26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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The return of the Odalisque
Take a bad-complexioned and, one is forced to admit, an often exceedingly bad-tempered looking odalisque, wrap a turban around her head and lie her on a very low sofa. Take a water pipe and place it next to a small table just in front of the sofa, and on the table place the bits and pieces of the kind of tourist tat that occupies shelf after shelf in Khan Al-Khalili, the kind of hammered copper objects -- only they are, more often than not, merely steel dipped in metallic paint -- the ubiquity of which suggests that no visitor to the bazaar leaves without at least one or two items to stick on the mantelpiece back home, and then take refuge behind your easel. Splash the paint around. Give the poor woman an unfortunate pallor, a slightly greenish tinge. And if anything goes wrong in the background, just arrange the paint to suggest a flapping Eastern- looking drape. But whatever you do remember -- and for the majority of people, unfortunately, this is no difficult task -- to do it badly. Paint as amateurishly as you can. Allow chromatic clashes, the more acid the better, and for no purpose whatsoever. Better still, squeeze the paint out of the tubes blindfolded and just stick to what happens to be there. And when you have finished, place the resulting picture in a crudely carved, cheaply gilded frame. There is a market for this kind of thing, and if the number of such paintings that hang in the shops is any indication, it is a far from small market.
But who buys them and what, if anything, do they mean?
The Odalisque is a favourite set-piece of these sub-Orientalist paintings, though she is by no means the only subject. Portraits, or at least images purporting to be portraits, are also numerous. They either attempt a three-quarter pose, allowing for the inclusion of details of extravagant costuming, or else they focus almost exclusively on the face -- topped by an elaborately constructed turban.
Once upon a time visitors to Egypt were able to buy a series of postcards called Arab Types. Produced in the first two decades of the last century, they are now sought after collectors items, sepia tinted bits of (far from innocent) stereotyping, with captions such as Beggar, Water Seller, Woman in the Souk. They too were head and shoulder shots, the models chosen, presumably, because they neatly slotted into the photographers' (and their clients) bizarre physiognomic and phrenologic taxonomies. The portraits that hang alongside the odalisques are a modern, painted equivalent of this long gone series of postcards. They too are framed in cheap gilt.
Not that the paintings are themselves cheap. They carry four figure price tags, and they are concentrated in the smarter areas of town. A stroll down Brazil Street in Zamalek will reveal one major outlet, though it is far from having a monopoly on such items. Indeed, so frequently are they encountered that there must, somewhere in the city, exist an atelier employing a host of people entirely devoted to producing such things.
The only non-Orientalist subjects such emporia include alongside these Odalisques and portraits are pastiches of 18th century French painting, most commonly reworkings of Fragonard. And the most frequently bastardised Fragonard is The Swing, that by- now ludicrously frothy bit of salaciousness that allows the viewer to watch a man hoping for a glimpse beneath the woman's much be-ribboned skirt.
A strange selection of paintings, certainly. The sheer consistency of the selection, though, indicates that it is by no means arbitrary. So what is going on?
A great deal of ink has been spent by art-historians in discussing the phenomenon that came to be called Orientalism, that pre- fabrication, within strictly defined painterly limits, by European and later American artists, of the East. One of the more common lines of argument, in crude precis, suggests that prefabrication was at least in part fuelled by a nostalgia-complex, by the desire to recreate a rose-tintedly pre-industrial world, feudal, with (presumably) uncomplicated social relationships, with clear gender demarcation and, in William Morris vein, a sentimental attitude to craft production. There are, too, elements of pornography within that recreation, though this, tellingly, tends to be a function of the depiction of women-only spaces. (One quite remarkable example, Theodore Chasseriau's Bathing Women, inset, is in the Gezirah Collection and was, for an annoyingly short period, displayed during the Orientalist exhibition that opened the refurbished Palace of Arts in the Opera House complex.)
Such paintings, of course, were intended for a foreign audience, though more than a few, as the exhibition mentioned above amply showed, ended up in local collections. Their modern counterparts, though, these appallingly painted odalisques and ridiculous Arab types, must be intended for the local market. Hard to imagine the passing tourist tucking one of these large, heavily framed and expensive paintings in a suitcase to take back to wherever and hang above the mantel-piece on which the far more easily transported copper gewgaws from the bazaar have been carefully arranged.
Despite the oceans of ink spilled on their 18th and 19th century models, no one, as far as I am aware, has as yet studied these modern equivalents, or explored the meanings inherent in their prevalence in the local market.
Why that Fragonard? And how could such a series of postcards -- at least they were throwaway -- have been reincarnated as paintings that cost several thousand pounds? Who, one must ask, as prosaically as possible, has become the tourist here, and just what does their choice of souvenirs, these contemporary reworkings of past forms, say?
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