, Jules, 155, 187, 278 Military, French, 22, 35–36, 67, 112–13, 127, 132; in Algeria, 12, 15–16, 27, 30, 36, 114, 120, 191, 200; in Morocco, 176, 177, 179, 200, 217, 225, 307n56, 311n54; in Tunisia, 139 Military painting, 15–16, 23, 82, 284n9 Millet, Jean-François, 52, 96 Miniatures, 1, 62, 74, 82, 186, 189, 219, 222, 235, 236–37, 238, 241–47, 271, 273, 278, 303n70, 321n87 Modernism: and aestheticization, 179–80; and Bernard’s art, 89; and decorative art, 180, 191, 213–18; and Evenepoel’s art, 85; and Gauguin’s art, 125, 264, 279–80; and Lebourg’s art, 41; and Mammeri’s art, 222, 231; and Manet’s art, 125; and Marquet’s art, 85, 269; and Matisse’s art, 3, 85, 159, 160, 167, 168, 169, 172, 174, 179–80, 184, 190, 191, 213; and Orientalism, 2, 3, 7, 33, 34, 85, 89, 125, 159, 168, 169, 172, 179–80, 190, 279–80; and Piot’s art, 85; and political

relations, 179–80; and Mohammed Racim’s art, 222; and Renoir’s art, 33, 34, 41 Modernization: in Algeria, 12–13, 15, 36, 165, 284n7; in Egypt, 59; and Gautier’s writings, 12, 15, 24, 36, 284n7; and indigenous art, 214–15; and Lessore ’s art, 12, 14; and Loti’s writings, 169; in Morocco, 169; and Wyld’s’s art, 12, 14 Moerenhout, Jacques-Antoine van, 94 Monet, Claude, 29, 35–36, 37, 41, 42, 50–51, 54, 69, 83, 125, 140, 160, 264, 266, 287n5 Montaland, Charles, 217 Montesquieu, le baron de, 61 Monticelli, Adolphe, 124 Moorish architecture, 26, 37–38, 41, 42, 60, 106, 108, 118, 151, 163, 170, 181, 182, 192, 194–95 Moorish art, 77, 199, 202, 203 Moorish poetry, 150 Moors, 22, 23, 26, 58, 118–22 Moreau, Gustave, 30, 85, 87, 130, 161, 164, 173, 293n7; artwork of: Dance of Salome, 87 Morisot, Berthe, 264, 266 Morocco: anticolonialism in, 176– 79, 211, 217, 225, 227, 248; decorative art of, 8, 191, 202– 13, 215–17; Dehodencq’s depiction of, 69– 71; Dehodencq’s travels in, 69; Delacroix’s depiction of, 16, 17, 61, 71, 169, 183; French colonial policies in, 7, 8–9, 65, 120, 169, 176, 177, 179, 192–93, 200–205, 217, 223, 309n4; French colonists in, 200, 211; and French exhibitions, 207, 208, 210–13, 212, 215–16, 216; French military activity in, 176, 177, 179, 200, 217, 225, 307n56, 311n54; indigenous architecture in, 201–2; indigenous art of, 8–9, 191, 200, 202–13, 215–17, 224–35; LévyDhurmer’s depiction of, 87; Lévy-Dhurmer’s travels in, 87; Loti’s description of, 71,

168– 70; Lyautey’s administration in, 8–9, 193, 195, 200–205, 211, 217, 222, 223, 229, 263; Matisse ’s depiction of, 3, 154, 170–90; Matisse ’s description of, 169– 70; Matisse ’s travels in, 3, 8, 159, 169–89, 202, 278, 281, 306n35; and modernization, 169; Poiret’s travels in, 213; and Ricard’s writings, 198; Roman architecture in, 189, 211; and tourism, 36, 169, 176, 201; urban planning in, 201–2, 229. See also names of specific cities and sites Morosov, Ivan, 279 Mosquée de la Pêcherie, in Algiers, 13, 195 Mosque of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, in Algiers, 37–38, 38, 55, 259 Mosque of Sidi Boul Baba, in Menzel, 139 Moulay-Idriss, 87, 233, 315n42 Mozabites, 21, 22, 72, 98, 136 Mucha, Alphonse, 75 Municipal Museum of French Art, in Algiers, 59, 143, 258– 60, 263, 271, 272, 319n56 Musée des Beaux-Arts, at Besançon, 292n50 Musée d’Orsay, 71 Museum of Decorative Arts, in Paris, 209, 210 Museum of the Casbah, in Algiers, 257, 257 Muslim Art Exhibition, 62, 64–65, 66, 74, 191, 241, 291n22 Mustapha Museum, in Algiers, 192, 195, 256, 257, 271, 273, 310n23 Mythological painting, 25, 87 Nabis, 287n1, 293n7 Napoléon III, 29, 62 Natanson, Thadée, 82 National Colonial Exposition at Nogent-sur-Marne, 106, 126–27 National Colonial Exposition of Marseille (1906), 69, 106, 118, 122–25, 147, 161, 165, 278

