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

works of North Africa as being a different kind of oriental art, one that is in some areas less obviously oriental and perhaps more innocent in its depiction, more focused on light, colour and shape rather than the exotic peoples.

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

the invention of the ‘European tourist’ that the West was able to abundantly and somewhat unsuspectingly immerse itself in the practice of ‘orientalism’. Orientalism cannot be detached from European colonial expansion; this is the fact, which sees Matisse as an orientalist, not dissimilar from J.-L. Gérôme. It was the expedition of the French General Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 to Egypt and consequently the occupation of the country until 1801 that attracted the educated bourgeois. Becoming truly fascinated with these desert countries, they began capturing their encounters with its dry sand and foreign people through paint, enduring to, and up until Matisse’s stay in North Africa in 1906. The first generation of ‘orientalist’ who made the trip across the Mediterranean began the reoccurring leitmotif of creating exotic fictions, far from hazy Europe, articulating the countries raw command of colour and light in glorious costumes and grandiose sceneries. The attentive and obsessive observation of the conquered peoples led to the artist becoming more exacting and ethnographic in their portrayal of nature. However, despite this, narratives produced by the oriental painters, whether Romanticist, Realist or Modernist, whilst accurate in decorative terms, was invented mainly by the powers of the imperialist imagination. Orientalist art is therefore simply a product of the colonizers view of the colonized.

Cultural critic and theorist Edward Saïd argued in his influential text Orientalism, that the orientalist discourse in all its vulgar and deprecatory form is a mechanism and constituent part of Imperialist Europe’s colonisation of North Africa and the Near East.

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

obscuring their window of view, abstaining them from visions of ‘reality’ and constricting them to the unescapable position of an Orientalist artists.

It is Jean-Lèon Gérôme who flawlessly and visibly moulds to the archetypal orientalist template originally shaped by Delacroix in his trip to Morocco in 1832. Sharing the need to visit the land, which throbbed of sensuality and ‘otherness’, it was their wealth and imperialist setting, which allowed for their travels – an actuality also shared with Matisse. Gérôme visited the East and Egypt widely from the 1850s onwards, along the way amassing a vast collection of artefacts, which would allow him to achieve in his Paris studio his infamous “hallucinatory visual perfections” or ‘myth making machines’. Responsible for establishing ‘documentary realism’ as the model for orientalist painting, he was an expert in illustrating orientalist fantasises and theatrical narratives as truths by embodying the orientalist artist almost by definition. Gérôme’s artwork, The Snake Charmer (1870) and its endeavours to authenticate is the medium through which a critique of oriental art as the colonizers ‘mirage’ view of the colonized will be made. The problem with those who belong to a colonialist background, a position outside of the orient, becoming a ‘cultural translator’ or ventriloquist who ‘makes the orient speak’ is a problem common to both Gérôme and Matisse. To understand Matisse as an orientalist we must first reveal the obvious in The Snake Charmer.