14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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Dressing the drama
Exhibit A: 100 Prints Representing Different Nations of the Levant, first published in 1712-13. The engravings in this volume were commissioned by Charles de Ferriol, French ambassador to the Sublime Porte between 1699 and 1710, from a series of full length portraits by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, a Flemish artist who, in 1725, was appointed court painter to Sultan Ahmed III.
Despite Vanmour's subsequent chroniclings of the Ottoman court and its ceremonies it is on the earlier engravings of his portraits of a vast array of Ottoman officials that his fame rested, at least for his contemporaries. For more than a century 100 Prints served as a source-book, providing artists in search of exoticism -- for which read near-Eastern colour -- with an infallible template: replete with furs, folds, satin, silks, turbans, emerald encrusted scabbards hanging jauntily from the hip, the figures that inhabit Vanmour's costume drama were to make cameo appearances in a large number of other works, either lifted wholesale from the pages or slightly adapted, by artists as different as Hogarth, Boucher and -- so several commentators argue -- Ingres. And by the mid-18th century, on the back of the new vogue for dressing à la turque, 100 prints and its imitators had passed from the hands of painters to costume makers and hostesses, an early party-planner's primer for those in search of the most decadent of novelties.
Exhibit B: A dusty shop off Sherif Street, Cairo, December 2000, full to bursting with African masks, oddments of silver plate, glassware, Imara porcelain, door knockers in the shape of hands clutching at metal balls, lidded soup bowls from Bohemia (of the kind exported en masse to the territories of the Ottoman empire), a tarnished samovar. And vying for attention above the objets trouvés scattered over the peeling veneers and nacre inlay of nondescript early 20th century reproduction tables and bureau, glimpsed through broken or else reconstituted chandeliers, are shiny oil paintings in crudely carved and heavily gilded frames.
In one of these paintings a woman reclines on a lavishly upholstered sofa. She wears a tunic of verdigris coloured stuff, one imagines silk, though the artist is far from successful in distinguishing the surfaces and textures of the various fabrics that he paints. Around her waist is an elaborate golden belt, twisted into fanciful arabesques. The crimson of her turban echoes the crimson of her trousers. The wrist that supports her pipe, for of course she is smoking a pastel of hashish, is wrapped around with pearls, while the pipe itself sits on an inlaid table that, had it not looked quite so shiny and new, might itself have formed part of the stock of this shop.
The two windows above the sofa on which this figure reclines have small square panes. They are set in plain, grey, unadorned stone walls: the glazing bars describe a prison window, the walls, in contrast with the luxurious fabrics beneath, describe a cell. And all of this is in glossy, rather too oleaginous paint, the viscous surface thickly and cheaply varnished.
Our odalisque is not alone: she is surrounded by similar figures in other paintings, all in antique dress, all as badly painted, as thickly varnished and as absolutely, theatrically Orientalist. She is unique, though -- or alone, in this particular shop -- in being lifted directly from the pages of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour's 100 Prints Representing Different Nations of the Levant. Figures in the other paintings, perhaps, have different sources: Paul Rycaut's 1670 Collection of Various Turkish Figures, possibly, though it is difficult to imagine where the makers of these paintings might have seen such a model, or one of the several twentieth century postcard series of photographs purporting to depict "Arab types." Of the latter, many remain readily available, not least Lehnert and Landrock's own photogravures, for sale in the bookshop at the other end of the same street.
Nor are these paintings restricted to the particular shop described above. They are a staple stock item of the myriad of similar shops that elevate the bric-a-brac displayed to antique status, and pass off the carelessly executed but loudly framed copies of Orientalist models as art. There are a great many of them, from Zamalek to Abbasiya, from Heliopolis to Ghamra.
It is natural to wonder just who provides the custom for this sort of painting. They do not come particularly cheap, priced in the high hundreds for a smallish, single figure study, or the low thousands for a more ambitious, multi-figure harem or bath-house scene. Certainly, their ubiquity would suggest that they are popular, but among whom?
It is a fairly safe bet to assume that it is not the public that attends exhibitions in the more serious galleries and occasionally buys from them that is hanging this stuff on their walls. They want something more apparently original, something a little more modern and, one hopes, though in my experience this is a purely coincidental consideration, something slightly better painted. They will, in all likelihood, be familiar with at least the gist of the body of criticism that has grown up around academic, nineteenth century Orientalist painting and it is unlikely that they would want an imitation of something of which they find it so easy to disapprove.
But the purchase of a bad copy of Vanmour on Sherif Street, in Cairo, and its hanging on the wall of your house, at least for the (thankfully) less erudite, does not carry the same weight as the inclusion of Arab types in the paintings hanging on the walls of an 18th century Rococo drawing room. The blueprint has been around for a long time now. True, it is fancy dress, stylised, distanced, and cloaked in a banally realist style. It is, perhaps, equally true that these days it can be afforded only by those who are neither tourists in their own past, nor in their own country. For the rest it is a little too close to home.
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