National Colonial Exposition of Marseille (1922), 211–12, 212, 230, 234 National identity, 24–25, 29, 31, 48, 116. See also Ethnic identity Nationalism, 31, 222, 235, 247, 248 National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts, in Paris, 250, 277 National Museum of Antiquities and Muslim Art, in Algiers, 143, 192 National Museum of Fine Arts, in Algiers, 1–3, 6, 7–8, 42, 145, 147, 148, 242, 249, 256, 257– 73, 260, 262, 275, 302n64 National types, 18–19 Naturalism: and academic tradition, 55; and Belly’s art, 52; and Bénédite ’s writings, 62; and Buffet’s art, 61; and Castagnary’s writings, 25, 27; and colonial expansion, 62; and color, 49; and Dinet’s art, 7, 61; and Guillaumet’s art, 7, 61; and Leroy’s art, 61; and light, 49; and national identity, 25; and Orientalism, 7, 34, 48, 52, 62; and Perret’s art, 61; and Renoir’s art, 34, 48, 55; and socialism, 48 Neoclassicism, 18, 130, 319n55 Néo-Français, 45, 317n11 Neo-impressionism, 52, 164, 264, 293n7 Nerval, Gérard de, 12 Nézière, Joseph de la, 9, 124, 203, 204, 210, 211, 311n43, 312n60 Nicholl, Charles, 132 Noiré, Maxime, 114, 144, 259, 269, 297–98n36, 302n53 Nostalgia, 3, 61, 79, 97, 98, 168, 238 Oetterman, Stephen, 110, 113 Oran, 252, 255, 256, 271, 272 Orientalism: and academic tradition, 18, 21, 34, 51, 53, 55, 66, 69, 82, 84, 89, 100, 103, 160, 174, 180, 259, 278, 289n40; and aestheticization, 37, 49, 69, 170, 179–80; and Alazard’s writ-

ings, 259–60, 269, 319n49; and Alexandre ’s writings, 79, 86; and Algerian museology, 260, 263, 267– 72; and art nouveau, 138; and Baudelaire ’s writings, 12, 31; and Bénédite ’s writings, 31, 34, 49–55, 58, 61–62, 85, 103, 319n49; and Bretonism, 83; and Castagnary’s writings, 24–25, 27, 31, 82; and colonialism, 3, 5, 61–62, 67, 79, 81–82, 90, 95, 106, 170, 180, 181; and costumery, 174, 213; and cubism, 69, 82, 157, 293n7; and depersonalization, 49, 83; and Duranty’s writings, 29–31, 82; and escapism, 25; and Eurocentrism, 170; and fauvism, 279, 293n7; and Fontainas’s writings, 82–83; and Fromentin’s writings, 17–19, 21–23, 27–29, 31, 37; historical accounts of, 3–4, 27, 41, 61, 69, 319n49; and impressionism, 7, 34, 35, 49–54, 277, 279, 289n40, 319n49; and literary references, 58, 67, 89–90, 138; and Loti’s writings, 169; and Roger Marx’s writings, 49–50, 53–54; and modernism, 2, 3, 7, 33, 34, 85, 89, 125, 159, 168, 169, 172, 179– 80, 190, 279–80; and Nabis, 293n7; and Natanson’s writings, 82; and national identity, 24–25, 27, 29, 48; and nationalism, 31; and naturalism, 7, 34, 48, 52; and neo-impressionism, 293n7; and photography, 84– 86, 95; and Pouillon’s writings, 245; and preservation of indigenous culture, 62, 64–65, 96–98, 168, 181; and realism, 7, 23–25, 29–31, 33, 49, 66, 82, 84, 89, 100, 146, 147, 160, 180, 237, 238; and Renan’s writings, 85, 90; and Said’s writings, 2, 4, 5, 25, 66, 170, 306n45; and symbolism, 82, 85, 87, 290n14, 293n7; as term, 24, 25; and traveling scholarships, 62, 129–40, 142–43, 157; and Vauxcelles’s

