Gerome Vs Matisse

Matisse cannot be extracted from the flow of history; he cannot be separated from Orientalism because he was a modernist. The precise fact that he was able to travel there, be an intrepid traveller, and look at a Moroccan vase and use that detail to then take away and paint means he is an Orientalist, he was given the opportunity of a colonialist. And in asking to unveil a woman who is posing for him is just as disrespectful as an orientalist artist painting women inside a harem. Both Gerome and Matisse are cultural translators or ventriloquists who ‘make the Orient’ speak, what makes this notion difficult is there position is outside the orient, more specifically the Colonizers of the Orient regions. However we can look at Matisse and his

Whilst he followed the path of an orientalist in every form, his actually artworks were much less orientalist than others. He was not painting in a voyeuristic, colonialist, precise way but was disrupting the west view of the east through his abstraction – this puts value on his modernist orientalist as not being as orientalist as that of Gerome.

The ‘orient’ was a strange location to the Western European of the nineteenth century, a place few had journey to. It was to them, a location with all the allure of myth – a distant, exotic and bizarre land where the ‘Other’ lived and romanticises thrived. Previously inaccessible to the European voyager, the ‘orient’, explicitly, was the sun-drenched countries of the Middle East and North Africa. It is recognised today that the orient was engaging the minds of Western peoples long prior to the nineteenth century. Renaissance and Baroque works by artists like Bellini, Rembrandt and Veronese often illustrated costume belonging to the culture of the Middle East. Gentile Bellini’s painting of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (1480) is such an instance. However, until the nineteenth century, the contact Western Europeans had with the East was negligible, only through trade and sporadic military operations. It wasn't until

He stated, "Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic (truthful) discourse about the Orient.” The nexus of authority with knowledge empowered the West to generalise and misrepresent the orient, consequently subjugating and controlling it. By exaggerating and distorting the difference between the familiar occident (West) and the alien orient (East), they are constructing the East as the extremely inferior, backward and foreign counterpart of the West, in need of Western ‘rescue’. It is therefore this colonialist podium, which the Orientalist artist stands on that, in part, generates Roger Benjamin’s notion of the ‘Oriental mirage’. The concept that a “travelling artists always has an unstable view of its subjects” is concrete, imitative painting of any kind is an estimation. However the Imperialist and Colonialist credentials of the orientalist artists inevitably skews this image further. The mirage becomes additionally distorted as they are faced with the obstacles of cultural misunderstanding and ethnocentrism. Jean-Léon Gérôme and Henri Matisse alike both ‘suffered’ from this colonialist cultural curtain, which was drawn across and