In Washington, an opulent survey of the Orientalist movement
"The pictures used to seem exaggerations—they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, they were not wild enough. They have not told half the story." So wrote Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, carried away as he was by the exotic sights of Morocco in 1867. Whether Twain was right or not, whether the reality of life in the Islamic world was more fanciful than its images in 19th century art, there could be no doubt that the popular pictures of the day exuded a fictive sensuality: the odalisque, her breasts exposed, her belly barely covered by harem trousers, lounging on a divan as she awaited a pasha's pleasure; swarthy eunuchs, armed with saber and musket, standing guard at the seraglio gates; the almah, or Egyptian dancing girl, clapping her castanets as she strips off her veils; the nubile concubine displaying her roseate flesh in a Turkish bath.
These erotic scenes, replayed in countless variations by such academic painters as France's Jean-Léon Gérôme and England's John Frederick Lewis, kept the crowds coming to the shows organized by the Academic des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. By the turn of the 20th century a host of French and English artists, and a few venturesome Americans, had been drawn by the lure of "the Orient": a term that then denoted not the Far East but the Middle East and North Africa.
Capitalizing on the rage for things Oriental that had also seized writers such as Pierre Loti and Gustave Flaubert and scholars like Sir Richard Burton, the Orientalist artists vied with one another in seeking out exotica. Harems aside, the subjects that most mesmerized them were slave markets, carpet bazaars, whirling dervishes, Arab stallions, caravans of caparisoned camels and wind-whipped burnooses of Bedouins on the sands of the Sahara. "There is a fortune to be made for painters in Cairo," noted William Makepeace Thackeray on a visit to Egypt in 1844. "I never saw such a variety of architecture, of life, of picturesqueness, of brilliant color, of light and shade. There is a picture in every street and at every bazaar stall." Some 70 years later another novelist, E.M. Forster, foresaw a dreary end to the Orientalist movement. In a letter to a friend about a voyage through the Suez Canal, he wrote, "It was like sailing through the Royal Academy—a man standing by a sitting camel, followed by a picture of a camel standing by a seated man: picturesque Arabs in encampment, ditto in a felucca."
As Forster had predicted, Orientalist painting in its academic manifestations fell into disrepute in this century, though a few of its pictorial motifs continued to exert a lively influence on some modern painters. That the movement's appeal can be readily reactivated, however, is attested by "The Orientalists," an opulent exhibition of 102 paintings currently on view at Washington's National Gallery. The phenomenal attendance at the show—124,000 people since July 1—indicates that the paintings are still as much fun to look at as they are instructive to contemplate. And in the case of the great master of the movement, Delacroix, and its modernist heirs, Matisse and Kandinsky, Orientalism remains a source of bedazzling beauty.