Index

347

Orientalism (continued) writings, 86–87; and Villa Abd-el-Tif, 147, 153, 157, 269, 278. See also Exhibitions; Exoticism; Society of French Orientalist Painters Orientalism, of individual artists: Agutte, 293n7; Belly, 25, 27, 52, 54, 61, 71, 125, 277; Berchère, 25, 268; Bernard, 87, 89; Besnard, 53, 62, 66, 130, 159, 160, 269; Bompard, 135; Buffet, 67, 132, 134–35; Léon Carré, 149–50, 278; Cauvy, 147, 278; Chassériau, 61, 96, 125, 161, 268–69, 277, 319n49; Chudant, 74– 75; Constant, 25, 62, 66; Cordier, 72; Cormon, 25, 62, 66; Cottet, 66, 109; Dehodencq, 69– 71, 96–97, 268, 269, 277, 319n49; Delacroix, 34, 61, 69, 95, 168, 241, 268, 277, 281, 319n49; De la Nézière, 203, 204, 210; Dinet, 7, 52, 53, 54, 73, 92, 94–95, 98–103, 109, 132, 136–37, 269, 271– 72, 279–81, 289n40; Dubois, 151; Dufresne, 156–57, 278, 293n7; Evenepoel, 85; Frère, 19; Friant, 135, 143; Fromentin, 17, 27, 28, 37, 69, 96, 161, 268–69, 277, 319n49; Gasté, 72; Gauguin, 69, 125– 26, 278, 279–81; Gérôme, 25, 62, 66, 69, 72, 159; Girardot, 131, 135; Girodet, 61; Guillaumet, 7, 27, 31, 58, 61, 71, 96, 125, 132, 268, 277; Ingres, 61, 86, 130; Jouve, 147; Klee, 180; Launois, 151; Lazerges, 259; Lebourg, 49, 268, 269, 277, 319n49; Leroy, 54, 73, 109, 135; Lévy-Dhurmer, 87, 293n7; Lunois, 73, 109, 135; Mammeri, 6, 233; Marquet, 85, 269, 293n7; Matisse, 3, 6, 85, 159–60, 164, 168– 72, 173, 175, 179–81, 183–86, 189–90, 278– 79, 281; Moreau, 87; Noiré, 269, 298n36; Perret, 54, 72; Piot, 85, 293n7; Point, 87; Poisson, 252; Potter, 67, 72; Prouvé, 90, 138–

348

Index

40, 142–43, 259; Mohammed Racim, 6, 244, 245; Regnault, 27, 61, 268, 269, 319n49; Renoir, 3, 6, 7, 31, 33–34, 36–43, 45–50, 54–55, 66, 69, 125, 159, 168, 268, 269, 277– 78, 281, 319n49; Rivière, 90; Rochegrosse, 25, 62, 66, 135, 269; Tissot, 25, 62, 66; Vernet, 82; Wyld, 19 Orif, Mustapha, 236, 238, 241, 271 Orléans, le duc d’, 13, 15–16, 266, 267 Ornamental art. See Decorative art Other, 4, 5, 15, 62, 90, 98, 168, 281 Ottoman Empire, 8, 23, 41, 221, 236, 238, 245, 248 Ouargla, 135, 136 Ouled-Naïls, 98, 100, 110, 121, 122, 161, 163, 165, 167, 305n26 Palace of Industry, in Paris, 61, 62 Palace of the Deys, in Algiers, 13 Palais d’Eté, in Algiers, 151–53, 219, 258, 303n73 Palestine, 21 Pannini, Giovanni, 319n47 Panofsky, Erwin, 243 Panoramas, 7, 105, 106, 110–14, 112, 115, 116, 118, 297n26 Paris: bazaars in, 86; Commune in, 27, 130; and Haussmannization, 13; siege of, 26, 27. See also names of specific sites; Universal expositions Patriotism, 25, 31, 67 Patronage, 66–67, 69, 74, 126, 147, 159, 168, 267 Pavillon de Marsan exhibit. See Exhibition of Moroccan Arts Peltre, Christine, 288n34, 295n44 Perret, Auguste, 261 Perret, Marius, 54, 61, 72, 113, 292n42; artwork of: Souvenir of the Fouta Expedition, 68 Persian miniatures, 4, 62, 82, 186, 222, 236–38, 241, 242 Perspective, 242–43, 269– 70 Peter, Victor, 75 Petit, Henri, 195

Petit Palais, in Paris, 109, 257, 323n11 Photography, 17, 38–40, 49, 84– 86, 95, 171, 221, 229, 259 Piazza, Henri, 237, 241, 278 Picasso, Pablo, 59, 74, 122, 127, 213, 279 Piot, René, 85, 161, 279, 293n7 Pissarro, Camille, 41, 224, 264, 266, 288n35 Place Clichy, in Paris, 86 Point, Armand, 60, 87, 290n14 Pointillism, 137 Poiret, Paul, 213, 219 Poisson, Pierre-Marie, 252, 253, 317n14 Polignac, le comte de, 267, 320n64 Political relations: and aestheticization, 49, 179–80, 190; and anticolonialism, 8, 23, 24, 79, 81, 82, 168, 179; and centenary of French Algeria, 250–52; and colonial expansion, 62, 65, 79; and colonial policies, 29–30, 194, 250–51 Polo, Marco, 90 Polynesia, 65 Pont-Aven, school of, 83, 89 Postcards, 171, 173, 177, 181, 190 Posters, 63, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 147, 148, 252, 254, 321n81 Post-impressionism, 143 Potter, Maurice, 67, 68, 72, 292n42 Pouillon, François, 99, 153, 235, 246, 248, 271, 292n45 Poussin, Nicolas, 84, 129, 319n47; artwork of: Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 84 Practice, artistic: of Belly, 52; of Bernard, 89; of Bonnard, 143; of Ketty Carré, 269– 70; of Léon Carré, 150–51, 224; of Cauvy, 147; of Chassériau, 71; of Cottet, 83; of Delacroix, 21; of Dinet, 92, 100–101, 102, 136–37, 238, 271, 281, 289n40; of Dufresne, 156, 157; of Dumoulin, 117; of Fromentin, 12, 17, 21; of Gérôme, 25; of Guillaumet, 53, 136; of Kleiss-

Herzig, 271; of Lebourg, 41, 49–51; of Lévy-Dhurmer, 87; of Mammeri, 222, 224, 226, 231, 232, 233; of Matisse, 84, 160, 170, 174, 179–81, 184–86, 189, 279; of Monet, 41, 287n5; of Prouvé, 140, 141–42, 143; of Mohammed Racim, 222, 241–43; of Renoir, 39–40, 41, 53; of Silbert, 124; of Suréda, 84 Preservation. See Culture, preservation of Prix Chenavard, 148 Prix de Rome, 25, 130, 145 Prix National (Prix du Salon), 130, 132, 138 Proletariat, 23 Prost, Henri, 201, 202, 217 Prostitution, 165, 167, 171– 72, 180 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 24 Proust, Antonin, 61 Prouvé, Victor, 8, 90, 138–43, 160, 259; artwork of: Arab Horseman, 140–42, plate 8; At the Menzel Fountain, 142, 143; Caravan (Study), 140; Fantasia, 140, 141; Flora Marina, Flora Exotica, 139; Sardanapalus, 138, 143, 259; writings of: De Gabès à Douïreth, 139 Puget, Pierre, 124 Rabat, 201, 204–5, 207–8, 210, 232, 233, 235, 311n48; Mammeri’s depiction of, 222 Rabinow, Paul, 201 Race: and cultural decline, 97–98, 203, 296n62; and ethnography, 19, 22, 55; and Fromentin’s writings, 22–23; and Gautier’s writings, 18–19; and Gobineau’s writings, 92; mingling of, 45, 165; and stereotypes, 22, 45, 55; and Taine ’s writings, 92 Racim, Mohammed, 1, 4, 5, 6, 74, 79, 151, 157, 198, 199, 219, 222, 223, 229, 230, 235–38, 241–45, 247–48, 249, 252, 269, 270, 271, 278, 281, 294n27, 321nn80,86–87; artwork of:

Barbarossa and His Fleet before Algiers, 271; The Caliph and His Entourage, 271; Casbah Terraces, 241–43, 242, 248; Day after the Wedding, 241; Galleys Fleeing before the Storm, 245; History of Islam, 247; The Hunt, 242; Hunt Scene, 271; Illumination in Egyptian Style, 237; Illumination in Persian Style, 237; Moorish Idyll, 244; Naval Battle, 245, 246, 247; Persian Hunt, 238, 240; The Rais, 247, plate 15; Splendor of the Granada Caliphate, 244 Racim, Omar, 219, 236, 237, 244 Realism: and academic tradition, 66, 82, 84, 89; and anticolonialism, 23, 24; and Bernard’s art, 89; and Léon Carré’s art, 148; and Castagnary’s writings, 24– 25, 31; and Cauvy’s art, 147; and Champfleury’s writings, 24; and color, 29, 124; and Courbet’s art, 18, 24; and Courbet’s writings, 24; and Dinet’s art, 92, 100, 238, 281; and Duranty’s writings, 29–31; and Fromentin’s writings, 29; and Guillaumet’s art, 96; and Lebourg’s art, 49; and light, 29; and Mammeri’s art, 231, 234; and Manet’s art, 29; and Matisse ’s art, 279; and Monet’s art, 29; and national identity, 24–25; and Orientalism, 7, 23– 25, 29–31, 33, 49, 66, 82, 84, 89, 100, 146, 147, 160, 180, 237, 238; and Proudhon’s writings, 24; and “Return to Order” movement, 231; and Silbert’s art, 124; and Villa Abd-el-Tif, 146 Reception, critical, of individual artists: Belly, 25, 27, 52, 54; Berchère, 25; Bernard, 89; Caravaggio, 18; Ketty Carré, 270, 321n80; Clairin, 27; Constant, 27; Corot, 52; Cottet, 84; Courbet, 18, 52; De Buzon, 153; Decamps, 184; Dinet, 52, 54, 89,

92, 99–100, 102–3; Dufresne, 155, 156–57; Fromentin, 12, 25, 27, 29–30, 286n53; Gallé, 139; Gauguin, 33, 126, 287n1; Gérôme, 19, 25, 285n24; Guillaumet, 27, 53, 58, 83; Lebourg, 41, 49–51, 288n27; Mammeri, 223, 226–35; Manet, 54, 286n53; Matisse, 168, 305–6n35; Meunier, 54; Millet, 52; Monet, 54, 287n5; Moreau, 30; Perret, 54; Prouvé, 139, 140; Mohammed Racim, 219, 223, 238, 241–42, 244, 247, 248, 316n65; Omar Racim, 219, 244; Regnault, 25, 27; Renoir, 41, 49, 54–55; Sisley, 54; Tissot, 174; Vernet, 27, 284n9 Régamey, Frédéric, 64, 65 Regnault, Henri, 8, 25–27, 50, 61, 268, 319n49; artwork of: Execution of a Janissary, 26; Haoua, 27; Hassan and Namouna, 27, plate 2; Portrait of General Prim, 25, 27; Salomé, 25, 27; Summary Execution, 26, 27, 71 Religious practice, as subject of art, 19, 93–95, 225–28, 269 Rembrandt, 174 Renan, Ary, 8, 84–85, 89, 91, 174, 307n54 Renan, Ernst, 22 Renard, Jules. See Draner Renoir, Jean, 37, 47 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 3, 6, 7, 31, 33–34, 36–43, 45–50, 54– 55, 66, 69, 81, 87, 125, 159, 160, 161, 163, 170, 173, 174, 180, 187, 264, 268, 269, 277– 78, 279, 281, 288n35, 319n49; artwork of: Algerian Figures, 45, 46, 268; Algerian Woman and Child, 45–46; Algiers Garden, 268; Ali, the Young Arab, 46, 173 Arab Festival, Algiers: The Casbah, 34, 35, 125, 161; Arab on a Camel, 46; Copy after Delacroix’s “Jewish Wedding,” 34, 35, 278; Field of Banana Trees, 42, 49; Head of an Algerian

Index

349

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (continued) Woman, 125; Jardin d’Essai in Algiers, 42, 49, 55, plate 4; Luncheon at Bougival, 49; Madame Stora in Algerian Costume, 34, 125, 161, 278; Mademoiselle Fleury in Algerian Costume, 43, 44, 45; Mosque at Algiers, 37–39, 53, 55, plate 3; Odalisque, 34; Old Arab Woman, 47, 47; Parisians in Algerian Costume, 45; Seated Algerian Woman, 55; Stairway in Algiers, 39, 39–40; Young Arab Boy, 55 Representation, 3, 18, 49, 170, 174, 190, 222 “Return to Order” movement, 231, 278– 79, 281 Ricard, Gustave, 264, 266 Ricard, Prosper, 163, 198–99, 203, 207–9, 223, 224, 229, 233, 236, 272, 311n43 Riffians, 175– 79 Rimbaud, Arthur, 132 Rivière, Théodore, 72, 90; artwork of, 90, 91 Rix, Hilda, 173, 176, 181, 306– 7nn47,49 Roached, Mohammed ben Macri, 230 Robert-Fleury, Tony, 289n40 Rochefoucauld, Antoine de la, 55 Rochegrosse, Georges, 66, 124, 135, 240, 244, 259, 269 Rococo period, 61 Rodenbach, Georges, 87 Rodin, Auguste, 161, 265, 266, 278 Rollince, Jeanne, 135, 137, 217, 271, 280, 322–23nn9–10 Roman empire, 4, 9, 189, 192, 238, 251 Romanticism: and Chassériau’s art, 71; and Delacroix’s art, 17, 149; and Fromentin’s art, 25, 149; and Fromentin’s writings, 29; and Gautier’s writings, 12, 15; and light, 29; and otherness, 62 Rome, 21, 26, 31, 129–30 Rothschild, le baron de, 62 Rouault, Georges, 154

350

Index

Roujon, Henri, 73, 288n35 Rousseau, Théodore, 52, 263 Royalism, 23 Rugs. See Carpets Russia, 19, 59, 123, 213, 276, 279 Sagnes, Guy, 286n51 Said, Edward, 2, 4, 5, 25, 66, 170, 306n45 Salon exhibitions: and Baudelaire ’s writings, 11–12, 284n9; and Bénédite ’s writings, 51, 58, 99; and Castagnary’s writings, 24, 25, 27, 58; and Fromentin’s writings, 28; and Gautier’s writings, 12; and Roger Marx’s writings, 33, 54; and Société des Artistes Français, 132, 134, 135, 142, 160, 230; and Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 142, 154, 159; and Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, 238, 243, 270; and Society of French Orientalist Painters, 7, 57–58, 66, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 92, 103, 106, 121, 134, 135, 142, 146, 147, 156, 160, 184, 292n38; and traveling scholarships, 130, 131, 132, 135, 138; and Zola’s writings, 29, 286n53 Salon exhibitions, by individual artist: Belly, 71; Buffet, 132, 134; Cauvy, 147; Chassériau, 71; Courbet, 24; Dinet, 92, 99, 135, 136; Dufresne, 154, 156; Fromentin, 12, 17, 28, 286n53; Gauguin, 126; Gérôme, 69; Henri Martin, 137; Matisse, 156, 159–60, 167; Potter, 67; Prouvé, 142; Mohammed Racim, 243; Regnault, 25, 27 Salonnets, 106, 121–22, 124, 126 “Salvage” paradigm, 168 Salzmann, Auguste, 17 Sand, George, 17 Satire, 79 Schapiro, Meyer, 17 Schneider, Pierre, 168, 189 School of Algiers, 7, 143, 145–49, 151–55, 157, 187, 194, 195, 223, 260, 267, 269, 278

School of Fontainebleau, 319n47 Schuré, Edouard, 90 Science, 19, 29, 49, 52, 55, 65, 67 Sculpture, 69, 72, 73, 110, 156, 252, 259, 265–66, 276, 281, 319n56 Séailles, Gabriel, 70, 269, 320n72 Segalen, Victor, 97, 168 Séguy, E.-A., 187 Seignemartin, Jean, 51, 288n34 Self, and colonial relations, 4, 222–23 Sembat, Marcel, 167, 173, 178– 79, 279, 307–8nn64,66,79 Seurat, Georges, 264 Sexual tourism, 165–67 Shattuck, Roger, 72 Shchukin, Sergei, 279 Sherman, Daniel, 258 Sidi Abd-er-Rahman Et Tsalibi, 38 Signac, Paul, 264, 293n7 Silbert, José, 124, 259, 292n48 Silvestre, Armand, 118 Simon, Lucien, 66, 135 Sisley, Alfred, 54, 83, 264, 288n35 Sisowath, king of Cambodia, 161 Sliman ben Ibrahim, 72, 72– 73, 94, 95, 98, 102, 167, 237, 271, 281, 292n45 Social class, 5, 45, 46, 47–48, 87, 273 Socialism, 23, 48, 82, 178, 179, 308n64 Société des Artistes Français, 131, 132, 134, 135, 142, 160, 230, 292n38 Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 142, 154, 159 Society of Algerian and Orientalist Artists, 144, 145, 238, 243, 258, 263, 270– 71, 298n36 Society of French Orientalist Painters, 6– 7, 37, 51, 55, 57– 62, 65–67, 69– 75, 77, 131, 134, 163, 168, 176, 204, 243–44, 259, 267; critical reception of, 81– 87, 90–91; and expositions, 7, 59–60, 61, 71, 74, 105–6, 109, 113–14, 118, 121–22, 124–27, 210, 278; salonnets of, 106, 121– 22, 124; Salons of, 7, 57–58, 66, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 92, 103, 106,

121, 134, 135, 142, 146, 147, 156, 160, 184, 292n38; and traveling scholarships, 7, 62, 134–35, 143, 146, 299n69; and Villa Abd-elTif, 146 Society of Painter-Lithographers, 57, 74 Soulès, Félix, 132 Soustiel, Jean, 291n22 Spain, 25, 26, 27, 91, 96, 123, 131, 132, 149, 157, 176, 177, 233; Andalusian, 26, 118–22, 127, 130, 150, 165, 223, 245, 247, 248, 273 Spencer, Michael Clifford, 284n2 Steam technology, 15, 36 Stein, Gertrude, 181 Stereoramas, 107, 114, 115 Stevens, MaryAnne, 43 Subjectivity: as aesthetic criterion, 83, 85; and colonial relations, 5 Supernatural, Dinet’s depiction of, 294n41 Suréda, André, 84, 181, 219, 269, 278, 322n9; artwork of: Fountain at Tlemcen, 84, plate 5 Surrealism, 264, 276 Symbolism: and Bernard’s art, 87, 89, 290n14; and Gauguin’s art, 92, 94; and Lévy-Dhurmer’s art, 87, 290n14, 293n7; and Roger Marx’s writings, 33; and Moreau’s art, 30, 85, 293n7; and Orientalism, 82, 85, 87, 290n14, 293n7; and Point’s art, 60, 87, 290n14; and Renan’s art, 85 Tableaux vivants, 105 Taine, Hippolyte, 92 Tangier: Camoin’s stay in, 161; Casbah in, 169, 173, 180–84, 308n77; Dehodencq’s stay in, 70; Girardot’s depiction of, 131; Loti’s description of, 169, 181; Matisse ’s depiction of, 180–89; Matisse ’s stay in, 159, 169–89, 191, 201, 281; Regnault’s stay in, 26, 27; Rix’s description of, 173, 176, 181, 307n49; Silbert’s depiction of, 124; and tourism, 36; Villa Brooks in, 187–88

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 176 Tarade, Jean de, 49 Tarde, Guillaume de, 201, 202, 203 Tardieu, André, 251 Technique. See Practice, artistic Tharaud, Jean and Jérôme, 223, 224, 226, 229, 313–14n15 Theory of art: and abstraction, 203–4; and academic tradition, 18, 84; and Castagnary’s writings, 24–25, 31; and De Tarde ’s writings, 203–4; and ethnography, 18–19, 95; and Fromentin’s writings, 17–19, 84, 95, 164; and national identity, 24– 25; and realism, 23–25, 31, 84, 174; and representation, 3, 18, 49, 170, 174, 190, 222; and subjectivity, 83, 85; and symbolism, 179; and Zola’s writings, 83 Thil, Jeanne, 278 Thomas, Nicholas, 5 Thornton, Lynne, 291n22 Thousand and One Nights, 58, 89, 154, 237–38, 239, 269, 294n27, 303n70 Tinare, Louis, 112 Tintoretto, 89 Tissot, James, 66, 174 Titian, 247 Touareg, 119, 120, 126, 151, 278 Tour du Monde, at Paris exposition, 7, 114, 115, 116–18, 117, 119, 127 Tourism, 15, 36, 55, 81, 109, 114, 127, 147, 148, 163, 165, 169, 173, 176, 201, 258, 273, 281 Tournemine, Charles-Emile de, 27 Toussaint, Henri, 150 Tranchant de Lunel, Maurice, 201, 203, 215, 311n43, 312n60 Traveling scholarships: and academic tradition, 130, 137; and art nouveau, 137; and Buffet’s travels, 132–35; of Colonial Society of French Artists, 143, 299n69, 303n1; and Dinet’s travels, 135–37; and exclusionary policies, 157; and Orientalism, 62, 129–40, 142–43, 157;

and Prouvé’s travels, 138–43; of Society of French Orientalist Painters, 7, 143, 146, 299n69; state-funded, 31, 124, 129, 130– 32, 135, 143, 157, 159; and Villa Abd-el-Tif, 145–46, 148, 151, 153, 154, 157, 269, 278 Trocadéro Gardens, 60, 106– 7, 107, 109, 112, 118 Tunisia: Bénédite ’s travels in, 59; French art exhibited in, 59, 81, 106; French colonial policies in, 7, 8, 192, 200; French military activity in, 139; indigenous art of, 74, 77, 215, 217, 221, 230; Institut de Carthage in, 75, 106, 143; Prouvé’s depiction of, 139–43; Prouvé’s description of, 138–41; Prouvé’s travels in, 138–41; represented in Parisian exhibition, 64; and Ricard’s writings, 198; Roman ruins in, 189; and tourism, 36; traveling scholarships to, 130, 132 Turkish culture, 238, 240, 241, 294n33 Turks, 23, 45, 184 Union Comtoise des Arts Décoratifs, 292n50 Union of Women Painters and Sculptors, 57, 65 United States, modern art collections in, 59 Universal Exposition of 1889, 7, 31, 59–60, 61, 106, 107 Universal Exposition of 1900, 7, 31, 71, 74, 106–22, 126, 138, 139, 165, 212 Urbanism, 9, 12, 24, 229 Urban planning, 201–2 Utrillo, Maurice, 265 Vachon, Marius, 195, 198 Vaillant, Edouard, 179 Valadon, Suzanne, 265 Vallotton, Félix, 66 Van Loo, Carle, 319n47 Vauxcelles, Louis, 86, 154, 306n35 Veil, in Islamic culture, 171– 72, 180, 198, 241, 306n45

Index

351

Verne, Jules, 114 Vernet, Horace, 15–16, 27, 35, 82, 284n9, 286n57, 295n44, 319n47 Veronese, Paolo, 89 Versailles, 257, 267 Villa Abd-el-Tif, in Algiers, 7, 143, 145–49, 151–55, 157, 187, 194, 195, 223, 260, 267, 269, 278, 302n64 Villa Medici, in Rome, 26, 130, 145 Villard, Antoine, 230 Violette, Maurice, 219, 244, 250– 51, 261, 272, 281, 317n8 Vitruvius, 202 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 265 Vollard, Ambroise, 43, 66, 89 Vuillard, Edouard, 1, 66, 125, 293n7

352

Index

Wagner, Richard, 139 Wagram, Alexandre de, 125 Waroquier, Henry de, 265 Watercolors: and Delacroix’s art, 8, 61, 161; and Dufresne ’s art, 154; and Regnault’s art, 26, 27; and Tissot’s art, 174 Werth, Léon, 127 Women: indigenous art produced by, 197–98, 207, 217; and Islamic culture, 171– 72, 184, 306n45 Women, as subjects of art: and Bernard’s art, 89; and Chassériau’s art, 96; and Cottet’s art, 83; and Delacroix’s art, 34, 241; and Dinet’s art, 74, 100, 122; and Dufresne ’s art,

154; and Fromentin’s art, 96; and Fromentin’s writings, 19; and Gérôme ’s art, 25, 26; and Guillaumet’s art, 96; and LévyDhurmer’s art, 87; and Lunois’s art, 74; and Manet’s art, 125; and Matisse ’s art, 170– 74, 180; and Prouvé’s writings, 140; and Mohammed Racim’s art, 241; and Renoir’s art, 34, 43, 45–47, 125, 173; and Suréda’s art, 84 World War I, 127, 151, 233, 237 Wright, Gwendolyn, 9, 201, 202, 310n34 Wyld, William, 12, 14 Ziem, Félix, 34 Zola, Emile, 29, 31, 83, 286n53